Trump’s Tweets Explained

I’ve never been a fan of Donald Trump’s demeanor (accent on the “mean”).  All the derogatory nicknames, vindictive tweets, and constant dubious accusations turn me off along with many in his own party who should be his allies.  The latest episode regarding Morning Joe Scarborough and Mika Br … we’ll settle for Mika… has brought this issue once again to the fore. 

Though these tactics turn me off, I can at least explain them.  Am I a mind reader?  Do I have some special insight into Donald Trump’s inner psyche?  No, all I’ve done is read his books.  He explains exactly why he does this.  In addition, I’ve watched as several Republicans were chewed-up and spit-out by the Left’s tactics.  Apparently, so has Donald Trump.  I’ve also connected a few dots that others may have not. 

“The Art of the Deal”, published 30 years ago, explains many of the quirks that made Donald Trump the most unlikely President in U.S. history.  It also helps explain the Morning Joe tweets. 

"In most cases I'm very easy to get along with. I'm very good to people who are good to me. But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very  hard."

                                                       Donald Trump, “Art of the Deal”, 1987

  

Donald Trump had a long and congenial relationship with Joe and Mika up until his recent tweet.  Or so it seemed.  The turning point was not Trump’s tweet, but rather Joe and Mika’s recent attacks on him.  He’s crazy, a dictator, and ruining the country are just some of the things now routinely said on Joe and Mika’s MSNBC show.  Given the above quote, is it any surprise he’s fighting back?

Ok, let’s stipulate that it’s just Trump’s nature to fight back hard.  Why go all the way to being outrageous like he did?   Why call them “psycho”, “low IQ”, accuse Mika of having a face-lift, and imply they were kissing-up to him at Mar-a-Lago?  Doesn’t Trump realize that by going over the line he is doing more damage to himself than to the object of his attack? 

"One thing I've learned about the press is that they're always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better...The point is that if you are a little different, a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you." 

                                                          Donald Trump, “Art of the Deal”, 1987

Nothing has confounded his critics more than Donald Trump’s unconventional tactic of courting controversy.  He built his business brand, and now his political brand, on his belief that all media is good media when one is on offense.  He goes out of his way to be outrageous, different, bold, and controversial.  He relishes the media attention and he seems not to care that most of it is negative. 

The experts said that tactic may work in Manhattan real estate, but it would never work in national politics.  (While not an expert, I was among them.)  Now he’s President and the experts have been embarrassed.  What do they do? Read his books and try to understand him?  No. They are at it again claiming Trump is not acting “presidential.”

What is “presidential”?  Is it the passive aggressive behavior of a President who hides his intentions, speaks in glossy platitudes, and weaponizes the IRS to attack his opponents, or is it the active aggressive behavior of a President who tells you exactly who he is, what he is, speaks bluntly, and openly attacks his critics on twitter?  It’s at least a question worth putting to a vote, as it was in November. 

Ok, let’s stipulate that this is just Trump’s modus operandi.  Why be mean about it?  Why call Joe a psycho and Mika low IQ? There are other ways to be controversial and get media attention.  There are other ways to fight back and still be classy.  Being mean just seems unnecessary and turns off many voters. 

“Nice guys finish last” 

                                            Leo Durocher, 1946

Donald Trump was born in Queens, NY, during the summer of 1946.  Also born that same summer, a dinger from where Trump was born, was the saying “nice guys finish last”.  Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was conversing with a journalist when the kernel for that immortal phrase came out. 

Donald Trump had that aphorism marinating in his brain his whole life.  It has come to signify the essence of the Trumpian way - winning at any cost. 

While it alienates many, this trait undoubtedly has some value for a President.  Who would you rather go to war against, a nice guy or Donald Trump?  Who would you rather have to negotiate with, or try to take advantage of?

OK, now let’s stipulate that Trump is a person who fights back, believes controversy courts media, believes any media is good media, and can be rather mean.  Why continue this tactic now that he’s President?  He won.  He’s got nothing to prove, right?  Why not dial it back and act presidential? All he should be concerned with is winning support for his agenda!

 

"Our weak response in defense of the president and in setting the record straight, is, I believe, one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years."

                                                                                              Karl Rove, 2010

I think Donald Trump does not want to repeat this mistake.  He knows he is going to be attacked relentlessly no matter what he does because the people in media, academia, and entertainment, in other words the people who have the biggest megaphones, are almost uniformly Leftists.  So the choice is to absorb the blows, like George W Bush, or fight back the only way he knows.

George W Bush is by all accounts a gentleman.  He is a patrician, attended Yale and Harvard, a former Governor, and the son of a President.  He wore a tie and jacket every moment he was in the Oval Office. When he was attacked non-stop as a war criminal, liar, Hitler, buffoon, illegitimate President, and the man who collapsed the global economy, did he offer a defense?  Did he fight back?  Did he go on offense?  No.  He thought fighting back was beneath the dignity of the office.  He turned the other cheek out of a misplaced sense of honor.  In other words, he put his honor above the honor of those who voted for him. 

George W Bush left office with a 30% approval rating, the GOP lost the entire congress, the Democrats were able to unilaterally socialize control of medicine, and the socialist age of Bernie Sanders was begun.  To this day Bush is unfairly blamed for 9/11,the 2008 financial collapse, the collapse of Iraq, the mess in Afghanistan, ISIS, and herpes.  But at least he has his dignity, right? 

George H W Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all offered weak defenses against the Left’s attacks.  None went on offense.  All lost elections.  The last GOP presidential candidate to fight back hard was Ronald Reagan, who did it with class and humor.  He also lost elections before he won them.  Donald Trump has never lost an election. 

Ok, now let’s stipulate all the above.  Why do this on Twitter? 

“My fellow Americans…” 

                               Ronald Reagan, whenever he wanted to get his message across

Ronald Reagan understood, like no other President before him, that he would never get his message out if he relied on a hostile media.  He had to go directly to the people and he did so on TV, radio, and in print.  Reagan became known as “the great communicator”.  

Donald Trump won the Presidency because of his stream of conscience communication style.  In his own unpolished and unconventional way he is also a great communicator.  Trump’s Twitter account is just his favorite way of doing the day to day communicating.  It’s instantaneous and effective.  And it drives his opposition bonkers. 

The bottom line is; Donald Trump understands more about all this than he’s ever given credit for.  He codified his philosophy 30 years ago so none of this should surprise anyone paying attention.  He just is who he is.  It’s that simple.  It doesn’t make it right, but at least it can be understood.  

Oh, and he’s not crazy.

7 Reasons Donald Trump (and all Republicans) Are In Imminent Danger

(This was originally posted 4/2/17) 

1.  Almost all presidents have at least one serious attempt on their lives.  It's just a part of the job. 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... 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 Democrat's golden goose.

Trump is a similar threat to entrenched Democrat entitlements.  Among them: Socialized Medicine, open borders, control of the vast bureaucracies, union power, illegals able to vote, etc. These are today's 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 from the same party) 
• McKinley, a Republican, was killed by an anarchist
• Kennedy, a Democrat, was killed by a communist

Of course, all were probably 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 seen as ideologues.  By that I mean they had specific issues they were committed to and were willing to unapologetically fight for.  In Reagan's case it was broadly getting government off the back of the people, 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:  enforcing borders, reducing the "administrative state", restoring the rule of law, fighting jihad, etc.

Like Trump, Reagan was hated by Democrats, painted as evil, dumb, dangerous, crazy, etc.   Reagan 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 because Democrats figured out they could augment their characterization of Trump as evil by tying him to the "evil empire".   By doing so they have been able to peel off some of his weaker, hawkish, GOP support like McCain, Graham, et al.        

7.  The government, regardless of who's in power, t is largely a Democrat institution.  That includes the Secret Service, FBI, career DOJ, etc.  These unionized, mostly Democrat, government entities are responsible for the President's safety.  Though they are usually considered to be above politics, will they perform as they should if they become convinced the man they are protecting is evil?  Will they take a bullet for a man they are told daily is Hitler?

  

*     Loretta Lynch calls for "blood and death in the streets"

**  The anti-Lincoln Tradition

      "Lincoln is an Idiot"

The Real People Who Hacked Our Elections [UPDATED]

According to a new report by The Public Interest Legal Foundation, thousands of illegal votes have been found in Virginia .  This was over a period of many years based simply on non-citizens self-reporting.  These illegal votes were not found by any government agency, but rather by a private foundation looking into illegal voters who inconsistently answered citizenship questions.

This is significant because we've been told voter fraud doesn't exist.

(UPDATE: For a full rundown of complete up-to-date voter fraud convictions, news, and allegations, click here: rnla.org)

The reason voter fraud evidence is so elusive is because Democrats have vigorously fought any attempt to find it, track it, measure it, prosecute it, or prevent it.  According to the new report, Virginia officials, all the way up to Governor Terry McAuliffe, vigorously tried to keep this information from seeing the light of day.   

The statistics are overwhelming:  States that encourage voter fraud vote Democrat, and states that aim for integrity vote Republican.    

Voter ID laws are strict in only nine states of which Hillary Clinton won only one, Virginia.  All the other strict ID states voted for Trump.

Of the states that allow illegals to obtain driver's licenses, Hillary Clinton won every one of the thirteen except one, Utah.  The only reason Utah was an exception is that while they do issue licenses to illegals, it is a distinct license and Utah requests ID to vote.

Virginia is the only state Hillary won that is both strict on IDs and not one of the states that issues driver's licenses to illegals.  In other words, those thousands of illegal votes were from greencard non-citizens or illegal immigrants.  Of course, the only check on a voter's status as a citizen is...well, there is none.    

2106 Election Results Map

          States that Issue Driver's Licenses to Unauthorized

                                          Immigrants 

States and Voter ID 

2106 Election Map Showing Democrat Concentrations Near Border Crossings and Routes

(Hat Tip: @Military4Trump on Twitter)

The above maps are not coincidences. Democrats have been on a decades long mission to encourage unauthorized immigrants to come here, and once here, be given loopholes to vote. The reason is simple; they overwhelmingly vote Democrat. 

To further this along, Democrat President Bill Clinton signed a law in 1993 known as the Motor Voter Bill, which basically automated voter registration for anyone applying for a driver's license or other government benefit.  That makes it extremely possible for illegals to wind-up as registered voters, despite assertions to the contrary, in the 13 states that issue licenses to illegals.  Motor Voter is how Virginia ended up with thousands of non-citizens on their roles.    

Here's a picture of Bill Clinton signing the Motor Voter bill.  Notice the two people standing directly behind him?  They are Francis Fox Piven and  Richard Cloward, in the green and grey respectively, two radical Columbia University professors who advocated collapsing the U.S. by overloading it with dependents and immigrants.

And here is Barack Obama, who studied at Columbia University while Cloward and Piven held court there, answering  a question with only one correct answer.  The question is essentially, "should illegals be afraid to vote?" His answer should have been, "they shouldn't vote because it's illegal". That's not what he says though.

Link: HERE

So, how many illegals and non-citizens voted? There is absolutely no way to know because by Democrat design voting is done on the honor system.  No citizenship records are kept and no electronic records are kept relating to who actually voted.  That leaves only maps and circumstantial evidence like above, or non-citizens self-reporting like in Virginia.

Donald Trump has a point when he says voter fraud ought to be investigated.  He must work to ensure integrity in our voting system.  This is a minimum requirement for a Democracy.

Victor Davis Hanson - "Regime Change by Any Other Name?"

I rarely reprint someone else's piece in full, but this one's worth it.  (Follow the link to read it in it's original splendor.)    

Regime Change by Any Other Name?

Truth or consequences? Obama skated for far worse misdeeds.

By Victor Davis Hanson — May 22, 2017

Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election.

There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers.

Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration.
Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as incapable of properly vetting travelers to the U.S.

The first lady did not work for an elite escort or prostitute service. She never said that she and young Barron Trump would not be moving to the White House. Barron does not have autism.

Trump’s father never ran racist ads as a supposed candidate in a purported political campaign. Kellyanne Conway denies that in a private conversation between segments on MSNBC, she privately remarked to hosts that she had to take a shower after working for Trump.

Donald Trump never suggested to the Mexican president that the U.S. was going to invade Mexico. Nor did Trump plan to mobilize the National Guard to send back illegal aliens.
He did not remove a Martin Luther King bust from the White House.

There was no evidence that he ever promised to ease Russian sanctions (much less that he promised the Russians he would be “flexible” after he was elected). He did not short the FBI of resources to conduct an investigation into supposed Russian collusion. He did not go to Moscow and watch prostitutes in his bed urinate where Barack Obama had previously slept.

His deputy attorney general did not threaten to resign over the Comey firing.

And we have no idea whether Trump really gets two scoops of ice cream while limiting his guests to one, or pads around in a bathrobe in the early evening, or cannot find the light switch in the White house.

Yet all that is what daily we hear and read.

Meanwhile . . . 
Fake news crowds out real news. Here is what we do not read much about: North Korea, long appeased, could well send missiles against our allies, perhaps even with nuclear payloads.

Afghanistan is at a crux and will either implode or need more American troops. China’s role is in the balance, and it may or may not help defang North Korea. The greatest tax- and health-reform packages in years are now in the hands of Congress. Executive orders have revolutionized the domestic energy industry and achieved a stunning and historic reduction in illegal immigration.

The stock market is soaring, employment is up, and confidence in the economy has returned. Wall Street seems to dip only on talk of impeaching Donald Trump.

Commensurate Worry?
And here is what no longer troubles us at all. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama used back channels to communicate flexibility to the Iranians (as in the later assurance he gave, on a hot mic, to the Russians), which may have helped undermine the ongoing Bush-administration negotiations with Iran.

Hillary Clinton set up an illegal server, distributed classified information in an illegal and unsecured fashion, lied about it, and destroyed thousands of e-mails central to an investigation — and got off without an indictment.

In the 2016 election, the head of the DNC conspired to massage the debates and help swing the nomination to the Clinton campaign.

The prior attorney general of the United State met with the spouse of a presidential candidate under investigation, in a stealthy conversation on an airport tarmac, did not inform officials of that meeting until the get-together was discovered by a reporter, semi-recused herself under pressure only to turn over her prosecutorial discretion to the head of the FBI, in a fashion that was both improper and perhaps unconstitutional.

We do not hear how exactly Russian interests at Uranium One obtained market control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium holdings, or the connections between Uranium One and their prior multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, or that the Podesta Group had numerous financial dealings with Russian interests, or that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 from Russian oligarchic interests while his wife was secretary of state — ten times more than what Michael Flynn was alleged to have received.

We know that unnamed intelligence officials during the Obama administration surveilled likely political opponents, unmasked their identities, leaked them to the press, either under the assumption that such skullduggery would not surface, or on the pretext that such monitoring was ordinary and involved national security.

We know that Obama’s director of National Intelligence lied under oath to Congress without ramifications. We know that a high IRS official subverted her duties for political purposes in a manner intended to alter the 2012 campaign, took the Fifth Amendment, refuses to testify further before Congress, and faces no consequences other than a plush, taxpayer-funded retirement.

Trump Agonistes
Of course, a media-targeted Donald Trump is weaponizing his enemies by his characteristic blunderbuss approach in interviews. Of course, in anger and without political experience, he tweets too much and says things better left unsaid. Of course, at 70, he has an in-your-face character that is unlike any other president’s and also unlikely to change. He mixes freely truth, rumor, and innuendo.

And of course his superb appointments and Reaganesque approach to foreign affairs, energy production, tax reform, and deregulation are all threatened by his own team’s inability to deal with a dishonest and largely corrupt Washington and New York media.

So Trump boasted and talked trash with the Russians? Terrible and stupid, no doubt. Worse than what Franklin Roosevelt communicated to Winston Churchill about the mass-murdering Stalin? (“I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks, he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”) Was Trump more Machiavellian than was Obama, with his “it’s important for him to give me space” requests to Vladimir Putin when he met President Medvedev before the 2012 election and apparently banked his reset policy on his ability to get away with misinforming the public?

All that said, none of the above is a reason to impeach, or remove on medical grounds, an elected president, or to suggest that he resign less than four months into office. Yet we hear exactly that not only from the progressive, in-the-street Left, but from many of the Never Trump Right.
In some sense, we are watching a sort of mass hysteria characteristic of pet-rock or hula-hoop democracy. (It reminds one not so much of the mob that went after Socrates –Trump is no Socrates — but of the mad fury of the French Revolution or the high-water point of the 1950s John Birch movement)

The ‘Resistance’
The “Resistance” peddled the yarn that the election tabulations were electronically rigged; then it was an appeal to electors not to do their constitutional duties; then it was reduced to street theater and demonstrations; then it turned to desperate deep-state leaks and media blitzes; now it’s mere hysteria.

The effort to remove the president is conducted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the wire services, and the major networks. And we have seen nothing like it in our time. In the last six months, Americans have been told quite falsely so many untruths about the Trump administration by their news agencies that for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a media as we once knew it.

Journalists are not shy about their prejudices. In some cases — James Rutenberg, Jorge Ramos, and Christiane Amanpour — they have admitted their view that the duty of the new media in the era of Trump is not to stay disinterested, but to become political opponents. Some have been exposed as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to prevent Trump’s election victory; they tried to keep those efforts secret because they knew what they were doing was unethical and self-interested.

A second effort to achieve a Trump removal is conducted by pop-culture celebrities — who make the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush furor of 2003 now look mild. This opposition is waged in a way that would have ruined careers if directed at Barack Obama.

Madonna dreams on Inauguration Day of blowing up the White House. Don Cheadle wanted Trump to die in grease fire. Snoop Dogg videotapes his mock execution of a Trump lookalike. Martha Stewart poses flipping the finger to a picture of Trump while flashing the Victory sign to a photo of the felon and former pimp Snoop Dogg. Icon Robert De Niro said eloquently of Trump: “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullsh** artist.”

The efforts to demonize and thus delegitimize and so emasculate Trump have reached sick new heights.

On cable television, Bill Maher jokes that Trump’s daughter fellates her father; on national television, Steven Colbert laughs that Trump fellates Vladimir Putin. Mutatis mutandis: Both would have been fired for suggesting the same about the Obama first family.

Ad nauseam Trump is compared to Hitler by the likes of Ashley Judd and Chris Matthews. Hillary Clinton announces she is part of the “Resistance,” a reference supposedly to the French maquis who sought to ambush Vichy officials and SS patrols during the Nazi occupation of France.

The Democratic party — now bereft of political control in most state legislatures and governorships, as well as in the Senate, the House, the presidency and the Supreme Court — has modeled its opposition on 1960s street theater. More than 60 congressional representatives refused to go to the Inauguration. Some call for Trump’s impeachment; others refuse to hold hearings, block nomination appointments, and demand special prosecutors. The California head of the party leads group chants of “F*** Trump” with extended middle fingers.

The Never Trump right has gone from criticism to outright hysteria and is now calling for impeachment or removal on medical incapacity. The subtext of these latest demands is that a Mike Pence — a wonderful man who did not run for president and would never have been elected if he had run — might assume the presidency and return the Republican party to its former supposedly sober and judicious custodians who, after the proper catharsis, might resume their Washington–New York stewardship of the GOP. For these Trump critics, a defeat along the lines of 2008 and 2016 is far preferable to a 2016 victory. Being praised for being good losers is always preferable to being ostracized for being poor winners.

The Obama Standard
I thought — and so wrote — that Barack Obama subverted the Constitution when he refused to enforce federal laws concerning the ACA mandate, illegal immigration, and contractual provisions of the Chrysler bankruptcy.

I felt Obama, as a candidate and a president-elect, was unethically signaling both the Russians and the Iranians through back channels that he would soon be flexible, even as George Bush was conducting foreign policy as our president.

I thought President Obama had no constitutional right to strong-arm Boeing, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the small Gibson Guitar company. His administration flat-out lied about the Benghazi catastrophe, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the Iran Deal, and the chemical-weapons depots of Bashar al-Assad.

The Obama administration endangered U.S. security by yanking peacekeepers out of Iraq for a cheap campaign talking point, by destroying Libya without a follow-up plan, by setting faux red lines and deadlines, by allowing China to create an artificial island base to adjudicate trans-Pacific sea traffic, by appeasing and resetting relations with Vladimir Putin, and by turning a blind eye to North Korean stepped-up aggression. When the president of the United States promises the Russians that he will be more flexible after an election, the message is that he soon plans to do things that, if known, would likely cost him a victory with the American voters.

Obama high-fived the bin Laden raid to the extent of revealing classified protocols and turning over to pet reporters and Hollywood filmmakers some of the trove of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda communications, in hopes of advancing party-line narratives.

His administration helped ruin the reputations of the IRS and the VA. His DOJ went after an obscure video maker and the journalist Dinesh D’Souza largely for reasons of political reprisal and deterrence. His team ordered illegal surveillance of AP reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen; it may well have surveilled and unmasked political opponents and leaked their names to the media.

Obama invited a felon with a parole ankle bracelet into the White House and praised a visiting rapper whose latest album cover celebrated the murder of a white judge, whose corpse was being toasted over by rappers.

Obama was degreed but not educated; he could not pronounce “corpsmen,” had no idea how many states there were in the Union, and thought Hawaii was in Asia and the Falklands Islands off the coast of India. The media demurred — based in some cases on the finery of Obama’s pants crease or his rhetorical ability to cause electrical sensations in one’s leg — and announced him a god, the smartest president ever to enter office. Obama himself in 2008 buffoonishly announced his power to lower global temperatures and the seas, and declared himself more adroit than all his own political handlers and aides in all of their respective jobs.

Obama’s deputy national-security adviser admitted that the administration had misled the press on the Iran Deal by creating an artificial “echo chamber” among media naïfs. Obama’s comments about Trayvon Martin and the Skip Gates affair were incendiary and in line with his campaign smears about the clingers or his calls to supporters to take a gun to a knife fight and “get in their face.”

And yet, for all that and more, Barack Obama certainly did not warrant articles of impeachment; he was not unhinged, nor did he offer any evidence of medical incapacity. He would not deserve to have his family smeared with jokes about incest or autism. Any Madonna-like talk of blowing him up in the White House would have been obscene, perhaps illegal, and probably grounds for prosecution.

We are now watching insidious regime change, aimed at removing the president of the United States not because of what he has done so far, but because of his personality and what he might do to the Obama agenda — and because for a variety of cultural reasons, our elite simply despises his very being.

A "Syphilitic Emperor"?

Right on schedule:   NYT columnist calls Trump "syphilitic emperor".

Democrats said the exact same thing about Abraham Lincoln:

Then they killed him.

Sources:

The Anti Lincoln Tradition

How Lincoln Was Dissed In His Day

Who Killed Seth Rich? (Revisited)

The news today is that according to an unconfirmed report, DNC staffer and murder victim Seth Rich may have contacted WikiLeaks shortly before his murder.  Immediately after his murder, Julian Assange suggested Rich was his source and offered a reward for information leading to his killer.

Additionally, the source of the new unconfirmed report said the DC police had been instructed to "stand down" in their investigation of Rich's murder.   Remember,  Rich was murdered two weeks before the DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks.

Here's my post from 8/22/16 regarding those events:

An intruder was spotted today, August 22nd, trying to scale the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Julian Assange has lived for the last four years.  The intruder successfully escaped capture.

This is significant because four people with access to information potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton have assumed room temperature in the last four months.  All under mysterious circumstances.

John Jones (upper left), lawyer for WikiLeak's Julian Assange, was mysteriously struck and killed by a train on April 21st in London.

John Ashe (upper right), an ex- UN official, was about to testify in a case that involved the DNC and certain Arkansas connections of the Clintons when he was found dead in his home gym on June 22nd.  His throat was reportedly crushed by a barbell.

Seth Rich (lower left),  a DNC staffer with Clinton ties, was mysteriously beaten and gunned down in Washington, DC. on July 10th.  Mr. Rich's death occurred about two weeks before WikiLeaks released their first batch of DNC email.   WikiLeak's Julian Assange recently suggested Mr. Rich was his source.  

Shawn Lucas (lower right) was found dead on August 2nd.  Mr. Lucas made a video that went viral showing him serving a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. There are no reports yet of how he died.

Some have suggested I am engaging in "conspiracy theories" by listing these four mysterious deaths and noting their Clinton connections.  I am doing no such thing.  I am proposing no theories. Everything stated above is fact.  If you see a conspiracy here, that's on you.

If I was engaged in conspiracy theories, at a minimum I'd have mentioned the mysterious 1993 death of Clinton lawyer Vince Foster.  I purposely did not.  Nevertheless, there are conspiracy theorists out there who suggest the Clinton body-count numbers about fifty.  Here is a short list.

Here's the bottom line:  To this date there are no credible murder allegations against the Clintons, after almost four decades of public life.  There are, however, several credible rape allegations.   Oh, and also: abuse of power, perjury, witness tampering, felony mishandling of classified information, felony government records destruction, intimidation... (I'm sure I"m forgetting some).  Other than that, the Clintons are squeaky clean.

Is Voter Fraud Worth Investigating?

On Thursday, May 11th, Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by establishing a commission to investigate the elusive issue of voter fraud.  

The reason voter fraud is so elusive is because Democrats have vigorously fought any attempt to prevent it, track it, measure it, or prosecute it. 

The statistics are overwhelming:  States that encourage voter fraud vote Democrat, and states that aim for integrity vote Republican.    

Voter ID laws are strict in only 9 states, of which Hillary Clinton won only one.  Of the states that allow illegals to obtain driver's licenses, Hillary Clinton won ever one of the 13 except one.  The only exception was Utah, which issues illegals a distinct license and requests ID to vote.

2106 Election Results Map

          States that Issue Driver's Licenses to Unauthorized

                                          Immigrants 

 States and Voter ID 

2106 Election Map Showing Democrat Concentrations Near Border Crossings and Routes

(Hat Tip: @Military4Trump on Twitter)

The above map is not a coincidence. Democrats have been on a decades long mission to encourage unauthorized immigrants to come here, and once here, be given loopholes to vote. The reason is simple; they overwhelmingly vote Democrat. 

To further this along, Democrat President Bill Clinton signed a law in 1993 known as the Motor Voter Bill, which basically automated voter registration for anyone applying for a driver's license or other government benefit.  That makes it extremely possible for illegals to wind-up as registered voters, despite assertions to the contrary, in the 13 states that issue licenses to illegals.  

Here's a picture of Bill Clinton signing the Motor Voter bill.  Notice the two people standing directly behind him?  They are Francis Fox Piven and  Richard Cloward, in the green and grey respectively, two radical Columbia University professors who advocated collapsing the U.S. by overloading it with dependents and immigrants.

And here is Barack Obama, who studied at Columbia University while Cloward and Piven held court there, answering  a question with only one correct answer.  The question is essentially, "should illegals be afraid to vote?" His answer should have been, "they shouldn't vote because it's illegal". That's not what he says though.



Link: HERE

So, how many illegals and non-citizens voted? There is absolutely no way to easily know because by Democrat design, voting is done almost entirely on the honor system.  No citizenship records are kept, and no electronic records are kept relating to who actually voted.  That leaves only maps and circumstantial evidence, like above.

Donald Trump has a point, he should investigate, and he should work to ensure integrity in the voting system.   It is essential for sustaining a Democracy.   

Why Did Trump Fire Comey?

The Left is apoplectic now that Donald Trump has fired FBI Director Jim Comey, despite calling for this very thing themselves for most of a year.  Many reasons have surfaced as to why Trump may have taken this action at this time.  Among them:

• Comey's bizarre press conference last summer where he laid out the case against Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information, and then excused her on the basis of "intent", which, of course, is not part of the statute.
• Comey's bizarre intervening in the Loretta Lynch / Bill Clinton tarmac meeting.
• Comey's bizarre letter re-opening the Clinton matter days before the election.  (Which actually hurt her, and helped Trump.)
• Comey's bizarre recent testimony in front of Congress.
• The Left believes Comey was onto Trump's supposed Russia collusion, and therefore had to be eliminated. (Yet, Trump would have to fire the entire FBI to keep that from being made public, since an investigation of that scope would likely involve hundreds.)   

That said, there is another strong case for why Donald Trump fired Jim Comey.  He is a partisan.

Remember Trump's famous tweet about being bugged by Barack Obama?  Right before that tweet, Reince Priebus, WH Chief of Staff, had asked Jim Comey to publicly state what he had already been saying privately, that there was zero evidence of any Russia collusion.  Comey turned him down flatly saying, A) the FBI doesn't get involved in political squabbles, and B) they don't comment about investigations.  Then, right after that, Trump tweeted about his phones being tapped, and what did Comey do?  He immediately, and publicly, came out and said there was no evidence Obama bugged Trump.

Bam! Trump knew instantly he had a partisan FBI director who was applying a double standard.


(UPDATE)
Here's a timeline of the events from 2/24 to 5/8:

2/24 -  Reince Priebus asks James Comey to publicly admit there is no evidence of Russia collusion. Comey turns him down citing it as a political squabble and part of an investigation he cannot comment on.

3/4 - Trump tweets about Barack Obama wiretapping him. 

3/5 - James Comey immediately and publicly denies Obama had Trump wiretapped.  How could he possibly know this within a day, and be so certain that he could state it publicly given that the resources available to a POTUS for surveillance go well beyond the FBI?  And how could he possibly comment on this political squabble while the Russia collusion squabble was off limits?

3/20 - Comey public testimony undercuts Trump's claim of wiretapping.  Apparently, Comey had been calling Trump "crazy" among colleagues for his tweet.

4/4 - It turns out members of the Trump transition were surveilled and improperly unmasked - the equivalent of being wiretapped.

5/8 - Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's memo makes case against Comey, which Trump uses as his opportunity to fire James Comey.  

Steal This Meme!

Are you tired of vituperative sophistry on social media and elsewhere?  Then steal this meme.  This is what Democrats said the last time a GOP President tried to undermine their immoral world.  Not to compare Trump and Lincoln, mind you, but to compare Democrats then and now.
#Perspective  #History

Sources:

The Anti Lincoln Tradition

How Lincoln Was Dissed In His Day

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.

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.

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?

  

*     Loretta Lynch calls for "blood and death in the streets"

**  The anti-Lincoln Tradition

      "Lincoln is an Idiot"