ANDREW C. MCCARTHY:

“…Vindman, of course, is one of the House Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses. His haughtiness in proclaiming the policy community and his membership in it grates, throughout his 340-page House deposition transcript. I couldn’t agree more, though, with our experts’ apparent consensus that Moscow is bad, should be challenged on various fronts, and would best be seen as the incorrigible rival it is, not the potential strategic partner some wish it to be — the “some” here known to include the president. Ukraine, for all its deep flaws, is valuable to us as a check on Russia’s aggression, another conclusion about which the president is skeptical.

That is, on the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.

But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay…”

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AOC Suggests We Need to Fight ‘White Supremacy’ to Combat Climate Change

You just can’t make this stuff up!

Robert Spencer:

“…Rex Tillerson and John Kelly failed as well. They’re out of the administration and Trump is still president, although there are no doubt many others still inside the government who think they know better than the president how the country ought to be run, and are doing their level best to implement their vision, without having had to go to the trouble to submit their plans to the judgment of the voters. The voters! Who needs them? Who knows better than Tillerson, Kelly and their ilk how to steer our increasingly fractious nation back to safety, peace, and prosperity?

As Daniel Webster and the other members of John Tyler’s cabinet, William H. Seward, and Lyndon Johnson demonstrate, Rex Tillerson and John Kelly are by no means the first egotistical elitists who thought their judgment so impeccable that they were willing to dare to impose it on the nation, even though no one had empowered them to do so. Nor will they be the last. But it was good of Nikki Haley, whatever her faults, to become a real whistleblower in this instance, just so we know where we stand. President Trump should be reelected or rejected by the voters in 2020 based on what he has done and intends to do, not on what a swarm of unelected bureaucrats has decided he should do instead…”

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Think about how much time and money is wasted on this kind of nonsense each year.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS:

“…Reugebrink is a federal employee and is the “Mindfulness & Resiliency Program Manager” with the Work Environment & Performance Office at the United States Department of Agriculture. Her job is, in her words, “to teach mindfulness and compassion practices that enable all of us to not just survive but also grow from exposure to stress.”

Reugebrink’s presentation quoted Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

Reugebrink also speaks at for-profit seminars sponsored by Forest Bathing International and the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides. The certification program for this organization says “the forest itself is the therapist. We don’t train therapists; we train guides. By slowing people down and facilitating sensory experiencing, guides open the doorways through which the forest can accomplish its healing work.”

Tuition for a six-month “Guide Training and Certification Program” is $3410.

In 2018, Reugebrink’s federal salary was $101,794 per year. She teaches “mindfulness” and forest bathing to thousands of federal workers each year at agencies such as the Secret Service, IRS, TSA and more…”

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Post Editorial Board:

“…President Trump’s determination to break with past policies has prompted outrageous “resistance” not only from Democrats but even by some in his own administration.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley offers the latest evidence of that, accusing ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and ex-Chief of Staff John Kelly of trying to “undermine” Trump.

In her new book and interviews about it, Haley says the men claimed “they were trying to save the country and that if they did not do something, people would die.” They believed “it was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interest of America.”

Yet Kelly’s and Tillerson’s gripes didn’t fit the model of “a rogue president.” They simply disagreed with specific policies, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal and moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

That’s not “out of control” — it’s refusing to be bound by conventional wisdom, which in fact proved to be false.

On the embassy move, Haley notes, the two predicted “the sky would fall.” For decades, critics warned that the “Arab street,” and perhaps the entire Middle East, would explode if Washington took this step. Yet Trump went ahead, and “the sky is still up there.”

Nixing the Paris accord and the Iran deal similarly failed to bring the promised disasters. The establishment was wrong.

More important, Haley is 1,000 percent right to say Tillerson’s and Kelly’s duty was to let Trump know their concerns — and quit if they didn’t like his final decisions.

Yes, Democrats in Congress have every right to oppose Trump’s policies, as Republicans did his predecessor’s. Yet Dems’ drive to impeach him has given a lot of play to various diplomats objecting to Trump’s “shadow” Ukraine policy.

Sorry: The State Department works for the president, not vice versa. Trump’s completely free to use outsiders like Rudy Giuliani as envoys, as presidents always have.

If Democrats can’t show Trump cutting foreign deals that benefit him personally rather than serving the nation’s interest, impeachment is just a giant waste of time…”

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Daily Northwestern Apologizes to Students for Journalism

Deep state actors upset with the President’s approach to foreign policy and choices regarding policy, this is the heart of the current impeachment farce. And farce it is. This article is an excellent analysis of one of the Democrat’s top witnesses. Click over for a good read.

Byron York:

“…Still, Vindman was deeply upset when Trump, relying on Rudy Giuliani and others, turned his attention to Ukraine. “In the spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency,” Vindman said in his opening statement. The outside influencers, he suggested, were undermining the work of his “interagency colleagues.” In the words of the Washington Post, Vindman was “deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy.”

Vindman’s discussion of the interagency, while dry as dust, might contain the key to his role in the Trump-Ukraine affair. In the last few years, the bureaucracy with which he so clearly identified has often been at odds, sometimes privately and sometimes publicly, with the president. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, writing in a new book, said two top officials, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House chief of staff John Kelly, sought to undermine Trump to “save the country.”

“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interest of America, they said,” Haley wrote. “The president didn’t know what he was doing.”

That view extended deep into some areas of the government. Now, parts of the foreign policy bureaucracy are in open war with the president, channeling their grievances through the House Democrats’ drive toward impeachment. When he testifies in public, Vindman will be the living embodiment of that bureaucratic war…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democratic opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it

We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?

When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?

When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?

If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?

If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?…”

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Cal Thomas:

“…If you are paying attention to the Washington circus that is the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s handling of the much maligned Ukraine call, this is what real collusion looks like: A media largely committed to advancing the goal of Democrats to severely damage or remove him from office, a series of at first private testimonies by people who appear to have similar motives and connections to Democrats and/or anti-Trump forces, and now a new book by “Anonymous,” which claims the president has a bad attitude and is difficult to work with…”

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“…Legal expert Alan Dershowitz commented on the “scary” impeachment inquiry being led by House Democrats against President Trump Sunday morning in an interview with John Catsimatidis on the “Cats Roundtable” radio show on 970 AM in New York City.

Dershowitz said the effort to get Trump on any crime reminded him of Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria who famously said: “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”

“Whether you’re from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing,” Dershowitz said. “The latest twist was people on television, particularly CNN and MSNBC, are saying that if the president or somebody else were to name the whistleblower in the Ukrainian situation that person would be guilty of a crime.”

“Well, I spent the afternoon yesterday searching the federal criminal statutes from beginning to end. I couldn’t find the crime.”

“First they made up collusion… I searched the statute books. There’s no crime of collusion… with a foreign country. After that, they said obstruction of Congress,” Dershowitz said. “In a desperate effort to try to find crimes [committed by] President Trump, they’re just making it up. And that means we are all in danger.”…”

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Steve Cortes:

“…Last week the fake-news operatives of our corporate media complex, particularly ABC News, revealed through their duplicity that they thoroughly deserve President Trump’s denigration as “the enemy of the people.” Far too many American media practitioners today forsake journalism in favor of narrative promotion. Indeed, they consistently show themselves to be a cabal of group-think “resistance” advocates masquerading as reporters.

The tapes released last week by Project Veritas revealed not only the stark hypocrisy of ABC News, but also the rank depravity of that organization for apparently covering up for a serial sexual abuser of young girls – and perhaps for his powerful friends as well. Making matters worse from a journalistic angle, both Amy Robach, the reporter involved, and her employer issued absurd statements attempting to deflect scrutiny of this clear ethical breach…”

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