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Hat tip Stephen Kruiser
I watched a portion of the Trump rally in Texas last night. The crowd was huge, something like 20,000 people inside a stadium packed to capacity with additional thousands outside the venue watching on big screen monitors. The crowd was raucous, as was the President. We are months away from any voting and a year roughly until the next election. I don’t think reasonable people could watch that performance, and the crowd’s response, and come away with an explanation other than Trump is a phenomenon.
Compare the Trump rally to the latest Democrat debate. The Democrats don’t stand a chance. I think national Democrat political leaders recognize this. The nonsense with impeachment is now, and will be, a failure. I can envision a landslide electoral college victory for the President. Such a victory would be a rejection of the Democrat/MSM insanity on display for the last 3 years. Will it translate down ticket to congressional races? That is less clear.
CONRAD BLACK:
“…generated by the dishonest national political press. This is the press whose Joe Scarborough of MSNBC did not show some of President Trump’s responses to his enemies because of “concern” for the president’s family, as he “seems to have lost his mind.”
This is a new frontier in American journalism, where a television news commentator who hates the president wishes to spare the president’s family a rerun of his entirely rational denunciations of his enemies.
The House of Representatives began considering impeachment because an anonymous Democrat and former political associate of Vice President Biden received a hearsay account of a conversation between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in which Mr. Trump encouraged the newly elected leader to find out if Mr. Biden and his son had done anything inappropriate in Ukraine. The president quickly made the transcript of the conversation public.
Partisan Democrats and formerly sensible commentators have portrayed Mr. Trump’s request as a demand for incriminating evidence on Mr. Biden, failing which he would not resume U.S. aid to Ukraine. In other words, this was a solicitation for a benefit of value to Mr. Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. The reference to a resumption of aid was 500 words earlier in the transcript, and not connected at all to the Biden question.
When Mr.Biden was mentioned, it was to request to know what happened — a neutral request for the facts. Yes, Mr. Trump said the appearance of the former vice president’s son $50,000-a-month sinecure as a director of a Ukrainian gas company, along with the elder Biden’s boast of having a Ukrainian prosecutor fired, was “horrible.” And so it was. But there may be uncontroversial explanations. If the Biden allegations are unfounded, Americans will want to know. If the facts are corrupt in themselves, Americans — and Democrats especially — will want to know that, too.
In reality, the whole episode is nonsense, a farce. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t hold a vote on a formal impeachment inquiry because she couldn’t win the vote. If there were such an inquiry, where the Republicans called and examined witnesses and subpoenaed documents, it would collapse as quickly as the Russian collusion fraud did when former special counsel Robert Mueller stumbled through his congressional inquiry…
…Mr. Trump can’t be removed from his office; he deserves and will gain reelection on his record; the Democrats will be back — both parties always are. But the sooner the country tunes out this dishonest, evil press putschism, the better for the whole country, especially the national political news outlets themselves…”
Humeyra Pamuk, Ece Toksabay, Tuvan Gumrukcu:
“…ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey agreed on Thursday to pause its offensive in Syria for five days to let Kurdish forces withdraw from a “safe zone” Ankara had sought to capture, in a deal hailed by the Trump administration and cast by Turkey as a complete victory.
The truce was announced by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence after talks in Ankara with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, and was praised by President Donald Trump, who said it would save “millions of lives”.
But if implemented it would achieve all the main objectives Turkey announced when it launched its assault on Oct. 9: control of a strip of Syria more than 30 km (20 miles) deep, with the Kurdish militia, once U.S. allies, obliged to pull out.
It was also unclear if the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) would fully comply with the agreement, which would leave Turkish forces in charge of a swathe of territory that the Kurds once held with U.S. military support…”
ROGER L. SIMON:
“…two cellphones belonging to Joseph Mifsud — the mysterious Maltese professor at the heart of the Russia probe (aka Spygate) — have suddenly materialized. The Epoch Times reports:
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has obtained two phones of Joseph Mifsud, one of the central figures of the 2016 Russia investigation, and the lawyer of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has requested them, saying they likely contain exculpatory evidence.
The phones, two BlackBerry models, “only recently” came into the government’s possession, said Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, a former prosecutor, in an Oct. 15 court filing (pdf).
Data and metadata on the phones “is material, exculpatory, and relevant to the defense of Mr. Flynn,” she said.
She is smart, well-spoken, beautiful, and I disagree with almost everything she says.
I still like her.
MARK TAPSCOTT:
“…WASHINGTON—Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s latest refusal to allow a formal vote on impeaching President Donald Trump has some legal experts worrying that a modern version of England’s infamous Star Chamber court is emerging here in America.
The Star Chamber court met secretly, afforded defendants no due process, delivered verdicts that couldn’t be appealed, and meted out often barbaric punishments. The chamber was especially feared in the 16th and 17th centuries, and its unrestrained cruelty was among the reasons the Puritans migrated to America…”
Or journalism
MICHAEL STARR HOPKINS:
“…If Democrats want to beat President Trump in 2020 and return a sense of normalcy to the White House, they may want to make sure that the current front runners are up to the job at hand. Winning a primary is one thing, but winning a general election is a completely different beast. When the top three candidates are a self avowed socialist, a former vice president mired in scandal, and a quasi populist at war with Wall Street, it is fair to say that there is room for concern. Luckily, it is still early.
Elizabeth Warren could potentially be the best candidate and the worst candidate to take on Trump in the general election all at once. She is clearly thoughtful, extremely smart, and prepared to lean into the historic moment that her candidacy presents, but like Hillary Clinton, she has yet to find her voice or ability to create a likeable narrative that will drive apathetic Democrats to the polls on Election Day.
The party cannot afford another nominee like Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004. Democrats do not need to prove that they are smarter than Republicans or occupy some moral high ground. Democrats need to prove that they are listening to voters, that they share their pain, and that they will fight like hell to improve the lives of all Americans…”
You can’t make this up! Nobody would believe you.
Peter Navarro:
“…First, articulate fair and principled goals. The Trump team insisted from the beginning that the outdated rate-setting system must be modernized and that all member states must have more power in setting their own postage rates.
Second, make the redline demands clear. The administration’s unwavering condition was to allow the United States Postal Service to immediately set domestic postage rates at a level sufficient to recover costs.
Third, be ready to walk if those redline conditions are not to be met. Here, it is vital to show unwavering resolve in the face of the inevitable resistance that will come from the defenders and beneficiaries of the status quo.
To demonstrate that unwavering resolve, we had to be fully prepared to exit the postal union. So even as our negotiations unfolded, we prepared to exit the agreement without disrupting international mail, particularly election and military mail. Through such meticulous preparations — which we made clear publicly and through diplomatic channels — we clearly signaled there was no hesitation in our threat to walk.
Fourth, change is rarely achieved by going it alone. Early in the negotiations, we engaged with the union’s leadership, even as we identified partners we could work with to win the reform we wanted — countries like Brazil, Canada, Iceland, Norway and South Africa were all similarly harmed by the status quo. Through intense negotiations, we built a coalition of pro-reform countries, founded on the principle that what is fair to American businesses and workers is also fair to the world.
Finally, hit back hard on those who opposed the needed reforms. An obvious antagonist was China, the biggest beneficiary of the distorted system. It tried to bully countries, particularly in Africa, to which it had lent considerable sums of money. We countered that there was much more to lose if the United States exited the postal union — and much to gain by working with a democracy rather than an authoritarian state.
A more subtle problem lay with several countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. At the Geneva meeting, their powerful postal systems sought to advance narrow rent-seeking interests that clearly deviated from the broader strategic relationships the United States has with these countries. We countered by bringing this divergence to the attention of higher-ranking government officials — and putting the issue in its broader strategic perspective.
Collectively, these five lessons represent a new kind of Trumpian diplomacy that achieves results while advancing the interests of American businesses and workers across the globe. Through gritty determination and creative diplomacy, we clearly have the ability to remake and revitalize many of the antiquated international organizations that today ill serve American interests…”
Rod Dreher:
“…The AG begins by talking about the capacity for self-government, meaning not the form of administration of a liberal democracy, but the ability of individuals to master their own passions, and subject them to reason. Can we handle freedom? That, says Barr, is a question that preoccupied the Founders.
No society can exist without the capacity to restrain vice, he goes on to say. If you depend only on the government to do this, you get tyranny. (This, by the way, is what’s happening in China; many Chinese actually support the tyrannical Social Credit System, because communism destroyed civil society and social trust.) But, says Barr, licentiousness is another form of tyranny. People enslaved by their own appetites make community life impossible. (This, I would say, is what we are more endangered by in America today … and it will ultimately call forth tyranny, Chinese-style.)
Barr offers this quotation from Edmund Burke:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”
Why is religion a public good? Because, says Barr, it “trains people to want what is good.” It helps to frame a society’s moral culture, and instills moral discipline. No secular creed has emerged that can do what religion does, he says. And by casting religion out, we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality.
“What we call ‘values’ today are nothing more than mere sentimentality, drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity,” says the AG.
Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.
“This is not decay,” he said. “This is organized destruction.” He named secularists in academia, media, and elsewhere as figures who are not neutral at all, but have rather inculcated a kind of religiosity in their own project of destroying religion. They conduct their own inquisitions and excommunications for heresy.
Then Barr said something, almost in passing, that in truth deserves a lot more attention by religious and philosophical observers: that we have created a popular culture in which we the people are “too distracted” to take these questions seriously…”
George Friedman:
“…For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.
Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.
A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal…”