Conrad Black:

“…The real origins of this satanic sequence of outrages and the real authors of this ridiculous special counsel report will be unmasked. The Democratic impeachers will be overwhelmed by the gathering backlash.

Mueller has been a respectable front for a ghastly assault on the Constitution, and at the end, he was, understandably, a reluctant witness, but—brave old soldier and Bronze Star winner that he is—he took a bullet for the platoon rather than accept the attorney general’s offer of assistance if he wanted to ignore the House subpoenas to appear. He wanted to retain his professional standing while fronting a horrible mutation of the political system. It was a little like Theresa May, the British prime minister who left office the same day, trying to leave Europe and remain in it simultaneously.

As Washington Dinsdale said in the 1939 Marlene Dietrich-James Stewart film “Destry Rides Again,” one “must choose between the bottle and the badge.” Mueller tried to turn an inability to exonerate—a standard that he admitted has never been asked or expected of any kind of American prosecutor—into something the Democratic congressional allies of his investigative team could use to continue their malicious and illegal harassment of the president. He never should have published the second volume of his report, which is a pastiche of selective and spliced scraps scarcely more rigorously composed than the Steele dossier and apparently intended, with no more success, to serve the same partisan interests.

It is a great sadness, a great victory, and a great irony. The spectacle of a stooped and aged Robert Mueller, after he had (voluntarily) been so dishonestly used by the president’s enemies, was an objectively sad one, a sorry swan-song to a substantial career. The victory of the Trump Republicans is seismic, and announces the imminent exposure and punishment of those who abused the system to attack the president and deform the political system.

The irony is two-fold. If Trump’s enemies had not launched the Russian collusion nonsense, all their pre-electoral skullduggery would not have been unearthed—if they had given him the normal honeymoon for incoming presidents, a serene ambiance would have settled Washington down, at least for a year or so, and they would now be wallowing in their Washington lobbying and other sinecures.

The second irony is that there is plenty of room to attack this president in more traditional and acceptable ways. His policies have mainly been successful; but he is too bumptious, egocentric, and stylistically annoying for many people, and the Democrats could have made something of an issue out of his personality.

Instead, they have struck out, will have no window through which to fire live ammunition at Trump, and will have to take the heat for their corrupt actions. They promised “scorched earth,” and are immolating themselves.

We are now between the lightning and the thunder…”

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Ethan Cai:

• • A study from the University of Pennsylvania finds that racism in the U.S. has significantly decreased since President Trump’s election in 2016.
  • This finding comes amid backlash from students, when many on college campuses are claiming that Trump is racist.

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Ilhan Omar, Quintessentially American

Hard to tell?

This sums up the Mueller Hearing perfectly.

JOHN KASS:

Used and abused by his “friends” Mueller, the old guy, dropped the ball for the Democrats. It was a disgrace. It highlights the twisted, ugly, devious nature of the Obama Administration bureaucrats. They should be investigated for corruption, and prosecuted where malfeasance is found.

Thomas McArdle:

“…Mueller was “exactly the right kind of individual for this job,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said when he was appointed special counsel in 2017. We’ve been told for over two years now that the former FBI director is a lion, a dogged crusader for the truth, a national treasure within the law enforcement establishment. But on Wednesday he was a shell of a man; he stammered, sat open-mouthed, gawking, endlessly asked for questions to be repeated and rephrased, and failed to remember what was contained in his own 448-page report — strongly indicating that it was not Mueller, but his team of left-leaning, Democrat-contributing prosecutors, such as Andrew Weissman, that actually penned the document bearing his name…

…House Judiciary ranking Republican Doug Collins of Georgia calling Mueller out on the matter of collusion. His report stated that “collusion” (a non-offense and not a legal term) and “conspiracy” were synonymous, but when asked by Collins, Mueller claimed the terms were not synonymous. Mueller was stumblingly forced to correct himself when Collins presented the words of his own report to him — an extreme embarrassment at the outset of the hearing…

…The long-anticipated, hyped-to-the-heavens Mueller movie gets a half-star at best. The question now is whether Democrats in Congress will walk out of the theater and stay out, abandoning talk of impeachment, or begin to produce a sequel to one of the biggest cinematic flops of all time…”

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Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure’

Liberal nightmare: Takeover of federal judiciary by “larval Scalias is devastatingly close to completion”

Trump can drive the loony left to distraction by tweeting on the disrespect and attacks on police in New York. It is an indication of the effects of liberal government, liberal policies, and the crazy racial politics that pervades the Democratic 2020 presidential candidates.

Watch the video it is disgusting.

Ed Driscoll strung this together:

RASHIDA TLAIB ON THE FLOOR OF CONGRESS: BDS Movement Against Israel Like American Boycott of Nazi Germany.

Earlier: Ilhan Omar Says Boycotting Israel Is Like Boycotting Nazi Germany.

Related: Rep Brad Schneider (D-IL) on CNN: Boycotting Israel Is Anti-Semitic, Won’t Condemn Omar, Tlaib For Supporting It.

More: How the Left Turned Against Israel.

The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace.

There’s ‘poop in the water’ at America’s dirtiest beaches. Is yours on the list?

Runnerup:

Al Franken’s sexual assault is what #MeToo was created to address and now liberals feel victimized by it.

I believe the first paragraph of Hanson’s piece below captures the reason for the shrieking, hysterical Democrat response to Trump as the 2020 election approaches. I think the Democrats intuitively feel their grip on minority voters slipping. More than anything else, this scares them.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Polls suggest that Donald Trump may well win a greater share of the minority vote than moderates John McCain and Mitt Romney — largely because of a raise in middle-class wages in a tight labor market, and new leverage of entry-level workers over labor-hungry employers. Do working-class blacks and Hispanics suffer then from false consciousness, and do they need tutorials from progressive grandees so they won’t be so incorrect as to appreciate having more jobs at better pay?  Racists do not craft economic policies that empower African Americans far more so than those promoted by the first African-American president.

Ditto the entire failure of the destroy-Trump agenda, whether exemplified by the Mueller exoneration and the absurd appeals to the Logan Act, the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment. What saved Bill Clinton from conviction after impeachment in 1998 was the lockstep voting of Democratic senators in the minority, which prevented a two-third conviction vote in the Senate and the consequent removal from office of the overseer of a booming economy. The reason Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest-serving Israeli prime minister and has survived every sort of personal and ideological attack is that he reengineered the Israeli economy and offered unprecedented prosperity to his constituents. Such shared bounty short-circuited his critics.

The subtext of the failure of all the Trump impeachment hysterias was not merely that they were based on emotional narratives rather than evidence and facts — empiricism has never been the forte of congressional frenzies — but that the public believed either that the removal of a successful president would stall the economic expansion or that it might show ingratitude for a domestic job well done. Democrats seems to have forgotten that voters are most interested in the economy — along with illegal immigration — and least concerned with their obsessions with climate change and the Green New Deal…

…the more the economy hums along, the more ridiculous the obsessive “Get Trump” fixations become. But if recession looms before 2020, then suddenly the weirder the progressive obsessions with destroying Trump, the more likely they will resonate…”

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The Editors at National Review:

“…Our natural instinct would to hit Iran hard for its depredations and to establish a deterrent against such attacks before they get worse. But in this case, Iran clearly wants to provoke a reaction, which suggests the administration’s more cautious, “rope-a-dope” approach may be the right one.

Skeptics doubted that the administration’s unilateral sanctions could truly bite after the nuclear deal opened Iran for business with Europe. They were wrong. The oil embargo and banking sanctions, imposed after Trump pulled out of the deal, have been cratering the Iranian economy. The regime’s aggressions are an attempt to find a way out of the economic punishment.

The mullahs hope to exploit daylight between the Europeans and the United States (although poking the British won’t advance that goal) and to send a message to the White House that its pressure campaign doesn’t come without costs. Tehran also has begun breaching nuclear limits imposed under the Iran deal, another front in an effort to spook the West into rallying around the Iran deal and convincing Trump to relent.

What to do now? The administration should obviously render whatever assistance the British may request. It should continue to send more forces into the region as a message of resolve, and to work with allies to better secure shipping in the Strait. It should ratchet up the pressure campaign against Tehran, and revoke the remaining waivers that allow the Europeans to cooperate with Iran’s purportedly peaceful nuclear program.

It is quite possible that Iran considers its provocations a prelude to another nuclear negotiation. For his part, Trump continues to dangle the prospects of talks, even blessing diplomatic outreach by Senator Rand Paul. But the regime has a strong incentive to try to wait Trump out and hope the election of a pro-deal Democrat delivers what it wants without any more trouble. Perhaps the Iranians believe that Trump getting embroiled in a conflict advances that goal. Regardless, they obviously want to escape from the box that they are in, and Trump shouldn’t let them…”

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