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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…”
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…”
I agree with Mr. Morgan’s analysis, but why do people on the left always seem to call for silencing of voices they don’t agree with?
PIERS MORGAN:
“…Who would Donald Trump most like to face as Democrat nominee in the forthcoming 2020 election?
I’d hazard a guess it would be a young, female, screechy, super-woke, easily triggered radical socialist snowflake with a disdainful view of America.
In fact, I can narrow it down more specifically to any one of the Squad – the four newly elected firebrand Democratic congresswomen of color currently lighting up U.S. politics: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley…”
Brent Scher:
“…Media outlets scrambled to prove false the accusation that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) married her brother after President Donald Trump mentioned it, but none have been able to definitively reach an answer, largely due to Omar’s unwillingness to provide information.
Trump was asked about the accusation that Omar’s husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was also her brother during a scrum with reporters last Wednesday and said he had heard talk that she married her brother but knew “nothing about it.”
National media had largely kept away from judging the merits of the accusation that she was related to her second husband, which have circulated since her entry into politics in 2016, but after Trump’s comment many came to quick conclusions. CNN’s Jim Acosta jumped in immediately to criticize Trump for diving in on “disgusting lies.” The Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer published a lengthy piece on Friday that did little to nothing to debunk what he calls a “baseless smear.”
The closest thing to evidence against the claim presented in Sommer’s piece is a reference to a time Omar showed a Star Tribune reporter pictures on her cell phone of immigration documents with a list of members of her family. Sommer’s piece fails to mention that Omar declined to provide copies of any of the documents to the reporter or allow him to make record of the information he was briefly allowed to view.
Omar didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Daily Beast. Her congressional office currently is alerting reporters through auto-reply that it’s not responding to press inquiries, including one from the Free Beacon, into whether any other outlets have been shown documents Omar purports to be evidence against the claim she married her brother.
That one time Omar allowed a reporter to view documents on a cell phone was also the extent of substantial evidence against the claim presented in the New York Times fact-check of Omar’s marriage. (The Times also uses faulty math to indicate, based on their dates of birth, that it’s impossible for Omar and Elmi to have the same mother. It’s not.)
PolitiFact, perhaps wisely, didn’t dive into the marriage question after Trump’s Wednesday remark, but rather went to the Star Tribune to ask about its attempts to gather facts needed to reach a conclusion. The Minnesota paper’s political editor told PolitiFact his interest in the marriage controversy began because his reporters “were not getting a lot of answers” from Omar on her incorrectly filed tax returns, in which she claimed to be married to her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, when she in fact was not…”
DAVID CATRON:
“…The lesson the Democrats seem to have learned from 2016 isn’t that they failed to earn the people’s votes, but rather that the electorate didn’t deserve the benign leadership offered by their standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Or, as she herself put it, “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” One would think that, after two years of such self-flattering rationalization, the Democrats would wake up to reality and stop denigrating the people whose votes they must have to win elections…”
Paul Sperry:
“…It is one of the most enduring and consequential mysteries of the Trump-Russia investigation: Why did former FBI Director James Comey refuse to say publicly what he was telling President Trump in private — that Trump was not the target of an ongoing probe?
That refusal ignited a chain of events that has consumed Washington for more than two years – including Comey’s firing by Trump, the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and ongoing claims that Trump obstructed justice.
Now an answer is emerging. Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.
Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.
In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter…”
Bill Gertz:
“…The influence operations are conducted by the United Front Work Department, a Central Committee organ that employs tens of thousands of operatives who seek to use both overt and covert operations to promote Communist Party policies.
The Party’s United Front strategy includes paying several Washington think tanks with the goal influencing their actions and adopting positions that support Beijing’s policies.
“The [Chinese Communist Party] has sought to influence academic discourse on China and in certain instances has infringed upon—and potentially criminally violated—rights to freedoms of speech and association that are guaranteed to Americans and those protected by U.S. laws,” the report says.
“Despite the CCP’s candid discussion of its United Front strategy, the breadth and depth of this issue remain relatively unknown to U.S. policymakers.”…”
No need to click over. It is the wide-eyed nincompoop calling Trump names. Racist has been used, overused, exhausted—like a flat tire. Booker has to create new terms of terribleness to characterize the president.
Worst media and political class of my life.
