Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ category

Washington Post Unhappy that Trump Criticized the Press

June 1, 2016

Washington Post Unhappy that Trump Criticized the Press, Power LinePaul Mirengoff, June 1, 2016

The headline in the paper edition of today’s Washington Post reads: “Charity scrutiny riles up Trump” (the story is here) This is not the most biased headline ever to appear in the Post, but it clearly is designed to cast Trump in a bad light. As such, it corroborates Trump’s claim that the media is out to “make me look very bad.”

The Post follows up with a lead editorial denouncing Trump for attacking reporters he considers dishonest. “Mr. Trump is unapologetic about his intention to bully the press,” the Post’s editors complain.

The Post, naturally, is operating under the assumption that it, and other mainstream media outlets, are eminently fair. But at Power Line, we have spent 14 years trying to show that this isn’t true — that, in fact, the Post and other such organs are biased against and unfair towards Republicans and, above all, conservatives.

What if we are right? How should a Republican president behave towards reporters who are biased against him and the party he represents?

Aesthetically, I liked George W. Bush’s approach. He was “presidential.” I don’t recall him ever lashing out, or even criticizing, his media critics publicly (though, when he was running for president a live microphone picked up an unflattering exchange with Dick Cheney about a New York Times reporter).

But the aesthetically pleasing approach isn’t necessarily the best approach. And the abuse the media intends to hurl at Trump will exceed even that experienced by President Bush.

I see no reason why Trump shouldn’t call out reporters he thinks are treating him unfairly; nor do I see any reason why he shouldn’t criticize the media in general. The First Amendment offers broad protection of the ability of reporters to write what they wish. However, it does not protect them from sharp criticism about what they write.

The Post’s editors equate criticism with “bullying.” They would. The two are not equivalent, however.

It’s quite possible that, as president, Trump will bully the press. President Obama has.Jennifer Rubin cited several instances of bullying by the Team Obama. The victims included Bob Woodward and Ron Fournier.

I doubt that, if elected president, Trump will be more restrained than Obama — or less restrained than Hillary Clinton.

If and when Trump bullies the press, he should be criticized for it. But if all he does is push back publicly against stories he considers unfair — which is what he did yesterday regarding coverage of the charities — he should not be accused of bullying. He should only be criticized if his charge of unfairness is itself unfair.

The Post complains that Trump sometimes calls press stories “libelous.” It notes that he’s said he would “loosen” (Trump’s word) libel laws so that journalists could be “attacked” (the Post’s word; the right word is “sued”) more easily.

Trump cannot loosen the libel laws. That’s up to legislatures and to courts reviewing any “loosening” legislation in light of the First Amendment.

I happen to like the libel laws the way they are, but they aren’t set in stone. Great Britain has a different concept and is no less of a democracy for it.

Peter Wehner has written, shrewdly:

What Trump is doing is exactly what Rush Limbaugh and others have been begging Republican presidential candidates to do — to run a brutal, scorched-earth, anything-goes campaign. They now have their man.

I don’t advocate a brutal, scorched-earth, anything-goes campaign, and at times I have criticized the campaign Trump is running. But I confess to being happy that the Republican nominee will push back against attacks by the liberal, anti-Republican mainstream media, and I’m looking forward to the negotiations over debate moderators.

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious

May 30, 2016

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious, Front Page MagazineDavid Horowitz, May 30, 2016

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Reprinted from Breitbart.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”

“Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier a Never Trump diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right.Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a leftwing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

Obama’s most consequential domestic legislation is the Affordable Care Act, which he had no part in writing. It was the work of leftwing think tanks and the congressional Democrats. So it will be with Trump, which is why all the blather about his vagueness or impracticality on policy issues is beside the point. Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so.  Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.

The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.

Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms – was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.

This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.

The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.

Newt Gingrich makes general election predictions

May 29, 2016

Newt Gingrich makes general election predictions, Fox News via YouTube, May 29, 2016

Gingrich predicts Trump will transform the electoral map

May 29, 2016

Gingrich predicts Trump will transform the electoral map, Fox News via Youtube, May 27, 2016

Cartoons of the Day

May 27, 2016

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

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votes

H/t Joopklepzeiker

Politicians and diapers

Anti-Trump thugs shout ‘Viva Mexico’ while burning American flag

May 25, 2016

Anti-Trump thugs shout ‘Viva Mexico’ while burning American flag, Fox News, May 25, 2016

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This is what a fundamentally transformed nation looks like – where mobs of troublemakers try to shut down free speech. They wanted to silence Mr. Trump and his supporters.

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An angry mob caused mayhem outside a Donald Trump rally Tuesday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico – turning the city into a de facto Third World country.

The rampaging gang was made up of anti-Trump goons — waving the Mexican flag — burning the American flag.

“Viva Mexico,” protesters shouted, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

They tried to storm the auditorium and clashed with police – hurling rocks and bottles. Local news reporters witnessed protestors jumping on police cars and smashing windows.

The rioters even targeted police horses — knocking one down – and throwing burning t-shirts at others. Who tries to burn down a horse?

The Albuquerque Journal reports “multiple” officers were injured after they were pelted with rocks. -We do not have the exact number of injured or the extent of their injuries.

The Associated Press reports that only one person was arrested. One. Leading this journalist to wonder if in fact orders were given for the police to stand down.

This is what a fundamentally transformed nation looks like – where mobs of troublemakers try to shut down free speech. They wanted to silence Mr. Trump and his supporters.

To be clear – what happened last night in New Mexico was not just an assault on Mr. Trump – it was an assault on the U.S. Constitution.

We have allowed the most exceptional nation on the planet to be transformed into a Third World country.

This is not who we are – but this is what we’ve become.

Horses! Jeezaloo, America.

But is Trump nasty enough?

May 25, 2016

But is Trump nasty enough? American ThinkerJames Lewis, May 25, 2016

Donald Trump, we are assured by the first two big pages of Google when you search for “Trump news,” is the meanest, nastiest, most racist (etc., etc.) son of a bachelor to come down the pike in many a long year. Our angelic media cultists are shocked, shocked by… (etc., ad nauseam). The GOPe has battled heroically to protect us from this beast, but the idiot voters out in the boonies (etc., etc., you remember the rest). So here we are, stuck with a nominal Republican who actually fights. Forty million ticked-off voters are backing him, and they don’t care about niceties. Being nice got this country into the ungodly mess we have today. The other word for “nice” is “gimme da money, sucker!”

I didn’t like it when Trump insulted Carly Fiorina in the debates, and I hope that backstage he has apologized to her. But it’s pretty clear why he performed his spectacular war dance in the debates. It’s not Jeb Bush who was the big target. It’s the embedded Washington power cult, both nominal parties, the Permanent Government now grown fat and lazy with trillions of dollars regardless of performance, the corrupt city machines in Chicago and New York, which are now state and regional political machines, the Senioriate in Congress — people with enough seniority to laugh at passing presidents — the radical Lefties Obama has planted as delayed-action bombs in the bureaucracy to explode in future “leaks” and “exclusives” for their pals at the New York Times, the Soros money-power cult that finances and directs the Democratic radical base, tens of thousands of lobbyists who have welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood and similar sweethearts to their moneyed ranks, and the NYT-WaPo Organs of Propaganda who put old Soviet apparatchiks to shame.

Question: Are the real power brokers in DC sufficiently scared yet to listen to fed-up voters?

Probably not. Right now if the Don dropped his famous line “You’re Fired!” nothing would happen. Nothing.

The Donald drove our old, beloved National Review into spectacular hysterics, where it is still stuck, trying to figure out how to climb down from its tall tree without looking ridiculous. Still, a hoo-hah may turn out to be useful, since any comfy power cult can use a good purgative every few years. It’s been too long since Bill Buckley graced its pages. Those terrified old moths flying out after the Donald’s O-kaze (Japanese great wind) are already settling down on more peaceful pools in the swamp.

The big, big question is whether anything can shake our deeply dysfunctional establishment, which actually welcomed the Nazi-era Muslim Broederbund with open arms, including Muslim Sister Huma and her hubbie the exhibitionist. The Ikhwan feeds Muslim terrorism, and has ever since 1929. Its high point was the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the greatest Arab peacemaker of the 20th century. Now the Brotherhood has its tentacles deep into the Clintons (witness Sister Huma and Hillary), as well as in Turkey, which has just announced that Überfuehrer Erdogan is taking dictatorial power in the only Muslim nation that managed to keep a modern, tolerant state alive for fifty years. Just to demonstrate the new power of neo-Ottomanism, Erdogan ordered his US-equipped air force to shoot down an annoying Sukhoi-24 (from behind, violating agreed-on flight rules), and killed the surviving pilot who ejected and was parachuting down. Putin was trying to embarrass Erdogan by exposing criminal collusion between Turkey and the demonic followers of ISIS, an obvious collusion that has been ignored by Barack Hussein Obama and NATO. So Erdogan shot down the Russian jet that was getting too close to his own ISIS-oil smuggling operation. Now the Russians have backed off Erdogan, who is stilling getting billions of dollars of Iraqi oil stolen by the Islamic State, when it isn’t massacring Christian children for their parents’ religion.

None of this, none, should be happening.  The greatest moral and strategic failure of the West since the Cold War has been to collude in the rise of Jihad. Not just tolerate. Not just retreat, but actively collude in a criminal movement by any definition of international humanitarian law. In the aftermath of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials, the West uniformly agreed that genocide was about as evil as evil gets. Terrorism was clearly understood as deliberate murder and mayhem directed at innocent non-combatants purely for political gain. Armies wore uniforms and insignia that clearly identified them as combatants, and therefore more likely to be targeted than innocent bystanders. Von Clausewitz had nothing but contempt for the irregular Cossacks who hid in the general population in the wake of national armies, to rape, loot and kill non-combatants. War is the worst thing people do to each other except for ISIS-type outright sadistic killing of the most innocent for the sake Allah and his bloodthirsty priesthood.

Post-WWII rules of combat emerged against the fresh history of the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust. With the crumbling of the Soviet Empire it looked as if domestic mass-murder might also be almost universally condemned. Millions of people expressed noble intentions. Now we can see that the Rad-Left/Jihad alliance was already being planted in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Admiral James Lyons and others. The United Nations lost every last shred of decency when the genocidal Sudan was elevated to the Human Rights Commission of the General Assembly, and Kofi Annan literally stood by and did nothing during the Rwanda genocide.

Nobody knows these days how to define “terrorism,” but before the rise of the Left/Jihad Axis of Evil, the meaning of terrorism was clear enough. Terrorism is murder, plain and simple, deliberate murder against civilians, regardless of age, gender and all the rest. Every civilized nation has incorporated post-WWII definitions of criminal murder of civilians in its codes of military justice. The Dutch Army has punished its own soldiers who stood by during the Srebrenica massacres and did nothing. The United States, Britain, Israel, and a few other countries enforce rules of decency in combat.

But the United Nations has surrendered completely to the dark side, singling out Israel and favoring Jihad. According to the “authoritative” ulema of Saudi Arabia, the ruling priesthood, ISIS is doing nothing un-Islamic. The Ayatollahs of Iran advocate nuclear genocide every single day, and we just found out that the White House used a thirtyish English Lit major to lie to a compliant media about the contemptible US-Iran deal. But he is just a scapegoat. American collusion with genocide-promoting Ayatollahs comes from the top, and dontcha forget it.

Of course Anti-American hatred is rife at the Jihad-controlled UN and the massively corrupt EU, all busily revising the truth to make the 7th century war theology look normal.

These are the defining events of the Obama era. They are not incidental side effects. They are completely intentional, and the once-proud city of Washington, DC, is now completely degraded, morally and even in matters of national survival. George Washington was an intensely, even an obsessively moral man, a man who kept a diary to track his own faults, where he fell short of his own ideals. It was not an unusual habit in the founding generation of the United States. Everybody knew about political, sexual, and moral corruption, because they could see it in plain sight in France, England, Ireland and the rest. The Founders knew all about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. They understood history and they understood politics, because they understood human nature. But in spite of their intimate knowledge of the worst things that people can do, they had higher hopes for the New World.

Donald Trump is fighting to become the new broom in the fetid swamps of DC. His voters don’t care much about nice manners, maybe because they know or suspect the Augean stables that need cleaning. They are right on the facts and right on the moral issues. They are placing their hopes in Trump, who is a mere human being, no more and no less.

It will take more than one person to make things better. Trump has been quietly telling the truth about taboo subjects like Jihad and the puritanical strictures of PC. The newsies are predictably fainting in horror, or pretending to. But morally they are fluff, blowing with the winds of fashion, from day to day. Total lightweights, every single one. The web-based media are both freer and more morally serious.

Trump is a serious guy, I believe, since he has been talking about the same policies in the same words since 1988. He has been consistently close to the mainstream of conservative thought, on almost all the things that matter. The media obsessed with trying to destroy him, and he has survived so far. (Without help from National Review and The Weekly Standard).

The liberal attacks will never stop. If they ever do, it will mean that Trump is finished. This is a fight, and it will remain contentious as long as the Left controls the corporate media. Get used to it. Flags and parades come long after the war is over, if ever.

But Trump has the right enemies.

It will take a lot of people, working together to rescue the country and the culture, to make a difference.

Abraham Lincoln’s generals kept losing battles to Robert E. Lee’s more agile forces in the first part of the Civil War. Finally, in despair, Lincoln asked “Where can I find a general who fill fight?” The answer was Ulysses S. Grant, who was not a perfect human being.

American voters have been asking the same question.

Now we have a general who will fight.

He’s not just a pretty face. In fact, he’s not even a pretty face.

But he’s got a good sense of humor, and so far he’s beaten a lot of the competition.

At some point, if he succeeds, he will need a lot of support from people who share the same basic values. Many voters are skeptical, which is the right thing to be.

But this is the best chance we’ve had in many years. If Trump is good enough — not perfect, just good enough — he will need a lot of help.

It’s up to you.

 

Full Measure Episode 34: May 22, 2016 (P1) — Campaign funding

May 23, 2016

Full Measure Episode 34: May 22, 2016 (P1) — Campaign funding

 

Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Maria Bartiromo Fox Business (5/22/2016)

May 23, 2016

Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Maria Bartiromo Fox Business (5/22/2016) via YouTube

Trump’s approach to North Korea bucks foreign policy elite

May 23, 2016

Trump’s approach to North Korea bucks foreign policy elite, The Hill, Ivan Eland, May 23, 2016

[A]lthough Trump is still putting together his foreign policy, he already has the pieces to create a more coherent and possibly more successful policy toward North Korea than the stodgy U.S. elite, who have sniffed at him.

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Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is at it again, horrifying the U.S. foreign policy elite by saying that he would speak to Kim Jong Un, the erratic North Korean leader, to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program. For example, the standard bearer for this elite, and Trump’s likely Democratic opponent for president, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sneered at Trump’s “bizarre fascination with foreign strongmen.”

Imagine actually talking to difficult countries, as Ronald Reagan successfully did with the Soviet Union! Trump knows that it takes a tough and effective leader to use negotiation and diplomacy instead of the reflexive use of military force, which has marked the weak and insecure presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Trump’s high-level negotiation likely would be more successful in limiting or getting rid of North Korea’s nuclear program than past, unsuccessful lower-level U.S. bargaining with the regime over the same issue.

With U.S. forces stationed in South Korea, Kim Jong Un is paranoid of a combined, U.S.-South Korean attack on his country. The main reason that he has likely developed nuclear weapons is to deter such an attack. A President Trump speaking to him personally might ease these fears significantly.

Also dismissed by the foreign policy elite is Trump’s strategy of putting pressure on China, North Korea’s only ally, to prod Kim to negotiate away his nuclear program. Trump said in a recent media interview: “I would put a lot of pressure on China because economically we have tremendous power over China.”

The foreign policy elite notes that despite recent Chinese annoyance with North Korean nuclear and missile tests, and China’s agreement to impose some economic sanctions on the regime, it still props up the always rickety North Korean autocracy with supplies of energy and other vital goods over their common border. Thus, the elite doubts that China will change this behavior.

Yet Trump, a businessman, may be more savvy than politicians and bureaucrats by focusing on negotiating parties’ incentives to do things—that is, Trump likely knows that for a sustainable arrangement on the North Korean nuclear program to be reached and honored, it has to be advantageous for both China and the U.S. Trump is correct that China is the key to moving North Korea on the issue and when pressure on China is combined with other elements of Trump’s foreign policy program, it just might work.

The main reason that China supports the dangerously unpredictable North Korea is that it feels it has no choice: If the North Korean regime collapses, China fears Korea will be unified under a pro-U.S. South Korean government—U.S. military and even U.S. nuclear forces could be right on China’s border.

In other words, China would then have a hostile alliance dominated by a military superpower, the U.S., on its border. Given the collapse of communist governments in Europe at the end of the Cold War and the expansion of a U.S.-led NATO alliance hostile to Russia right on Russian borders, the Chinese believe that their fears are well grounded.

Trump’s solution to this friction is to allow wealthy allies in the region like Japan and South Korea to defend themselves. China would no longer need to fear the U.S. superpower, with its massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, on its border if North Korea collapsed.

Therefore, if Trump implemented this change in U.S. policy, China might have a greater incentive to pressure North Korea to limit or eliminate its nuclear program than it currently does. China has no intrinsic incentive to want an unstable state possessing nuclear weapons as its immediate neighbor.

In sum, although Trump is still putting together his foreign policy, he already has the pieces to create a more coherent and possibly more successful policy toward North Korea than the stodgy U.S. elite, who have sniffed at him.