Donald Trump, Tragic Hero

National Review

His very flaws may be his strengths

. . . "The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy." . . .  Victor Davis Hanson

Colluders on the Loose

Victor Davis Hanson

 If there is a crime of collusion, then Clintoncampaign contractors should be under investigation for seeking Russian help to find dirt on Trump, to spread smears around throughout the DOJ, FBI, and CIA, and to make sure that the dirt was leaked to the press in the final weeks of the campaign — for the sole “insurance” purposes of losing Trump the election.

Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee . . .

"If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington.

" Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia collusion that might have warped the 2016 campaign and thrown the election to Trump. After a year, his investigation has found no concrete evidence of collusion. So it has often turned to other purported Trump misadventures. Ironically, collusion of all sorts — illegal, barely legal, and simply unethical — has been the sea that Washington fish always swim in.

"Christopher Steele, hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign through a series of firewall intermediaries, probably paid Russian sources for gossip and smears.
" . . .
"Imagine the following possible ethical collusion. What if both ABC News and CBS News were now running mostly favorable news accounts about Donald Trump’s administration, rather than the media’s 90 percent (on average) negative coverage. And imagine that one of Donald Trump’s chief advisers and a deputy national-security adviser was the brother of the current CBS News president, while the sister of the ABC News president was another one of Trump’s top national- security and energy advisers.

"What would the media say of such apparent incestuousness that involved two-thirds of the networks’ nightly newscasts? Yet that was precisely the case of the Rhodes and the Sherwood siblings during the Obama administration." . . .

Would this be collusion?

Has Giving Leftists What They Want Made America Better?

Lloyd Marcus  "Leftists have made huge gains in stripping godly traditional principles and values from our American culture.  It is disturbing to see Christians, conservatives, and Republicans surrendering more ground, allowing leftists to achieve their evil goal.

"Beginning in kindergarten through college, our kids are poisoned with toxic liberalism.  Parents are poisoned with subliminal and in-your-face liberalism 24-7 via TV, fake news, churches, movies, and so on.  Suddenly, like in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Christians, conservatives, and Republicans are stealthily transformed.  They begin spewing leftist narratives.  A relative whom I have known to be a strong Christian suggested that I soften my resistance to same-sex couples calling themselves married.  This relative is a Christian who has surrendered to leftists' attack on God's plan for marriage.

" 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" –Isaiah 5:20

"Folks, has giving leftists what they want made America better?

"In 1962, the United States Supreme Court gave leftists what they wanted: the removal of prayer from public schools.  So how has that worked out for us?" . . .

To a large degree, we have allowed leftists to remove "healthy shame" from our culture.  Leftists say the only thing anyone should be ashamed of is being conservative, Republican, Christian, or white.  Remember when it was shameful not to know the father of your baby?  Today, pregnant women boldly appear on national trashy TV shows, DNA-testing 27 guys to determine the father.  Leftists deem female promiscuity feminism at its best, women freely exploring their sexuality.  Leftists are angry at God for unfairly sticking women with the annoying possibility of getting pregnant.  Promiscuity carries health risks and emotional consequences.  Has the normalization of baby mommies and baby daddies strengthened our society?

‘Not Being Viewed as an Enemy’ Propels California Company’s Move to Texas, says CEO

Breitbart Texas

The top executive of a Southern California private charter airline says the Golden State’s hostile business environment propelled his company’s decision to relocate to Texas.

“ 'Not being viewed as an enemy, but being viewed as an asset is so refreshing,” said Alex Wilcox, Chief Executive Officer of JetSuite Inc., who, on Thursday, spoke to the Dallas Business Journal. He described the air carrier’s decision to move to North Texas this summer as a “welcome change.”

"He even shared a glaring example of one difference between California and business-friendly Texas. “I tried to start flying out of Santa Monica, California. And they sued me because I was trying to bring a service to the city,” said Wilcox. “When I got to Dallas, literally, people in City Hall were like, ‘How can we help you?’”

"The CEO said the company contemplated exiting California “for a couple of years.” JetSuite intends to make the Dallas-Fort Worth area its new home, although officials have not announced a location for their headquarters. Wilcox anticipates 60 employees will move with top brass to the Lone Star State and they will fill 180-200 jobs with Texans. The company’s chief executive said they will recruit qualified individuals for “behind-the-scenes” operational functions, dispatchers, maintenance controllers, “and the people who actually make airlines move.”

He quipped: “There are probably more people in aviation in Dallas than there are people in Newport Beach, in total.”
. . . 

"The airline’s move to Texas highlights the continued exodus of companies from the business-unfriendly California. From 2008 to 2015, an estimated 9,000 companies leftCalifornia, of which Texas was the top beneficiary of the relocations, During those seven years, California corporations accounted for 15 percent of companies that moved their headquarters or expanded operations into pro-business Texas. In many instances, the state incentivized out-of-state companies to expand into the state with the goal of creating more jobs and economic growth within Texas through the Texas Enterprise Fund." . . .

REAL OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE: How The Obama DOJ Tried To Shut Down FBIˊs Hillary Investigation

Doug Ross Journal

Loretta Lynch was attorney general at the time of the August call. She had been caught privately meeting with former President Bill Clinton in June 2016 on her government aircraft on the tarmac in Phoenix. That meeting occurred only days before Comey decided not to pursue criminal charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the use of a personal email server that she used to conduct official Department of State business. Lynch later claimed the Phoenix meeting was “innocuous” and a “chance encounter.”

"The Department of Justice Inspector General report on the “lack of candor” by FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe also documents for the first time the Obama administration’s effort to shut down the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation, according to a review of the report by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

"The inspector general (IG) confirmed in its long-awaited report released Friday that in 2016 the FBI had ongoing field investigations of the Clinton Foundation in New York, Los Angeles, Little Rock, Arkansas and Washington, D.C. The multi-city investigation was launched when agents found “suspicious activity” between a foreign donor and Clinton Foundation activity in the Los Angeles area, as TheDCNF reported in August 2016.

"The report, authored by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, an Obama appointee, chronicles the Justice Department’s effort to shut down the FBI’s investigation.

"The pressure allegedly came in the form of a phone call to McCabe from a Justice Department principal associate deputy attorney general (PADAG) who pressed McCabe on the continuing investigation. The IG did not identify which PADAG made the call." . . .

Comey waxes eloquent and gracious about Trump

"A CBS columnist from the right calls the Comey book junk and says it's not going to move the needle against Trump as Comey hopes. Thomas Lifson's must-read item from Sunday exposes the fraudery quite impressively here, too."

Rich Terrell

All 'integrity' and out to Get Trump: James Comey's nauseating interview

. . . "Comey justifies early bad decisions in his career, such as the prosecution of Martha Stewart, a bum rap prosecution if there ever was one, with dog whistles to the left about racism, claiming he had prosecuted a black reverend in Virginia for lying to the FBI,so he had to prosecute Martha Stewart, too. The fact that he wouldn't name the reverend pretty well tells us he didn't want us to look at that case too closely for what he claims are parallels.

"Then he let Bill Clinton off the hook in his last-hour pardoning of monster felon fugitive, Marc Rich, whose wife was a close Hillary Clinton ally, babbling on about how the pardon was unprecedented and then casually saying he found nothing actionable. George Stephanopoulos let him walk with that one and they moved on." . . .

Comey Book: October 2016 Disclosure of Hillary Email Investigation Based On Assumption She Would Win

. . . "Setting aside the fact that this “world” of his imagination also included other major decisions during the lead-up to the 2016 election, this admission reveals shocking hubris and partisanship.

"Even the leftist media and Hillary supporters are outraged by this disturbing insight into Comey’s “justice by polling.' ”

Thomas Lifson: It’s all downhill for Comey now

. . . "After we met, I glanced over at Jeff Sessions to see what he thought of it all, and although he spoke not a word his pursed, pink lips seemed to say that he was a weak, small man with no gumption. He was pleading with me with his downcast eyes to do the right thing. With my eyes I said right back, I will. I always have. I never swerve from what I believe, and you can bet a shiny nickel that I never will, sir." . . .

Loretta Lynch not too happy about James Comey throwing her under the bus

So maybe this is what Comey had in mind as he and Lynch now mix it up.  It sounds like a rat-king dynamic: rats with their tails tied together.  We should do all we can to egg this feud on so that the truth about what was going on among the Obama leftists can finally become known.

. . .
"No wonder Trump fired James ‘Judas’ Comey - I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw the egotistical, money-grabbing worm and his treacherous, disgraceful, secret-spewing book." 
I'm sure Piers Morgan means this in a nice way.

Big 7 Pettiest Comments During ABC’s ‘The Revenge of Comey’ Show

The big takeaway from the interview is Comey doesn’t like Trump and thinks Trump could be guilty of a couple crimes but he doesn’t have an iota of evidence. It’s his opinion as a Trump hater.

Earl of Taint

Plan to split California into 3 may be on November’s ballot

Legal Insurrection

Even more California to kick around!

"Last October, I reported that tech billionaire Tim Draper had organized a petition drive to get a vote to split California into 3 states (Northern California, Southern California, and California) on the ballot.

"Draper’s team has managed to get enough signatures to qualify for a vote.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who authored an initiative to break up the Golden State, says it has received enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. Draper says the initiative, which he calls the “CAL 3” has more than 600,000 signatures and will be submitted to election officials next week.

The initiative needed signatures from 365,880 registered voters – 5 percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2014 election – to qualify for the ballot.

“This is an unprecedented show of support on behalf of every corner of California to create three state governments that emphasize representation, responsiveness, reliability and regional identity,” Draper said.

"The proposed CAL3 plan partitions California into northern and southern regions, with a strip along the coast that would encompass the Los Angeles basin.

"The regions were selected based on their “leading industries. For example, Northern California has wine production and and forestry, Southern California focuses on financial services and trade, and “California” includes tourism and motion pictures.*

"The next hurdle Draper’s team has got to jump is the signature validation process." . . .

*Obama's BFFs. I can see him buying a home there.

Anne Frank is being dejudaized and placed in the service of antisemitism. An UPDATE you may not believe!

That’s a great picture, isn’t it? In the front, you have Jewish Anne Frank next to crying Muslim children. In the background are the children’s screaming mothers in their hijabs. Interestingly, both mothers and children come from countries that have (a) driven out their Jews, (b) seek to destroy Israel, and (c) strongly advocate Jewish genocide.

Is it fair to say the Anne Frank Museum has been made JUDENREIN?












Bookworm Room

"Five years ago, I reported that the Left was erasing Anne Frank’s Jewishness. Since then, the Left has begun using her to support Israel’s destruction."

"This is a post that started back in 2013, when I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam for the first time in 23 years. Although I was impressed by the way in which the museum had been remodeled to make traffic flow more easily, I was distressed by the fact that the exclusively Jewish nature of Anne’s martyrdom (for that was what it was) was almost invisible.

"The museum consistently downplayed the fact that Anne wasn’t killed by random “hate.” Instead, she was killed very specifically because of the oldest, and extremely targeted, hatred — antisemitism. This is what I wrote in 2013:

The museum around the house focuses in tightly on Anne, her family, and her friends. It makes the Holocaust very personal but, by doing so, fails utterly to educate people about the Holocaust or fascism.At the end if the museum, there’s a room with very short videos, many of which are about special interest demands against a greater European culture that is not bowing to their dressing, immigration, or marriage requirements. The videos begin by focusing on a fictional young person with needs, and then, having personalized that need, gives a brief, shallow, fairly even-handed look at the issue, whether it’s veils in schools, forcing Christian civil servants to perform gay marriages, or allowing people to serve in the military while wearing religious garb.  

. . . "A little over a year ago, I learned about the Marxist takeover of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York, which Anne Frank’s father, Otto, founded in 1959. It’s an extremely long post, which I think is worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll quote it only selectively here:" . . . Full article

Get ready for this more than relevant update:

Anne Frank House banned Orthodox Jewish employee from wearing his skullcap at work

"A Jewish employee at Anne Frank House could not believe his ears when his bosses banned him from wearing a skullcap at work.

"Barry Vingerling turned up for work on his first day at the museum in Amsterdam and was told to take off his 'yarmulke'.*
"Anne Frank House is a writer's house and museum dedicated to a famous Jewish teenager who wrote a diary as she hid from the Nazis in World War II.

"The board of the Anne Frank Foundation finally concluded, after more than six months of discussions, that Mr Vingerling could wear his yarmulke."
"He said he was happy to hear he could finally wear his skullcap but still did not understand why the Anne Frank Foundation had made an issue out of it for so long.'I work in the house of Anne Frank, who had to hide because of her identity. In that same house I should hide my identity?' he said."

Also called a kippah

Mark Steyn had these thoughts after seeing "Chappaquiddick"

Mark Steyn "As I wrote a few days ago, I had minimal expectations of Chappaquiddick The Movie, which opened last week despite the best efforts of the Kennedy family and their various retainers and enablers. I have always been revolted by the fact that Ted, after killing Mary Jo Kopechne, did not have the decency to do a John Profumo and retire from public life for the rest of his days - and I was even more revolted by the way Massachusetts voters did not have the decency to impose that choice upon him.

"But utter contempt for your protagonist doesn't make for very interesting drama. So it is to the film's benefit that its director, writers and Jason Clarke in the lead role manage to locate enough humanity in the empty waddling husk of Teddy to make a compelling story. Mr Clarke is Australian, his director John Curran is American but has spent much of his career Down Under, and the screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan are two first-timers born a decade after Chappaquiddick and who'd apparently never heard the word until 2008. That combination of outsiders and neophytes may be one reason why this film is considerably more gripping and potent than a cookie-cutter limousine-liberal yawnfest like The Post.

"In the shorthand of history, Chappaquiddick is a stand-alone event, but it occurred, in fact, on the July weekend in 1969 that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon - and it arose from a reunion of the "Boiler Room Girls", the devoted young ladies who'd worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign of the previous year. " . . .

Trump corrects a historic wrong by pardoning Lewis Libby

Thomas Lifson  "The level of partisan dishonesty that led to a wrongful conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby for lying to an independent counsel investigator probing the alleged leak of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA desk jockey lives on.  A shocking level of misinformation is being broadcast by purportedly reputable sources like the New York Daily News and Jake Tapper of CNN.  More on that below, but first, consider the malpractice that led to Libby's wrongful conviction in the first place.

"The best single source of information on the railroading of Libby is the work of Clarice Feldman here on American Thinker.  Based on her extraordinary work here, the Weekly Standard asked her to write up a comprehensive view, which she did in 2006.  Her lengthy article, "The case of the missing crime," is essential background reading to understand the magnitude of the injustice that befell Libby.  The entire operation of the investigation under Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (who was appointed by none other than his close friend, James Comey!) rapidly became a witch hunt to get something on Vice President Cheney that could drive him from office.  The parallels to today's investigation by Robert Mueller are painfully obvious." . . .

The misrepresentations continue today.  The New York Daily News headlines: "Trump pardons Scooter Libby, Bush administration aide who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity."

Here is a screen grab, in case the Daily News attempts to hide its misreporting

"The kindest thing to say about this headline is that it is recklessly ignorant.  Libby was not the leaker.  By the time he was interviewed, it was known to Fitzpatrick that the leaker was Armitage.  Libby was never charged with being the leaker, either." . . .

. . . "I cannot forgive President George W. Bush's failure to fully pardon Libby, especially in the face of strong pressure from his vice president to do so.  Instead, he commuted the sentence, sparing Libby a prison term but leaving his name and professional standing as a lawyer ruined.  Over the years, as the perfidy of the case became clearer, Libby recovered some of his status.  But only a full pardon would suffice to correct the wrong, and President Trump has delivered that justice.  Of course, the financial losses are not restored, nor can the agony Libby experienced be undone." . . .

Trump’s Tomahawk Diplomacy in Syria

The National Interest

"As horrific and as unacceptable as the use of chemical weapons is, and as odious as Assad’s regime remains, the U.S. would not be using coercive force if there were not interests worthy to protect."

. . . "The ends of America’s strategy are clear. We can’t tolerate a return of the Caliphate. We can’t watch while Iran presses a dagger at Israel’s heart, risking a regional war. We don’t want the problems of Syria to bleed over and destabilize Iraq and Jordan. We don’t masses of refugees on the road again.

"Now the challenge for the Trump administration is to transition to a regional footprint that achieves those ends in a sustained manner over time. The strike should help give the U.S. the time and space to put that presence in place."

A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on issues of defense and foreign relations. 

On the bombing of Syria

Thomas Lifson: A ‘Goldilocks’ air strike on Syria  . . . "But so far, the strike on three targets in Syria appears to have been not too much, not too little, but just right to deliver the necessary message. Here is the official Pentagon map of the targets:" (Click to enlarge)

. . . "The first message is that the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated.  The huge “red Line” blunder of Obama has been corrected again. This is more than a do-gooder concern for humanity, even though that is what is being said, for the most part. If these weapons are used and not punished, they will used again and again. Not only can terrorists gain access by capturing them in Syria, chlorine is not that hard to fabricate. A poison gas attack on Israel or the United States is not out of the question.

"But there are other messages being delivered.

"The second one is to Russia:" . . .

. . . "The third message is to Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran:" . . .

Russia claims Syria air defences shot down 71 of 103 missile  "The Russian military has claimed that the Syrian air defences, whose most modern weapon is a three-decades-old Russian-supplied anti-aircraft system, shot down 71 of 103 missiles fired by the US and its allies, the UK and France.

"As further details began to emerge about the sites targeted by the US-led strikes, Col Gen Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military said the strikes had not caused any casualties and that Syrian military facilities suffered only minor damage

"Although it was not possible to verify the claims, the most up-to-date system that Moscow has supplied to the Syrian regime is the short range Pantsir S-1, which has an anti-missile capability." . . .

Mattis: Syria Strikes a ‘One-Time Shot,’ Further Operations Will Depend on Assad  . . . "While last year’s strikes were done unilaterally, and hit one target — a Syrian regime airfield that housed about 17 percent of its air force –  Dunford said Friday’s strikes were conducted with two allies on multiple sites and would “result in a long-term degradation of Syria’s capability to develop chemical weapons.”

“ 'Important infrastructure was destroyed. They will lose years of research and development data, specialized equipment, and expensive chemical weapons precursors,” he said." . . .

Click to enlarge

The Syrian War Is Actually Many Wars  . . . "The United States is in Syria mainly because of isis. At a recent event in Washington, the U.S. envoy to the anti-isis coalition Brett McGurk spelled this out: “We are in Syria to fight isis. That is our mission and our mission isn’t over, and we’re going to complete that mission.” More recently, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Congress that the United States was not there to take sides in the broader civil war." . . .

Syria's Assad vows to 'crush terrorism' after Western attack  Generally Assad and Putin refer to the anti-Assad forces as terrorists. Meaning those gassed by Assad. TD

How Will Moscow Respond to the Syria Strikes?
For now, the ball is in Moscow's court--and we will see what its response looks like.


Syrian air strikes LIVE: US, UK and France hit Assad's chemical weapons
This article repeats the claim that most missles were shot down.

"Syrian state TV has broadcast these images which it claims proves it shot down some missiles heading for targets in the country yesterday."

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows the damage of the
Syrian Scientific Research Center which was attacked by U.S., British and French military
strikes to punish President Bashar Assad for suspected chemical attack against civilians

Live from Damascus: Syrian TV covers the air raids
Pretty much the same opinion of President Trump as CNN and MSNBC.
. . . "Also at the channel’s website were some new political cartoons and after a search I discovered a whole page of them. The captions for each one, in Arabic, are on the side of the cartoons and can be translated online.

The cartoon at the top, and probably the most memorable one, was a caricature of President Donald Trump. The caption via Google’s translation service translates as “Terrorism ... To the dustbin of history.” “Brush artist Nidal_Khalil.' ”

Ortas

"The cartoons, which largely transcend language barriers, offer direct and telling insights into the official propaganda being issued in a hot spot on the other side of the world."