Blood Libels and the Attack on Guns

Immediately after the shooting in Florida on Valentine's Day, the left began flooding social media with the message that the Republicans had blood on their hands for not passing "common sense gun control" that would have stopped the shooting. This was before any details had come out about the shooting.

Even now that some details have been released, there is no real examination of the various proposals to see if they would have made a difference. The Washington Post's fact checker looked into a dozen shootings since Sandy Hook and agreed that none of the "common sense proposals" would have stopped them.

One proposal that I keep hearing is raising the age for buying AR-15-style guns to 21 or higher. This is based on the fact that Cruz, the Florida shooter, is 19 and, reportedly, bought several AR-15s in the last year. There have even been several false claims that it's easier to buy a gun than cough syrup. But no one seems to be really looking at the facts. They are pushing an anti-gun narrative and hoping that no one stops to examine the facts.

Here's an inconvenient fact: Cruz is 19 but he was showing people an AR-15 and pistols that he owned in 2016. So he owned guns before he was 18. Most likely his parents bought them for him. So much for raising the age for buying these rifles.

People keep focusing on the AR-15 as if keeping Cruz from owning would have prevented the tragedy. But he also owned pistols. The Virginia Tech shooter only used pistols and he killed 32 (plus himself) and shot another 17. In close quarters, a pistol is as deadly as a rifle and easier to aim. Pistols are also much lighter. Depending on configurations, Cruz could have carried 2-5 pistols for the same weight as an AR-15. The point is that we have no idea if the body count would have been lower or higher if Cruz had been denied the use of an AR-15.

What is not being discussed is how to close the loopholes that Cruz fell through. He was well known to the police. Neighbors said that the police visited him around every other week. He exhibited numerous classic signs of a sociopath including violent behavior and abusing animals. It's possible that he was given a pass because of a Florida program to avoid incarcerating minorities (his adopted name, "Cruz" is enough to qualify him for that).

But the Democrats don't want to talk about real solutions that might have stopped this shooting. They want outrage that will lead to anti-gun legislation and give them an issue in November.

Note: Yes, the term "blood libel" usually refers to the claim that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in Passover rites but the term also means a false claim that someone's blood is on someone's hands.

The Best and Worst Presidents of My Lifetime

It's President's Day which originally was Washington's Birthday but then they combined Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays into a single holiday and moved it to Monday. Anyway, it's an excuse to name the best and worst presidents of my lifetime. I'm only including them because I don't have personal experience with any others and it still covers a 60+ year spread.

I'm not going to include Trump. He's only 13 months into his presidency. I'm going to skip Ford for the same reason. He wasn't in long and didn't have much impact. I'm including JFK because he completed most of his term and did have an impact.

First off, the best president is Reagan. There were problems during his administration, mainly Iran/Contra, where he openly defied Congress. There were some other mistakes but he changed the course of politics. It shows how influential he was that Barack Obama was openly musing about being a similarly transformative president in 2008. When Reagan came to office in 1981 the country was a mess. We were in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (in some ways it was worse than the Great Recession). The Soviet Union was expanding and the military contracting. People didn't feel very good about America. Reagan kicked off the longest peacetime economic expansion in history, put in place policies that ended the Soviet Union and left America feeling good about itself again.

So, onto the worst.

Eisenhower was competent. JFK is a mixed bag. He gave us the space program. He didn't advance civil rights as far as he could have and he got us into Viet Nam, although in a limited way.

LBJ's administration is even more mixed. Where JFK dipped his toe into Viet Nam, LBJ jumped in with both feet. He gave us Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security. All of those programs are popular but none of them are sustainable in the long-term. The most important civil rights advances came during his administration and he was more supportive of them than he is given credit for.

Nixon's a very special case. He continued LBJ's expansion of government with such things as the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Humanities. He expanded Viet Nam before getting us out. He opened relations with China. He was reelected in a landslide, winning 49 states. But he managed to get himself impeached and he always was hated by a significant portion of the population. He also oversaw the beginnings of the economic problems that dominated the 1970s.

Ford replaced Nixon and Carter replaced Ford, coming in with overwhelming approval ratings. He was not up to the job. Inflation soared, unemployment remained too high and eventually the economy crashed hard. He continued Ford's "detente" with the USSR which led to Soviet expansion. The friendly Shaw of Iran was overthrown and Carter helped place a constitutionally elected government in place only to see it overthrown and a theocracy set up in its place which is still a problem. After that, "students" with the support of the government overran the American embassy and took the staff hostage for months. The only good thing to come out of the Carter administration was the Camp David Accords which Carter facilitated between Israel and Egypt.

I've already ranked Reagan as best, so skipping on to Bush 41...

It's not unusual for a sitting vice president to run and finish in a close race. Bush won in a landslide. He was a competent president but seemed out of touch and a minor recession was enough for him to lose reelection.

We saw mild but steady growth under Clinton punctuated by the tech bubble. Near the end of his term, Clinton rated himself as a solid B president and was hoping to raise his score with a diplomatic victory like the Camp David Accords. This eluded him so he remains a B.

Bush 43 is another mixed bag. The economy did fairly well under him and he was far more moderate than he's given credit for being. 9/11 was not his fault but his response to it was questionable. There's no question that we needed to overthrow Afghanistan in order to break up al Qaeda. Similarly, we'd never actually ended hostilities with Iraq before Bush toppled the country. In both cases, his administration discovered that it's far easier to overthrow a government than it is to set up a stable replacement. If he'd taken the route that Obama did in Libya and left the two countries alone then both would probably be failed states and humanitarian disasters but Bush would be held in higher esteem. Similarly, if Bush had had a 3rd term then he might have managed to clean up his messes. He managed to turn Iraq around and stabilize it by the end of his presidency. While Obama takes credit for saving the economy, the crisis actually came during Bush's last months and he stabilized it before leaving office.

On to Obama. He took office during the worst downturn since Reagan, possibly since FDR. While he didn't mess up the recovery, he didn't help it, either. We had the slowest post recession growth since FDR, probably for the same reasons - expanding government. The stimulus package didn't stimulate. Obamacare was unpopular and had to be propped up by (unconstitutional) executive orders. Obama was handed a stable Iraq and managed to mess it up by pulling all of our troops out and not taking ISIS seriously. Obama was determined to sign a treaty with Iran and allowed the Syrian civil war to grow into a humanitarian crisis rather than offend Iran. He mocked Romney for calling Russia our most important geopolitical rival. He called his Korean policy "strategic patients" but it really amounted to kicking the can down the road. He was part of the overthrow or Libya and allowed it to sink into a failed state humanitarian crisis. The rule of law saw severe hits as his administration expanded executive and administrative reach. After saying dozens of times that he didn't have the power to allow "dreamers" to stay, he did it anyway. Title IX was similarly stretched to the breaking point. The public had been polarizing for years but this accelerated under Obama. We have the most turbulent times since the 1960s but no war and no civil rights movement to explain it. People are just polarized and angry and the Obama administration fed this. The IRS was weaponized under Obama, delaying applications for groups they disapproved of for years while approving favorable groups in a few weeks. The Justice Department may well have been politicized, too, as information is leaked out about the handling of confidential messages on Hillary Clinton's private email server.

So, who's the worst of this bunch? The finalists are Clinton and Obama. Both left the country worse off than when they took office. Carter was at a loss on how to handle the sky-high inflation. Obama never figured out why the economy was growing less than 2% when it should have been growing more than 3%. Carter was at a loss to stop the spread of communism in South America. Under Obama, we saw more than half of the youth decide that communism is better than capitalism.

For now I'll name Obama as the worst president. Carter was out of his depth but Obama was actively trying to undermine his government and country.

Mass Shootings and Magical Thinking

Like clockwork, a shooting happens and there's a demand to ban "military grade" assault weapons. If only these guns weren't available, then no one would ever be harmed again.

This is magical thinking. It assumes that inanimate objects somehow entice people to violence and that they would be peaceful without these totems at hand. Let's look at some facts.

First, all of these mass killings are really copy cat crimes stemming from Columbine. We had occasional mass murders before that but it's become increasingly common since Columbine. With each killing there is days of news coverage. This convinces unhappy individuals that they can go out in a blaze of glory.

Second, the use of guns and specifically assault weapons is accidental but feeds into the copycat nature of these acts.

The Columbine killers did not plan on shooting their way into the school then killing each other. Their plan was much, much worse. They planted a bomb based on a propane tank in the lunch room. It was timed to go off when the lunch room had the most people in it and there was a good chance that it would have also killed the people in the library above the cafeteria. The guns and pipe bombs were for killing the people who survived the bomb. When the bomb failed, they entered the school, shooting people along the way and tried to detonate the bomb by hand. When that failed, they killed each other. If they had succeeded then we'd be having school bombings instead of shootings.

The so-called assault weapon was banned for a while but the ban was allowed to expire because this class of gun is almost never used in crimes. Assault weapons are a subset of rifles and more people are killed with knives than with all rifles put together.

The assault weapon was another accident. This one came from Sandy Hook. The killer there wasn't able to buy guns but his mother was an avid shooter. He killed her then used her gun to massacre children in a school. Before that, most mass shootings were with pistols. A pistol is a better weapon for this. It is easier to conceal, you can easily carry more than one, and they are easier to aim in close quarters. But the Sandy Hook shooter used a Bushmaster AK-47 and the news reported it as the gun of choice for mass murderers.

Note - the Las Vegas shooter was an unusual one. He was shooting into a crowd from a building. The bump stock he used would be worthless in any other situation.

So, disturbed people do copy cat crimes using copycat methods. But there's any number of ways for an evil person to kill people. Bombs are fairly easy to make. Simply setting fires can be deadly. Attacks in Europe have shown that a large truck can be more deadly than a gun.

So far, the mass killers have been copying each other instead of copying terrorists but there's no guarantee that will continue. In the meantime, blaming the gun instead of the person behind it is an exercise in futility.

It Happened Again (and they reacted according to script)

On Valentine's Day, a shooter killed 17 people in a Florida school. I really wish the response from the Left didn't come across as: "Thank heavens we have a new issue! DACA wasn't working for us any more."

The initial reaction was "Republicans have blood on their hands." Why? At the point they said that they had no idea of any of the "common sense gun control" measures they want to pass would have made a difference. Yes, the shooter used an AR-15-style rifle but there's nothing magic about them. At short range, pistols might have been more deadly.

It was widely spread that this was the 28th school shooting this year. Bernie Sanders, who is trying to establish a record on gun control after Hillary painted him as pro-gun, tweeted the figure. It came from Anytown USA and is therefore suspect. While most people think that a "school shooting" means students shot or killed, Anytown counts any time a gun is discharged in a school or a school event. Most of the "shootings" on Anytown's list were harmless.

There was also a rush to assign the blame to outside influences. Social media claimed that the shooter had Antifa and ISIS messages. A news service reported that he'd tried to join a white supremacist group without verifying the person making the claim (he lied).

I've already seen charts showing a correlation between mass shootings and availability of guns. These appear to show a cause and effect but they leave out a few important details. Americans have always been heavily armed but mass shootings are a fairly recent phenomena and the murder rate has been dropping even as the number of guns expands. My guess is that the copy-cat factor is the biggest reason for all of the mass shooting.

There is also a general mockery of anyone who used the phrase "thoughts and prayers" without proposing some action, no matter how irrelevant. This is disgusting opportunism.

The Left needs to stop pointing fingers at the right and look at its own sins. Their response to a tragedy shouldn't be opportunism.

The Problem With Fake News

A few weeks ago the Republican Party ran a list of the ten worst examples of fake news for 2017 (one of these was actually an election night tweet from 2016). The Washington Post fact checkers promptly gave this list a Pinocchio rating on the bases that 7 of the 10 had issued corrections or apologized. Sorry, WaPo but it doesn't work that way. While it's true that the news media makes mistakes all the time and issues corrections later, that is not an excuse for these. None of these represented breaking news like a fire or shooting. They were all events that happened some time before the story broke but were released before all the facts were known. There is no good reason to release stories like this (there is a bad reason: stories that embarrass President Trump sell papers/increase rating and the various media are afraid of being scooped). There are several problems with running a story then issuing a correction or retracting the story later.

The biggest problem is that the corrections are never given as much play as the original story. Sometimes they correction is tacked onto the end of the story. Other times the story is quietly withdrawn without notice. Corrections are never given the same sensational headlines. Worse, many people hear about these stories from other sources than the original. I first heard the story that candidate Trump had ordered Michael Flynn to meet with the Russians through Facebook. I never saw anyone sharing the retraction that it was president-elect Trump who ordered the meeting and it was about sanctions against Israel, not about winning the election. The Trump-haters who gleefully share anything that looks bad for the President never bother to share the retractions or corrections (assuming they even hear about them).

A second problem is that all of these stories create false memories. Even if people see the corrections later they are still likely to remember that there had been some scandal involving the President and Russia (or whatever the story was). The stead drumbeat of Trump/Russia stories gives the impression that there is something to them. A reasonable person would assume that this constant barrage of stories is a "where there's smoke there's fire" situation. To date, there are no credible stories about Russian collusion.but a recent poll indicated that half the country believes that such an event took place.

What else can you call it when the news media has convinced half of the public that something happened with no proof? It's Fake News.

And no, the President calling out the media on the false reporting they do does not make him an autocrat.

Thoughts About the Shutdown

The shutdown lasted less than 72 hours and ended with the Democrats failing to get anything new (they already had a vague promise for a future vote on a DACA bill before the shutdown. What happened?

Democratic messaging was, at best, confused. They tried to blame President Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown but at the same time they made it clear that it was all about DACA. They must have been counting on a sympathetic press to give them cover but between social media and their own mixed messages, that wasn't possible.

The Republicans shut the government down a couple of times under Clinton and once under Obama. Each time the president came out the winner. The Republican shutdowns were over budget and debt issues which are much more closely tied to spending than amnesty for illegal immigrants and they still lost. Why did the Democrats think it would be any different this time? Sympathetic press?

The Democrats looked at the wrong poll numbers. While a majority of the country favors helping DACA recipients (I think it's around 80%), it is pretty low on their priorities (One poll put it at number 16). The shutdown meant that things that had a higher priority were stopped in favor of a lower-priority issue. This hurt the Democrats. Also, the issue was hurting them in red states that they need to win to take the Senate. The Democrats made the same mistake about the shut-down that they made in 2016 about the election: they spent too much time looking at national averages and not enough time looking at state-by-state breakdowns. California, all by itself, is big enough to shift the national polls but elections are held on a state-by-state basis.

The shutdowns under Clinton were fairly painless leading to a lot of jokes about not needing the government anyway. The shutdown under Obama was brutal. Rather than just closing government offices, any land owned by the government was closed. An example is the Colonial Parkway in Virginia which connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. This is just a road. It doesn't need any federal employees for people to use it but the blocked it off anyway.. In fact, in some cases the government more money to stay closed than they saved by not being open because of guards and barricades. The shutdown under Trump looked like it would revert to the more gentile style with as many parks and other facilities as possible staying open. It's unclear how much of this was at the direction of Trump officials and how much was federal employees trying to help Obama and hurt Trump. Probably it was a combination of both.

Pundits who claim that the Democrats ended the shutdown because they still believe in civility are fooling themselves. The left lost interest in civility a decade or more ago. The shutdown was all about playing to the base and aking a show of standing up to Trump.

While the Republicans have agreed on some sort of replacement for DACA, there are major differences to be settled. The biggest one is who will be covered? Will it be the 800,000 or so enrolled in DACA, the 3,000,000+ who came here at a young age (often alone as a teenage), or will it be limited to the original "Dreamers" who have gone to college or been in the military? Working these out under the artificial urgency of a shutdown is a poor way to run the government.

Why the Government Shut Down

The Democrats shut the government down just in time for the anniversary of Trump's inauguration. They are trying to blame the Republicans because the Republicans control both houses but it takes 60 votes in the Senate for a spending bill and the Republicans only have 51. So, out of 49 Democrats, there are not nine who will vote for keeping the government open.

They are doing this for two reasons. The first is theatrics. They are using this to claim that the Republicans can't govern and that Trump is unstable.

The second reason is complicated. Officially it's because they are pushing for a DACA bill. The Republicans already offered a package deal - DACA in exchange for eliminating chain migration and the green card lottery and for some money for the wall. The Democrats countered with DACA but no change to chain migration and a revision to the green card lottery that would have half the drawings from "under represented countries". I'm assuming that last part provoced Trump's "S-hole country" complaint. There was also a pittance for repairs to the current border fence but no wall.

The part about chain migration is really important. The Democrats' plan would allow the DACA recipients to sponsor their relatives. Remember that the whole DACA problem was caused by illegal immigrants who brought their kids. The Democrats would reward them for doing this by letting them get citizenship through their kids. Remember the idea of "anchor babies"? This is worse.

The news talks about 800,000 "dreamers" being affected by DACA but add in chain migration and the number jumps significantly. We're talking about an eventual amnesty and citizenship for up to 10,000,000 people.

And most of them will vote Democrat.

That's why this is so important to the Dems.

Trump's First Year

When Donald Trump announced that he was running for President, I just rolled my eyes. I was still mad at him for birtherism. Before Trump got involved, it was something the Clinton campaign had invented in 2008. But after Trump jumped on the bandwagon, everyone forgot that birtherism was already well-established and insisted that Trump (who was a Republican at the time) invented it.

Then there was Trump's party hopping. I really distrusted a New York former Democrat. I expected that he'd be to the left of Romney who I figured would be a good administrator but would disappoint me in the positions he took.

I fully expected Trump to wither away when the debated started. Surely people would start to see that he was, at best, a RINO.

But he dispatched a pack of the best. Governors, ex-governors, Senators, political dynasties - he beat them all without any problems.

Several pundits I trust were calling on people to vote for Hillary Clinton on the idea that she may be a corrupt socialist-wannabe but at least she knew how to work within the system and the Republican Congress would keep her from doing too much damage (were they awake during the Obama administration?). I watched the Republican National Convention and decided that I was going to have to vote for Hillary.

Then came the Democratic National Convention. I watched some of it to see my new party in action. There was Michelle Obama saying "When they go low, we go high". Had that woman seen any of Hillary's anti-Trump ads? They set a new record for low. Then there was the Khans, waving a copy of the Constitution. Yes, their son was a hero but they were put on the stage by central casting to tell us that Trump was wrong to worry about Muslims. This was only a few weeks after one of the worst mass shootings in American history when a gunman swearing allegiance to ISIS killed gays in the name of Allah. Don't tell me that we don't need to worry about radical Islam.

Anyway, by the end of the Democrats' convention I realized that there was no way I could vote for that crowd. Hillary had ignored the old maxim - swing to the left for the primary and swing to the center for the general election. She'd spent the primary running against her husband's accomplishments and she was going to keep running to the left.

The longer the campaign went on, the more I liked Trump. First there were the rumors about Hillary's health which culminated in her collapsing in public. They followed that up with several lies (it was a hot day and she was dehydrated, she never drinks enough water, can you imagine trying to get Hillary Clinton to drink water?). Then they admitted that she was sick but we were to blame (she tried to "power through" pneumonia because women aren't allowed to get sick).

As far as I was concerned, Trump won the election in his opening statement in the first debate. Trump told us why he wanted to renegotiate the trade treaties and how that would help the average American. Hillary alternated between telling us how qualified she was and trying to get Trump to lose his temper. She forgot to tell us what she would do for Americans.

Election night was a surprise but not a shock. I'd been studying the electoral map. I figured that the pollsters had oversampled Democrats and Trump was running stronger than they showed. Once you assumed this, then all of the undecided and leaning Democrat states which were in the margin of error were likely to go to Trump. Which is exactly what happened.

So we took election day off to celebrate. And we just smiled the following day when throngs of women turned out in their pink pussy hats (which are now forbidden because not all "women" have pussies and women of color have brown pussies).

So... how did he do?

Let's be honest, Trump got off to a rough start. New presidents always have problems. Carter tried to be his own chief of staff and failed miserably. Clinton appointed a childhood friend as chief of staff then had to fire him. Trump made these guys' first few months look smooth.

This was inevitable. Between the never-Trumpers and the people who refused to "normalize" Trump by working for him, he had a shallow bench to draw from. He used a lot of family and campaign staff who had never worked in government. Turnover was unusually high. But things have settled down, just as they did for his predecessors.

Politically Trump really surprised me. His opponents keep calling his policies "populist" or "nationalist" or "authoritarian". Actually, they are Reaganesque. Trump followed through on his pledged to reduce government. He also stood up to our enemies.

When Syria first crossed Obama's unintentional red line, he went to Congress for permission to respond, promising that the response would be "unbelievably small". When Congress refused to shoulder the blame, Russia bailed him out, negotiating with Syria to remove their chemical weapons. That didn't stop them from killing their own people. They simply used chlorine gas which wasn't on the forbidden list and Obama was happy to ignore them. The first time they did that with Trump in the White House, we made a missile strike against the air field their bombers used. This might have qualified as the unbelievably small response that Obama planned but coming as it did on the heels of the gassing, it showed strength and the gassing stopped.

Obama left Trump a note telling him that North Korea would be his biggest problem. Obama kicked that can down the road as far as it could go. I'm not sure that Trump has a solution to North Korea - the four previous presidents failed. But they seem to be talking Trump more seriously than Obama.

A year ago were were still at war with ISIS and expecting it to take years to drive them out of the territories that they controlled. That put Americans and Europeans at risk from ISIS's sophisticated terrorist network. Trump stepped up the war and changed the rules of engagement. As a result, ISIS no longer controls any cities. That makes it much harder for what's left of them to recruit which makes us safer.

Trump's biggest triiumps have been domestic. We were told when he tool office that the days of economic growth were over. Instead we just had three quarters of growth over 3% - the best showing in 13 years. The stock market keeps setting records.

This is not just the continuation of trends that started under Obama. It is the response Trump rolling back burdensome regulations. Obama's administration seemed to believe that there was no cost to new regulations (or that they were worth it). Businesses refused to invest, preferring to keep their cash reserves to handle whatever new regulations were thrown at them. Now, with that fear gone, businesses are investing and giving raises.

And that was before the tax reform. The corporate tax reform was significant and highly overdue. American corporations were keeping trillions of dollars parked overseas because America had the world's highest corporate tax rate. Hillary's (and Bernie's) solution to this was to try to penalize corporations. Trump and the Republican Congress encouraged these companies to bring the money home. Apple alone announced that they will bring a quarter trillion dollars into the US. We will soon see a cash infusion of trillions of dollars into the US economy. This is big.

Plus Trump is packing the courts with young conservatives.

I could go on but you get my drift. Yes, Trump is blunt and uncontrolled but the left hated every Republican president. The more conservative he is the more they hate him. Even Romney, as mild as moderate a candidate as you will find was going to roll America back to the 1950s with segregation and a loss of women's rights. The nation would be just as divided had a more moderate Republican won. As long as they are going to hate you anyway, you might as well go big.

The Age of Unreality

Almost before the ink was dry on the Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage, the LGBT movement shifted gears to the T (for trans). What had been something quietly whispered about suddenly became mainstream and suddenly the terms "identifies as" and "happens to have" were added to the vocabulary. This isn't necessarily a good thing. While the left likes to pretend that they are the ones who believe in science, they have put the activists in charge of this one instead of scientists.

The problem is that, with the exception of some rare genetic conditions, there are only two sexes and a good deal of our societal definition of gender was formed by biological differences in behavior. But, between the Trans activists who want to redefine gender and the Intersectional Feminists who want to erase masculinity, we have left biology far behind.

Once you start pretending that a woman can have a penis then you have started making stuff up. But the movement is fixated on validating the idea that you are whatever you identify as. This has reached the point in England where doctors are being told to ignore biology for fear of upsetting people's delusions. So doctors will offer pap smears to trans women who do not have a cervix but not to trans men who do have a cervix and are still at risk of cervical cancer.

But it gets worse. An engineer was fired from Google a few months ago after he suggested that the reason there were fewer female engineers was that engineering did not interest as many women as men. California has strong protections for freedom of opinion in the workplace and he is suing Google under these laws. One of his exhibits was a presentation by a man who identifies as a wingless, yellow female dragon and as a high-rise building on how people should address this individual.

Got that? This man thinks that he is a female dragon and a building at the same time. And Google was concerned that people would offend him by not addressing him the proper way (side note, since he identifies as a building, does he have a street address?). Recently the British version of Big Brother had a trans woman on who demanded to be treated as a woman. A great deal of the conflict came from the cis-gendered not treating the trans woman the way that it felt that it should be treated.

So, what will happen when the next season has someone who identifies as high-rise condo on the show? Will the trans condo person be offended if no one is willing to buy a flat? It sounds silly but just how far are we supposed to humor people's fantasies?

But once we hit the limit and tell someone, "Sorry, you are neither a building nor a mythical creature" then the floodgates will be loosed and people will start telling trans women that they are just a man in a dress. And that's something the activists can't allow.

A Perfect S***storm

For the last few days the press has gone crazy because President Trump is supposed to have referred to Haiti and soem African countries as Sh*thole countries. This apparently proves that he's a white supremacist, unfit for office, etc, etc. It also has a Bevis and Butthead quality to it:  "He said a bad word! Heh, heh, heh." That part is the most laughable. Presidents often use salty language in private. Bill Clinton and LBJ were known for it. Nixon, a Quaker, surprised people by the number of "expletive deleteds" in the Watergate tapes. I'm sure that JFK and the Bushs used similar language. Obama called Libya a Sh*t Storm in public.

There's also some question about the accuracy of the quote. The Washington Post attributed it to two Congressional aids who were briefed on the meeting - in other words, people who were not there. Since then, two people who were there say that they don't remember it (which means that the part about everyone going suddenly quiet at what the President said was incorrect). Lindsey Graham gave a "he sort of said  something like that" answer. Dick Durban claims that he heard Trump say it but Durban has been caught lying about presidential meeting before.

Trump has denied using that language but affirmed that he is in favor of changing immigration policy to favor people with skills. This is not news. He has long been on record for reforming the immigration system.

It is also worth remembering that the initial source, the WaPo, has been known to go out of its way to embarrass the president. Just a few weeks ago they reported that a government agency banned the use of seven words. They even doubled down on this with an editorial. This came from a single, anonymous source and was rushed into print without bothering to contact the agency for comment. After the story was released, the agency said that this was not a general prohibition. It was a guideline of words to avoid when submitting budgets to a Republican Congress. So the WaPo is willing to run stories based on shaky sourcing, without verification, just to embarrass the President.

The bigger issue is if the President said something inherently racist. Yes, he did name Haiti and some African countries as sh*tholes. We don't know which ones. Presumably ones that have sent a lot of refugees here. So is this an accurate description of Haiti and some African countries? I think the fact that they are sending refugees answers that. A list of the world's worst countries to live in would certainly include Haiti, Libya, Somalia and some other African failed states. Is it now racist to point this out?

But, let's assume that the President did say something to the effect that he preferred people from Norway to people from hell-holes. Norway is supposed to be one of Bernie's Scandinavian socialist countries that we want to emulate.

What Trump obviously meant was that we should be encouraging skilled immigrants from stable countries who will be an asset to our nation over people who will immediately need expensive public assistance and be a drag on the nation. There is a valid argument in favor of this. The days of the open border predate the welfare state and we can't have both.

While Europe is absorbing a lot of refugees, it also has strict requirements for regular immigration. You have to prove that you will not be a drain on resources. Trump is proposing that we follow that example. Normally the left loves to emulate Europe but this is one time where they don't want to. When they point to Trump for preferring people from majority-white countries, what they really mean is that they only want immigrants who are not white. But they can't say that so instead they call Trump a racist.

 

The Trump Trap

There's a lot of talk about President Trump being interviewed by the Mueller investigation. The question is not only will he submit to an interview but under what conditions. Will he testify under oath? Will he be given a list of questions that he answers in writing, as was done with President Reagan? Will he be given an informal interview without being sworn in, without notes and without recordings as was done with Hillary Clinton? The left is pushing for him to testify under oath but this it a trap.

So far, the three people who have been charged by the probe were not charged for any illegal activity. They were charged with lying to the investigation. In the case of Michael Flynn, he wasn't even informed that he was about to be given a formal interrogation and he was not given benefit of council.

President Clinton was asked, under oath, if he had had sexual relations with an intern. This was not a trick question and he gave a bald-faced lie and denied it. That led to his impeachment for lying under oath.

Trump recently testified in a lawsuit involving his property. He did not prepare and his answers were not all truthful although none rose to the level of perjury.

The trap is to get Trump to testify under oath about Russia. Being Trump, he's bound to say something wrong or get a timeline wrong. All they need is something incorrect and they will charge him. And it doesn't matter if there was actual collusion with the Russians or not. The goal is no longer to discover a crime that was already committed, it is to entrap the President into unintentionally committing a crime.

Presumably, if I see this then his legal team is way ahead of me and will protect him from this. In the meantime, I'm going to discount any calls for him to testify under oath as part of the trap.

Karma and Hillary Clinton

Somehow I doubt that Hillary Clinton is the type of introspective person who looks back at her mistakes and sees the lives that were ruined by them. Instead, Hillary is the type of person who obsessively reorders her enemies list and plots revenge on all of them (and their little dog, too). I have my own candidate for Hillary's worst decision - the overthrow of Libya.

During the Arab Spring there was widespread rioting across several Muslim countries. One of them was Libya. In the middle of the unrest, Hillary met with some Muslim extremists who convinced her that they could pick up the pieces if we helped overthrow Gaddafi's regime. President Obama was ambivalent and Vice President Biden was against it. Hillary was the one who convinced Obama that we should act. They used the excuse that we were protecting women and children but they knew it was a lie. We were actually protecting (male) Muslim extremists. Obama's actions were illegal. He didn't bother to consult with Congress or report to them within 30 days as required by law.

Democrats (and many Republicans) love to complain about Bush's wars but he got Congressional approval first and he had much better cause. Afghanistan was protecting Osama Bin Laden and we had been engaged in a low-level shooting war with Iraq for a decade. In contrast, Gaddafi had voluntarily given up his nuclear program with the understanding that he would be safe from US intervention. But Obama, at Hillary's urging, helped overthrow him anyway.

The people Hillary met with didn't live up to their promises. They were not able to create government. Libya descended into failed state status. Thousands died. There are slave markets in Libya now. This should be a black mark on Obama's and Hillary's record but it isn't because it's too easy to ignore. Where Bush followed the "you broke it, you bought it" rule and stayed to rebuild the countries he destabilized, Obama left Libya to the international community. Unsurprisingly, no other nations were willing to take over nation-building after we washed out hands of the matter. When asked about Libya late in his presidency, Obama said that he had expected more from them and that they disappointed him. That appears to be the extent of his and Hillary's regrets - that no one cleaned up their mess.

But, in a rare example of karma, this decision cost Hillary the presidency.

When we overthrew Gaddafi, that scared the bejesus out of Putin. He has sure that he would be next and he correctly blamed Hillary. That's one reason Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It was not to help Trump, it was to hurt Hillary. So, to whatever extent Russian email hacks, Wikileaks and Twitterbots affected the election, that was why they did (to be fair, Putin was also just doing it to show that he could).

But that's not the only affect Libya had on Hillary. The destabilization of Libya led to the deaths at Benghazi. That led to numerous Congressional investigations of Hillary's role in the deaths. The last of the investigations noticed that there were very few emails from Hillary. They asked why and were told that she had a private email server and hadn't turned over the contents to the National Archives as required. And that launched the FBI investigation. Until then, no one cared that she'd used a private server but once the news got out, it had to be investigated. And that also led to the discovery that her assistant, Huma, had been forwarding emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, who was being investigated for child pornography.

Hillary constantly complains about having to run against Trump, Russia and the Director of the FBI but if we'd left Libya alone, Russia and the FBI would never have been involved. Karma's a bitch.

Of course that still would have left her with a lackluster campaign.

How Obama Lost the Election For Hillary

The general wisdom is that Al Gore lost the 2000 election because of President Clinton's antipathy towards guns swung Gore's home state of Tennessee to vote for Bush. If Gore had won Tennessee then he wouldn't have needed Florida. Because of that, Democrats backed off from anti-gun platforms until the party swung hard left under Obama. Even then, both Obama and Hillary Clinton insisted in 2008 that they would not be anti-gun.

I'm sure that gun rights had an effect on the 2016 election but I don't think it was as decisive as in 2000. I think that religion was the dividing line in 2016.

The Obama administration and the Democrats in general came out as pretty much anti-religion. In 2008 Obama insisted that he was against gay marriage. By the end of his administration, the party was not only cheering the legality of gay marriage, but attacking anyone who still objected. Even people providing individual services while same-sex marriage was still officially illegal were put out of business by the government in the name of tolerance.

While this is still being debated in the state and national supreme courts, another issue has already been judged - Obamacare's birth control provisions.

When it was first proposed, the Obama administration was reluctant to give any form of religious waiver. After being shamed into it, they allowed for some sort of waiver but they insisted that it be applied as narrowly as possible. Two cases made it to the Supreme Court. One involved Hobby Lobby which always included birth control but did not include 3 of the 15 types mandated by the government. The owners of Hobby Lobby felt that the remaining three were too close to abortion. It would have been simple for the government to grant waivers on religious grounds but they insisted on fighting it all the way to the SCOTUS - where they lost.

The government took an even harder line with Little Sisters of the Poor. They took them all the way to the SCOTUS, too. If they had won then they were prepared to put the Little Sisters out of business. They lost that one, too. But think about it - they were taking such a hard line that they were willing to put a religious charitable organization out of business over birth control.

These cases sent out a message - that the left has its own priorities and considers religion as an impediment to their agenda. To them, religious objections are nothing but and excuse for bigotry.

One question that the Democrats kept asking was why Evangelicals and Catholics voted for someone who had been divorced and had multiple affairs. The answer is obvious and they said so at the time - they were worried about their survival under more years of Democrat rule.

How important was this to the election? It's hard to say but look at these maps. This is the states that Hillary won:

And this ranks states by how religious they are:

Hillary mainly won the least religious states.

Maybe the Democrats need to rethink their attitudes on religion.

#NeverTrump Double-think

Columnist Michael Gerson recently wrote a column about President Trump's successful first year. Gerson is a double-#NeverTrump. He writes for the Washington Post which is as hostile to Trump as any newsroom in the country and he has close relations with the Bush family. But Gerson is also a conservative so he was in the difficult position of having to acknowledge Trump's successes while downplaying them and something any Republican president could have done. This involves a lot of double-think. He also throws in a lot of petty character assassination. The crux of Gerson's argument is that Trump did very little except take credit for the work of others.

Gerson starts with Trump's nomination and the confirmation of Justice Gorsuch which he points out came from a list provided to him by the Federalist Society. So? All presidents choose from lists of qualified jurists. It should be pointed out that the judges appointed by the Bushes have a mixed record as conservatives. Chief Justice Roberts in particular was a disappointment in his legal gymnastics to justify Obamacare.

He goes on to the defeat of ISIS and counts that as a continuation of President Obama's policies. While it's true that the ISIS policies under Obama and Trump involved the use of weapons and air strikes, the actual on-the-ground effort was very different. Obama policy might be described as "do what you have to as long as you don't make them mad." He was convinced that killing ISIS members would bring new fighters to the cause. Battles for cities involved pushing the ISIS fighters from block to block with minimum casualties. This allowed the ISIS fighters to retreat until the battle moved to a different area then they'd move make and the area would have to be cleared again. The rules of engagement meant that often permission to kill someone had to come from the White House. Trump changed all of that. He beefed up the effort and changed the rules of engagement to allow killing ISI casualties. The result was that an effort that Obama said would take years was over in months.

Gerson also complains about anti-Muslim bigotry but, to lots of conservatives, the effort to separate Islam from terrorism was misguided.

Gerson gives Trump and Congress credit for the overhaul of the tax system but then dismisses it by saying that any other Republican president would have accomplished the same thing and passed an overhaul of Obamacare as well. That's pretty speculative. The main reason that the Obamacare repeal/replace effort failed is that Trump's victory caught Congress by surprise. The Republicans talked about replacing Obamacare with something better for years but never got around to drafting one until well into 2017. What they came up with was too hard to sell. It's hard to see how a different president could have saved that mess.

Gerson complains about Trump's disparagement of the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence organizations. While Bush (41) led the CIA at one point, they had little love for Bush (43). The CIA seemed to be gagging a covert operation against Bush (43) during the 2004 election when they leaked a constant stream of information that was critical of Bush. The FBI appears to have gone to lengths to clear Hillary Clinton of charges related to her private email server and at the same time pursued the Trump/Russia connection based on shaky evidence.

And Gerson also points out that Trump hasn't cut regulations. He simply ordered government employees to cut them. Newsflash, Micheal. That's how presidents do everything. The important thing here is that Trump did order cuts to regulations. He's the first president since Reagan to try to slow the growth of government. Regulations under both Bushes grew enormously. And we won't talk about what happened under Clinton and Obama.

Gerson complains about the reaction of foreign states to Trump. Again, he needs to look back at Bush (43) who was very poorly regarded overseas. That's how Republicans are treated.

Gerson is setting up a perfect Republican as a straw man argument.If only some other Republican had been elected then he'd have accomplished everything Trump did but without all the anger.The truth is that Trump is acting as the most conservative president since Reagan. He is more conservative than most of the other candidates, particularly Jeb!. He is hated by the Left but so was Reagan and the Bushes. The term Bush-derangement-syndrome was invented to explain how much the left hated W. Most of the things the Left says about Trump were also said about Reagan.

Trump was the strongest candidate and he is turning out to be a reliable conservative. Gerson should swallow his pride and accept that.

Hillary's Worst excuse Ever

I refuse to give Hillary Clinton any of my money in order to read her bundle of lies... ahem... newest book so I'm seeing excerpts second-hand from others. Here's one on her emails.

Hillary begins with (sort of) taking responsibility:

Right off the bat, let me say again that, yes, the decision to use personal email instead of an official government account was mine and mine alone. I own that. I never meant to mislead anyone, never kept my email use a secret, and always took classified information seriously. (pf 291)

That's great but we already knew that. The big question is why did she do it? Was she trying to shield her emails from FOIA requests? Was she afraid of someone going through her emails like she had with her staffers after her 2008 loss? Was she thinking even further back to the Iran/Contra scandal of the Reagan White House which came to light because staffers didn't realize that the White House email system was backed up regularly and their attempts to delete incriminating emails were useless? No, here's what she says:

A lot of young people today are used to carrying around multiple devices and having both a personal phone and one provided by their work. But I'm not a digital native. . . I didn't send a single email while I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I've never used a computer at home or at work. It wasn't until about 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone (pg 292-293)

So she used a private server because she's too old and technically ignorant to use an official account? Seriously? The woman who claims to be the best-qualified candidate for president in history says that she couldn't grasp this modern technology? And that she spent most of her time in the Senate without ever using email?

This is a fall-back on her original excuse - that she wasn't savvy enough to use multiple devices. But that was disproven. There are photographs showing her with multiple devices. Further, she could have used her Blackberry with an official account.

For someone who never sent an email before 2006, she sure caught on fast. Remember that there were more than 60,000 emails on her server from her time as Secretary of State. More than 30,000 were personal business (or so she claims since her staff went to heroic efforts to be sure that no one recovered her emails about yoga and her daughter's wedding).

Hillary imagines students looking at their history books and wondering how someone as terrible as Donald Trump could have been elected? The answer is that people didn't trust Hillary because of her chronic inability to tell the truth.

#MeToo and Opportunism

The #MeToo movement has been big the last few weeks and Democrats have jumped on board, even going so far as to distance themselves from Bill Clinton, John Conyers and Al Franken. Unfortunately, the Democrats change of heart on women has more to do with political opportunism than real conviction.

Before making my case I'm going to divide the #MeToo cases up. The first group is the "open secret" group. There is no question about their guilt. Everyone around them knew that they forced themselves on women. Jokes were made about it in public. Multiple suits had been settled. This describes Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and John Conyers. They were unceremoniously fired as soon as their sordid activities became known as an effort at damage control. Because they had been turning a blind eye, their respective employers (and Congress) were complicit.

The second group is the "out of thin air" group. These are accusations that came as a surprise to people. The most important of these was Roy Moore and it came as a godsend to the Democrats. They hate Moore's overt religion and they saw a way to keep him out of the Senate and pick up a seat. Even better, if Moore won they could tie him and President Trump together and ride a wave of anger by women into a congressional majority. But this meant playing a long game which requires sacrificing pieces along the way.

The accusations against Al Franken are of the "out of the blue" variety. If he hadn't had his brother take a picture of him groping a sleeping woman (or playing at groping her) then the accusations would have been ignored completely. But the Democrats couldn't take the high moral ground with that picture in the news so Franken was pressured to resign. Eventually he gave in and promised that he would resign at some point in the future.

But then Moore lost his senate race. Half of the Moore/Trump connection is gone and Trump was elected after the accusations were made against him. Suddenly the long game doesn't seem so wise.

This is the decision point for the Democrats. If they really have had a change of heart about the treatment of women then they will stick to their guns. They will insist that Franken follow through on his resignation and distance themselves from Bill Clinton. On the other hand, if this was just political opportunism and faux outrage then they will forgive these two and downplay the other accusations against congressmen (mainly Democrats).

Things don't look good for the Democrats moral principles. Some Senators are asking Franken to reconsider his resignation and Bill Clinton is being welcomed back on the fund-raising trail.

Certainly some Democrats are legitimately concerned with women's rights. The question is how deep this runs? Is the Democratic leadership willing to sacrifice members for inappropriate behavior or will they go back to overlooking assaults against women in the pursuit of power?

Note to Democrats: Not Everything is About Trump

Republican Roy Moore lost a senate race in deeply Republican Alabama. Is this a sure sign that the populous is rising up against President Trump? Hardly. Moore wasn't even Trump's first choice. He supported the acting senator in the primaries but Moore beat him with the help of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Moore was always a flawed candidate. His views on religion and gay rights seem stuck in the 50s or 60s. Establishment Republicans such as George Will disowned Moore from the start and that was before the sexual allegations started.

Personally, I think that these were overstated. What they boil down to was that nearly 40 years ago when Moore was in his early 30s he was attracted to women in their mid-teens. This is creepy but legal. It was not pedophilia - that's having sex with someone 13 or under. The youngest of these accusers was 14 and claimed that he wanted sex but didn't actually have it.

The important thing is that all of these accusations were from before Moore was married. No one claims that he cheated on his wife or otherwise engaged in any questionable activities with women since he married. Not that it matters. We were told constantly about what a terrible person Moore is. The Republicans in general and President Trump in particular kept Moore at arm's length through much of the campaign.

This attack served its purpose. Many people who would have voted for Moore lost their enthusiasm. The exit polls show this. Democrats had a high turn-out and Republicans had a low turn-out.

Then there was the protest vote. Jones beat Moore by 49.9% to 48.4% but 1.7% were write-in votes. I think it's safe to assume that the majority of these were Republicans who made protest votes. If they had voted for Moore then he'd be senator.

So a controversial candidate with a major sex-scandal lost by a small percentage in a heavily Republican state. Whatever affect Trump had on the vote is drowned out. This is not much of a sign for the future.

The Republicans are now down one seat in the Senate (which they can possibly pick up again in 2020). That makes it a bit easier for the Democrats to take the Senate in 2018 but it's still a long-shot. To do it they will have to win several races in states that Trump carried plus two states that currently have Republican senators. Every Democratic incumbent won in a year that Obama was on top of the ballot and every Republican incumbent managed to keep his seat with Obama at the top. Trump will not be on the 2018 ballot although the Democrats will try to make the election a referendum on him and whatever the anti-Trump outrage of the day is. It's unlikely that multiple women will appear to denounce multiple Republicans or that this will still have the same shock value that it had in the Moore/Jones special election.

There's also a good chance that the economy will be booming. There are early signs of it including (anti-Trump) economists warning that booms are bad. Wave elections seldom happen in good times. People tend to vote their wallet.

To sum it up, don't look at this election as a barometer for 2018.

Why Americans Don't Trust the News

I have a simple piece of advice to the news media: you can be a trusted source of news or you can be part of the Resistance but you can't be both at once. Currently too many news organizations are siding with the Resistance and it's kill their credibility. Two recent examples involve the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. First ABC News reported that General Flynn was going to testify that candidate Trump had directed him to meet with the Russian government. Except they got the timeline wrong and Trump was President-elect at the time and the meetings were perfectly legal. Then CNN reported that Donald Trump jr was given an advanced peek at a Wikileak dump (with the implication that Wikileak might be affiliated with Russia). But, like ABC, CNN got the timeline wrong. The email in question was dated September 14 instead of September 4. The Wikileak dump in question had been made on the 13th so this was just a heads-up about information that was already public.

Both of these mistakes happened because the respective newsrooms are full of people who are positive that Trump needed Russian help in order to win the election. They are in a bubble with no dissenters to question their findings or make sure that they double-checked their sources. Instead they are in a competition to see who will report Trump's fall first. This leads them to make critical errors and causes the public to question anything they say.

It must be pointed out that the actual effect of Russian influence on the election is highly questionable. They bought more ads outside of the election cycle than during it and they supported numerous causes. Many analysts think that the Russians were trying to sew general confusion rather than help a specific candidate. Even if they were trying to help Trump that does not mean that they were working with the Trump campaign. After the overthrow of Libya, Putin was convinced that he would be targeted next for overthrow and specifically blamed Secretary Clinton for this.

To date, the case that there was a quid pro quo agreement with the Trump campaign relies mainly on wishful thinking rather than any facts. But Hillary Clinton continues to push the narrative that she lost because of the Russians and newsrooms are still full of Hillary supporters.

The various newsrooms need to take a lesson from the 2004 presidential election and 60 Minutes. A 60 Minutes producer named Marla Mapes was convinced that President Bush had avoided the draft during Viet Nam by taking a slot in the Texas Air National Guard that was only available for the rich and well-connected. She was told flat-out that the TANG always had openings because it required more time and was more dangerous than normal National Guard service but she refused to believe it. While she was researching the story, an anonymous source offered her some memos that Bush's commander had typed up but kept secret. She took these and ran with the story without bothering to do any real fact-checking. But, as with most things that are too good to be true, these were fakes, and not even very good ones. They had numerous problems with the format and terminology and appeared to have been written with Microsoft Word. The story blew up taking the career of Mapes and Dan Rather with it. To this day, Mapes refuses to admit that the documents were poorly-done forgeries.

What happened to CBS and 60 Minutes in 2004 is threatening to happen to the entire news industry now. No one stops to question the basic assumption that Trump colluded with the Russians. This spills over into other reporting on national issues. There are two sides to every story but the only one that gets reported is the anti-Trump side. When President Trump rescinds one of President Obama's executive orders, the focus of the news is on the people who will be hurt without mentioning that the order was probably illegal in the first place. I could go on but that could take an entire post by itself. The point is that the more one-sided the news reporting becomes the less it will be trusted. 

Why Hillary Lost and Why She Blames Everyone Else

I'm not about to give Hillary Clinton money for her book "What happened" so I'm depending on others who have read it for the details. I just read an account of the "Commander in Chief Debate" which wasn't exactly a debate. Matt Lauer interviewed both candidates separately then the interviews were aired back to back. In Hillary's book and in several recent interviews she complains that she started out talking about judgement but then he asked her about the emails. She was annoyed. She had already been cleared of any crimes by the FBI. She felt it was an unfair question. She expected a powder puff interview. So she gave a pat answer. Later a Republican veteran asked about them again, this time about the fact that no charges were filed which gave the impression that the investigation was fixed. She was really upset that such a person would be allowed to ask such a question.

That that's why she lost. The emails were a big issue. They showed lack of judgement that she compounded several times over, first by deleting over 30,000 emails then by having the server scrubbed (and not like with a towel). Several felonies were committed including scrubbing the server while there was an active subpoena and simply being in possession of some highly-classified emails but no one from her team was ever charged.

This was a big deal. Simply repeating that the FBI declined to recommend charges does not convince people that her judgement is sound. If anything, it doubles down on bad judgement. She never has gone beyond the "I'm sorry I got caught and I wouldn't have done it if I'd known how much trouble it would cause me" that she coughed up instead of a real apology.

And now, over a year later, she's still railing because Matt Lauer had the nerve to ask her about a major issue. And she acts as if Trump cruised to victory without a single scandal.

Does "Billy Bush tape" ring a bell? It should. Hillary was playing excerpt from it six times an hour for weeks in swing states. That was just the biggest issue that came up. Every week or two the press uncovered something about Trump. But Hillary forgot all about that.

What really comes through is Hillary's sense of entitlement. She's outraged that anyone did anything to prevent her from having a cake-walk into the White House. How date Bernie run against her and how dare he make popular promises? How dare Matt Lauer and NBC bring up the emails? And how dare the FBI investigate them? Or re-open the investigation after discovering that her assistant Huma was forwarding emails to her husband Anthony Wiener to print? And how dare anyone, especially women vote for anyone but her?

The Divisiveness of Hillary Clinton

I've been called divisive more times than I can count, and for the life of me, I can't understand why. Politics is a divisive business, it's true, and out country has gotten more polarized with every passing year. . . Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren't? . . . I'm really asking. I'm at a loss. - Hillary Clinton in What Happened

Is this woman so self-unaware that she doesn't see the differences between her own actions and other politicians? I can give a few quick examples of her divisiveness:

Let's start with the news that her husband had been having an affair with a White House intern in the late 1990s. When Bill ran in 1992 he and Hillary did an interview where he seemed to say "I've had affairs in the past but I won't have any if I'm elected president". Hillary knew of her husband's long history with other women better than anyone. She employed a staff just to quash these women from speaking out. So she had no reason to doubt that Bill had indeed been having an affair. But that's not how she reacted. She denied everything and (this is the relevant part) blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy". To no one's surprise, the affair was real but Hillary never went back and admitted that she'd been wrong to claim that Republicans made it up.

But that's ancient history. Just two years ago there was this exchange at a Democratic debate:

ANDERSON  COOPER: Which enemy that you made during your political career are you most proud of?

CLINTON: Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians; probably the Republicans

So Hillary named Republicans as enemies that she was proud to have. She refused to back away from that statement when asked about it later.

In July She tweeted: The Republican Party platform is so hateful, you'd think Donald Trump wrote it himself.

Then at a public fundraiser Hillary said some things that she'd previously been only saying to small, private groups: If I were to be grossly generalistic, I would say you can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets," Clinton said. "There are what I call the deplorables -- the racists, you know, the haters, and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he's going to restore an America that no longer exists. So just eliminate them from your thinking, because we've always had an annoying prejudicial element within our politics.

She later backed away from using "half" but it was too little, too late. Republicans knew that she really thought of all of us as deplorable.

All of this is very divisive. Hillary sees the world as us vs. them with "them" being the Republicans. You don't see Biden or Kerry doing things like these.

Then there is her book tour. I can remember losing candidates going back to Humphrey in 1968. They all took their loss fairly gracefully. Humphrey and Gore tough college for a while. McGovern, McCain and Kerry returned to Congress. Gore eventually reinvented himself as an environmental profit and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mondale, Dole, Romney and Dukakis pretty much bowed out of politics. Carter reinvented himself helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.

Absolutely none of these losing presidential candidates wrote a book complaining about how they deserved to win then went on a speaking tour contesting the election. Hillary is unique in being the worst loser in modern history. And that makes her divisive.

The Inevitability of the Current Sex Scandals

The past year or so seems to be a reversion to New England in the 1690s when the Puritans ruled. The Puritans divided the colony into the elect and the reprobate. The elect were already saved. They were guaranteed their place in heaven. The reprobate would go to hell. The problem was telling who was in which group. Unfortunately, when God saved someone, he did not leave a visible mark so the only hint was that the elect could do no wrong. I mean that literally - it would never occur to one of the elect to sin. So everyone was examining everyone else's behavior to see who sinned and who didn't. All of this lead to the Salem Witch Trials, among other things. Of course, it is impossible for anyone to be completely without sin so this lead to a very nasty environment.

The modern version has its own version of the elect and the reprobates - The minorities and their woke allies vs everyone else. And, as with the Puritans, no one can ever be woke enough.

During late Summer and early Fall it was historic figures who where being examined. Naturally, the slave holders were judged as inadequate but it goes further than that. Presidents Lincoln and Grant were also found wanting. Lincoln allowed some Indians to be executed after a major uprising and Grant owned a slave for a while (with no points given for Grant freeing the slave in 1850).

Now the witch hysteria has moved on to sexual harassment. This began with the airing of then-candidate Trump talking about being able to inappropriately touch women without repercussion. That died down for a while but started up again with 40-year old accusations against Harvey Weinstein. That mushroomed into accusations about many actors, directors, etc. Then it spread to politicians - first a Senate candidate who was  accused of being creepy 40 years ago and now sitting Senator Al Franken.

Personally I'd love for Franken to be forced to leave the Senate and live a life of obscurity but this would never have come up if we weren't in a sexual exploitation hysteria.

One beneficial result of the current hysteria is a reexamination of President Clinton's record of sexual abuse. That's long-overdue. And it may prevent Hillary from making another run for President. After all, she spent decades covering for Bill.

But in general, the current hysteria has gone too far. People's careers are being ruined on the basis of accusations, often with no corroboration. We have the Obama administration and the feminists to thank for that. They insisted that there be no presumption of innocence for sexual harassment. Ironically, most of the people hurt so far are from the left.

Hysteria is never a good public policy. There are reasons that we have presumption of innocence, statute of limitations and all the other things in our justice system. All of that's gone out the window along with any sense of proportion. Is a squeeze on the butt or being touched through your clothes the same as being beaten and raped? It shouldn't be and we should wait for some sort of corroboration before  ruining people.

But this is just the current phase of a general hysteria. Something new will come up in a few weeks and all the sexual allegations will be forgotten.

The real question is how long the general hysteria will last.

The Day that Trump Won

A year ago we woke up knowing that it was the day Hillary Clinton would become the first woman president. She had bragged more than a week before that she wasn't even thinking about Donald Trump anymore. Her campaign insisted that she'd run up enough of a lead in early voting in Florida to make it impossible for Trump to win that state.

But Florida went for Trump. So did Pennsylvania and several other states that Trump wasn't supposed to have a chance in. What happened?

For me, the election was s surprise but not a shock. I'd been watching the electoral vote carefully and I knew that Trump had a decent chance. All you had to do was make the assumption that the polling models favored Clinton. There were several states that "leaned Clinton" meaning that polls showed her ahead but within the margin of error. If you assumed that the turn-out would match the last two presidential elections then Clinton was ahead. But if you assumed that the minorities who turned out in record numbers for the first black candidate would not turn out for a rich, white woman who oozed entitlement then Trump would win. It was as simple as that.

Of course, the Democratic elite had no idea it was coming. They saw Trump as a clown who somehow managed to get on the ticket. They ignored the fact that he had already beaten the other political dynasty, the Bush family. Jeb was supposed to be the more accomplished version of George W. but Trump easily defeated him along with other governors and well-known senators.

After Clinton's loss in the 2008 primaries it was assumed that she would be Obama's successor. Her stint as Secretary of State was meant to flesh out her resume which was actually fairly weak (She had no real accomplishments in the Senate and she was the first woman to argue that being married to the President qualified her to replace him).

The primaries should have signaled the Democrats that Clinton was a weak candidate. Even with the DNC being under her control she had problems running against an ancient socialist who wasn't even a Democrat. She was well-known to the nation and at least half the population had a firmly-fixed dislike of her. To top it off, she spent all of her time courting minorities and ignoring the working-class whites who traditionally supported the Democrats.She also refuses to admit mistakes or take responsibility for her actions. This trait continues  as Clinton blames the Russians and the FBI for her loss rather than her own mistakes.

Every time she opens her mouth to deliver a rehearsed excuse I thank the voters that she's not our president.

The Pro-Abortion Mind Game

A Harvard philosopher named Michael Sandel came up with a "thought exercise" to prove that we don't really believe that life begins at conception. It goes like this:

You are in a fertility clinic and there's a fire. On your way out you hear a noise and check in a room. You find a five year old child and a container marked "1,000 embryos". The fire and smoke are getting bad and you can only save one. Do you save the child or the container of embryos? Naturally you will save the child which means that you don't really believe the embryos are people which, in turn, means that you've been lying in order to contain control of women's bodies.

I cleaned it up a bit but that's what he says. You can see the whole thing laid out here if you really want along with a separate take-down.

So, does this thought exercise do what it claims to? Not really. It was contrived to make you choose the desired outcome. There are several reasons that the average person would choose the child. Here are some of them:

1) We don't handle abstracts well in a crisis. Most people wouldn't even stop to read the containers. They'd grab the child and run.

2) We are hard-wired to choose the concrete over the abstract. We see this constantly in movies and TV shows - someone is given a choice to save a hostage knowing that it could mean the death of many others. Given the choice between a live child and a container, people will choose the child, even if they know that the container represents more children. What's more, we don't actually know what the contents of the container are. Just because it has a label does not mean that it is currently full or even in use.

3) We know more than we are told. Anyone who knows how in-vitro fertilization works knows that we are already in squishy grounds. Only a fraction of the embryos will actually be successfully implanted so it is not a 1000 vs 1 choice. Most of these embryos will be discarded or die in failed implantations (which is why the whole process is morally squishy). The catholic Church debated allowing this process for this very reason.

4) This is an impossible situation. Embryos are not freeze-dried, ready to add water to reconstitute. They are kept frozen at near absolute zero. So the container in question would actually be a larger freezer. Disconnecting it would lead to the death of the embryos within minutes. To put this in perspective, let's take an alternate thought exercise. You are in a maternity ward and a fire breaks out. You see a five year old and two premature infants in incubators. Do you save the child or do you save the two infants, even knowing that they will die unless they can quickly be put back in incubators? And, if you choose the child does this mean that you do not think that the infants are actual people until they can breath unassisted?

It's one thing to propose a thought exercise to make people clarify and justify their reasoning. But that is not what Sandel did. He is playing a mind game to enforce his point of view. And he's not doing a very good job of it. He needed to propose it in neutral terms so that people's defenses were not raised. But he is really just performing for the people inside the bubble. He's not expecting anyone with dissenting views to really examine his exercise.

 

Weinstein, Trump, Clinton and Thomas

The big news right now is that movie producer Harvey Weinstein has been preying on women for decades. The real news is that this was widely known within certain circles but suppressed. Even the story that finally broke the news was killed by NBC News and the reporter had to go elsewhere to get it published.

Weinstein is highly connected. He is a major donor to Democrats. He consulted Hillary Clinton's campaign and President Obama's daughter interned with his production company. Given all of the Hollywood connections the Clintons and Obamas have, it's hard to believe that no one took them aside and whispered a warning in their ear. The truth is that they probably didn't care until a string of flops meant that he was no longer as powerful. Newer revelations show that this may be the tip of an avalanche. Left-leaning Hollywood may be full of sexual predators and no one cared.

A year ago the big news was a 1990s hot mic tape catching Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush that being rich and famous allowed him to touch women (through their clothing) and no one complained. While several women came forward after that to accuse Trump of improperly touching them, these accusations smelled of an opportunistic chance to derail the Trump campaign.

Going back 26 years, we have the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. Thomas was on track to sail through the confirmation when Teddy Kennedy broke precedent and revealed secret testimony given to the FBI. Anita Hill, one of Thomas's former employees, claimed that Thomas had made inappropriate comments in her presence. There was a minor uproar over this, even though a large group of women who had worked with Thomas said that he'd never behaved in an inappropriate manner in their presence. Thomas was confirmed but female outrage made 1992 the "year of the woman" in elections.

In-between we have Bill Clinton who had multiple affairs including one in the White House and has been accused of violently raping two other women while president. When this news came out, conservatives wanted to know where was the outrage? Several feminist leaders answered that they didn't really care what Clinton did in his private life as long as he supported their agenda. The progressive organization MoveOn was founded to convince the county to "move on" after Clinton's impeachment.

The implication here is that the left only cares about sexual harassment (or worse) when it's to their advantage. They are willing to ignore abuse as long as the abusers support the right causes and as long as the victims stay quiet.

So, why is the left surprised that President Trump's supporters act the same way - ignoring Trump's personal indiscretions because they need him to undo the damage of the Obama presidency?

There's a larger issue here, one that the left will come to regret. You have to be consistent in how you apply standards or they cease to be meaningful. For the past few years the left has pushed the idea that free speech is an outdated concept. Eventually they will miss the protections they currently take for granted but threw away for short-term political gain.  

Cold War III

We are in a conflict that I'm calling Cold War III. Before I explain it, I'll backtrack a bit to cover the first two cold wars.

The term "cold war" was invented to describe the conflict between the old guard of capitalist/democratic countries and the revolutionary communist/dictatorships typified by the USSR and, later, Red China. This was a war of ideologies although it did erupt into some shooting proxy wars. Viet Nam, Korea, The Seven Day War between Israel and it's neighbors, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and numerous conflicts in Africa and South America were all part of this ideological war. The United States was eventually declared the winner although Communist ideology is on the rise again.

While it's seldom called this, the Second Cold War is between militant Islam and the rest of the world. Again, this is a proxy war with Iran, Saudi Arabia and others financing extremist groups. Note that it is not necessary for one side to be cohesive. Iran and the Saudis are enemies just as Russia and Red China were. Militant Islam has not been as successful in controlling entire nations as communism was but it has managed to use asymmetrical warfare in the form of terrorist attacks to kill thousands in the US and Europe, something that never happened in the first Cold War.

So, what about the Third Cold War? This is a cold civil war. So far, few shots have been fired but there is conflict. Again, on one side is traditional America with it's capitalist/democratic system. The other side is sort of a hydra with many heads but all of its components share a single goal - to change America beyond recognition by attacking every possible institution. The terms "social justice" and "income inequality" are often used and most of these groups are explicitly against capitalism. A number of other fundamental American institutions are also under attack. Free speech is the most obvious. People at all levels on the left have declared that "hate speech" is not protected where "hate speech" is loosely defined as anything they disagree with. College students have equated having speakers they disagree with to physical pain in order to justify violent protests. Our legal system is threatened on college campuses where the presumption of innocence has been replaced by a presumption of guilt in rape complaints. While these actions take place outside of the legal system, they go on a student's permanent record and can make him unemployable for decades. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has suggested that the rules for evidence should also be changed in civil rights cases.

Rather than accept the results of the 2016 Presidential election, the Hydra came up with plan after plan for ways to alter the results. They are still hoping that somehow the investigation on Russian influence will expand far enough to find something to force Trump from office.

Virtually every aspect of American life is being challenged at some level, especially on campuses. Statues are being removed. Colleges are being renamed. This is not limited to Confederates. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is now offensive because of his Indian policies. Just a few years ago Democrats were pointing to Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive policies as a model for the Republican party. Now he's reviled as a colonialist.

Science itself is under attack. White males are over-represented among scientists and mathematicians so some feminists have condemned it as an artifact of the patriarchy.

Science says that there are two sexes determined by X and Y chromosomes but the Hydra says that there are multiple genders, as many as 32. And they want to make it punishable to use the wrong gender.

I'm calling this a war because of the way the Hydra acts. They use the language of war. They call themselves "The Resistance" and vow to resist President Trump and to fight the patriarchy. Once you start digging deeper into the demands of the different groups, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Black Bloc, etc., you find that they are committed to ending capitalism.

Any attempts at reasonable compromise are simply treated as gained ground. An example was removing Confederate flags from state property. Rather than being accepted as a compromise, this was a beginning point where all Confederate flags were to be removed, even from toy soldiers and the Dukes of Hazard TV show suddenly because a symbol of white supremacy. This escalated into demands for removing statues of Confederate generals which moved on to grave memorials and statues unrelated to the Civil War.

There is also a total lack of remorse. After a BLM-inspired cop-killing in Texas, you might expect a bit of moderation. Instead they continues to call for more dead cops, even before the funeral. When one of their number attempted to assassinate Republican members of Congress, they took to social media to insist that the Republicans had brought it on themselves and probably deserved to be executed.  

So far it has stayed a low-level civil war but it has been marked by violence. Besides the attempt to assassinate congressional Republicans and several cop killings, they have also help several violent demonstrations and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

I was looking for parallels and came up with one, the English Civil War. That was fought in the 1640s between the establishment led by King Charles and the Puritans. The King's side represented the establishment. The Puritans have several similarities to the modern Hydra. The Social Justus Warriors draw a lot of their support from campuses. The Puritans drew heavily from apprentices who were in the same age range. In fact, the term "Round Heads" given to the Puritan army came from the short-cropped hair that the apprentices wore. In addition to the apprentices, the Puritans drew a great deal of support from the urban centers while the rest of the countryside was for the King. Look at the 2016 election map by county and you see that the Democrats are all clustered in the cities.

After the end of the English Civil War, a number of veterans felt that the reforms instituted by the Puritan-controlled parliament did not go far enough. They wanted a complete leveling of society to eliminate the rich. They were known as Levellers (along with an even harder-line group called the Diggers). essentially, these were proto-marxists.

The Puritans' approach to religion was very similar to being "woke" today. You were not born to either. Both required an epiphany and there was always the chance that you were not truly converted so you were constantly searching your own conscience and that of those around you for any hints that you were not fully converted.

The English Civil War did not suddenly erupt. The tensions leading to it had been building for a generation or more. Similarly, I expect our current state to continue as a low-level civil war, although a Soros-funded Communist front group announced that the revolution will begin November 4th.

Some of the current hysteria will die down soon. Revolutionary chic is affecting the bottom line of some of the businesses that support it. The NFL and ESPN have seen a major drop in viewership and are reacting. The NFL is considering requiring players to stand for the national anthem and ESPN suspended one of their people who called for a boycott of NFL sponsors over the kneeling protests.

Others are seeing a hit in their bottom line but have not yet taken action. Marvel Comics (which, like ESPN is owned by Disney) has seen a major drop in sales since they replaced most of their long-time characters with women and minorities. Award show ratings are at a major low, probably due to the politics the winners and presenters bring to the show. Late night comics are all fighting over the anti-Trump audience but their ratings are a fraction of what Jay Leno was pulling just a few years ago. Colleges like Missouri and Evergreen which have seen well-publicized protests have had huge drops in enrollment.

Will this be enough? It's impossible to say at this point. The Hydra had a major set-back with the election of Donald Trump. Of all of the candidates, he was the least likely to try to compromise with them. But the next Democratic candidate will be well to the left of Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party has also rid itself of any moderates and now insists on a rigid conformity to the far-left party line. If they win the next few elections then we will see an erosion of civil liberties that will make us nostalgic for President Obama's pen and phone.

But, it's hard to hold on to red-hot rage. Passions are cooling and people are accepting that the status-quo is not going to be overthrown. We went through some of this in the 1960s including calls for violent revolution but it all blew over after a few years.

Columbus Day, NFL Protests and the Unraveling of American Society

Around two hundred years ago a group of influential Americans including Washington Irving decided that we, as a new nation, needed a set of American heroes distinct from the English ones we had inherited. They settled on three illustrious men without whom, America would not have existed: Christopher Columbus, George Washington and Ben Franklin. A few others were added into the mix. Longfellow elevated Paul Revere as well as three of his Pilgrim ancestors but Columbus Washington and Franklin were the big three. Washington and Franklin were well known but Columbus was a much more remote figure. Irving remedied this by writing a biography of Columbus but, despite having access to the largest collection of Columbus-related documents in the world (at that time), he invented most of his history. To Irving, the truth was not as important as having a figure worthy of admiration to unite the country.

Now, 200 years later, the semi-terrorist group Antifa has declared war on Columbus with plans to deface Columbus statues across the country because Columbus is a symbol of white supremacy. Again, the symbolism is more important than the history. This is part of a general campaign from the left to declare symbols of American history to be offensive. This began with the removal of Confederate flags from statehouse grounds because the racist killer Dylan Roof posed with a Confederate flag in some pictures he posted on social media. Things got a little crazy from there with gift shops removing plastic soldiers from gift shops because the gray ones carried a Confederate flag. It moved from that to protests over statues of Confederate generals and went into overdrive after a counter-protestor was killed in August. In the aftermath of that, nearly every statue of a white man has suddenly become suspect.

Then there are the protests at the NFL. This began with a single player refusing to stand for the National Anthem. A few other players followed his lead and more were kneeling during the anthem this year.

The original protest was over the perception that police kill a disproportionate number of blacks but since then it has expanded to include institutional racism, inequality and President Trump. Regardless, the message is that America isn't worth showing respect for. The result is that watching football is now a political action.

All of this is part of a long-term strategy to de-legitimize America. There is to be no shared space that unites us as Americans. Our heroes have been redefined as racists, our institutions have been politicized. Where Washington Irving and his companions tried to unite us, there is now a movement to separate us as much as possible. Some of this is planned, a lot of it is people who are simply following the example of politicizing everything.

Even national tragedies no longer join us. Hillary Clinton didn't wait for the bodies to be identified before tweeting out how we need gun control. When a Bernie supporter started shooting at Republican Congressmen at a basketball practice, the left used it to attack Republican policy.

There is no reasonable accommodation with this movement. It is meant to constantly push. And ground ceded simply becomes the new starting point for the next push.

So we have to hold our ground and continue to celebrate Columbus Day and stand for the National  Anthem.