#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?