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January 2018

MOVIES AND TELEVISION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Final Year Reveals the Obama Administration’s Naïvety and Arrogance It sought to avoid conflict but left a bloody trail. By Kyle Smith —

By on January 24th, 2018

In a moment of woeful irony in the Obama-administration documentary The Final Year, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power travels to Cameroon to offer photo-op comfort to families terrorized by Boko Haram — only to have her motorcade kill a seven-year-old boy. The boy had run out into the road to gape at a helicopter pulling security for Power’s team of VIPs. Greg Barker, the director of this fan film, does not depict the horrifying accident and does his best to downplay it: It is discussed while we watch a clip of Power’s convoy moving at a crawl when in fact it was reportedly traveling at over 60 miles an hour when it struck the boy. Despite Barker’s intentions, the handiwork of the Road to Hell Paving Company is obvious. Team Obama, with its let’s-hug-it-out attitude to world conflict, left a bloody trail.

The Final Year, which is playing on a few screens ahead of its debut on HBO in May, has drawn some notice for a five-minute scene set in Power’s apartment on Election Night 2016. She invited the camera crew to film her party with the world’s 37 female ambassadors to toast the inevitable Hillary Clinton landslide, which she feared would happen so quickly that she wouldn’t have time “to milk the soft power dividend of this moment,” as she later told Politico. Power’s fist-pumping as she watches the election returns turns to blanching, but it’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes who has the most amusing reaction to Donald Trump’s victory.

Rhodes twice reassures us that Clinton will win. “I’m sure,” he says with a smirk on a trip to Southeast Asia. Asked later whether a Trump administration might endanger his accomplishments, he says, “I’ve never really considered that he has any opportunity to win the election.” So what does the speechwriter and former aspiring novelist have to say when Trump does in fact win? “I mean, uh, I can’t even [long pause] I can’t, I ca— [long pause] I mean I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words. I don’t know what the words are.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING :Trump’s Midterm Known Unknowns ‘Shy’ Trump voters, a booming economy, consumer confidence, looming investigations, anti-Trump frenzy — all add up to uncertainty in the 2018 elections. Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 24th, 2018

Conventional wisdom and media hopes are now combining to warn us of what is shaping up as a Trump wipeout in the 2018 midterms.

Certainly, presidents with an approval rating below 50 percent usually lose more than 30 seats in the House. That crash would be more than enough to produce a Democratic majority and thus would ensure an impeachment proceeding designed to paralyze the remainder of Trump’s first term.

In the Senate, the Democrats have three times as many seats to defend (and lots of them in Trump-won states). Yet recently they are gaining confidence that they can flip enough races to deadlock or even win the Senate. The now-orthodox narrative about the midterm elections is increasingly hyped by the media as a “blowout” or “tsunami.”

Yet the dilemma is not just that we are ten months out from the election and relative party popularity is already gyrating, but that there are lots of landmark developments in play that we usually do not experience in any midterm election.

The first, of course, is Trump and the polls. No one knows whether the “Trump phenomenon” of 3–5 percent underreporting in the polls is still valid. The Rasmussen poll has Trump at 45 percent, about 5 percent higher than the gold-standard RealClearPolitics average of 40 percent — analogous to the Election Day outlier and often-scoffed-at polls by USC/Los Angeles Times and Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP. Anecdotally, most can attest that colleagues and friends still usually look both ways before whispering, “Wow, Trump is doing great.” It may be a mass phenomenon that, for some, expressing hesitation about Trump or even virtue-signaling about his excesses serves as psychological penance for voting for him.

Conventional wisdom trusts the 40 percent average; by 2016 unorthodox thinking, however, one might argue for the 45 percent outlier. But remember again, we are in surreal, even revolutionary, times when what is certain is now suspect, and what is absolutely impossible is feasible.

No one ever imagined that the take-the-knee NFL protests would have tanked viewership and attendance by over 10 percent and shaken the very foundations of a multibillion-dollar industry. No one ever dreamed that many in the illustrious liberal aparat would be attrited in just days by long-known but suddenly disclosed creepy behavior — John Conyers, Al Franken, Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Ryan Lizza, Charlie Rose, Jann Wenner, and Leon Wieseltier. We had never seen late-night television turn into nonstop political ranting. We have no idea whether comedians’ spiked ratings represent the new normal or have earned a quiet but simmering backlash.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clinton–Obama Emails: The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted New FBI texts highlight a motive to conceal the president’s involvement. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 24th, 2018

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen. The latest jaw-dropping disclosures of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, illustrate this point.

For the moment, I want to put aside the latest controversy — the FBI’s failure to retain five months of text messages between Strzok and Page, those chattiest of star-crossed lovers. Yes, this “glitch” closes our window on a critical time in the Trump-Russia investigation: mid December 2016 through mid May 2017. That is when the bureau and Justice Department were reportedly conducting and renewing (in 90-day intervals) court-approved FISA surveillance that may well have focused on the newly sworn-in president of the United States. (Remember: The bureau’s then-director, James Comey, testified at a March 20 House Intelligence Committee hearing that the investigation was probing possible coordination with Trump’s campaign and Kremlin interference in the election.)

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Party of Saul Alinsky & Its War on Trump Everything the Democrats now do or say is guided by Alinsky’s radical teachings. John Perazzo

By on January 24th, 2018

When Senator Cory Booker delivered his fuming diatribe last week, blasting the “ignorance and bigotry” of President Trump’s “vile and vulgar” reference to “s***hole countries,” it was merely the latest installment in the interminable series of assaults against Trump by Congressional Democrats and virtually every member of the mainstream news media. From the day Trump was elected, the Left’s principal objective has been to ridicule him variously as a deranged buffoon, a demented menace, a traitorous collaborator with the Kremlin, a congenital racist, a fascist, an Islamophobe, a xenophobe, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, and a misogynist. Every day, every hour, brings a new charge.

Not one iota of this has occurred randomly. Every single fragment of this assault against Trump has been meticulously orchestrated and carried out by the Left with undiluted fidelity to the famous blueprint for political warfare that was first laid out several decades ago by the late Saul Alinsky, who posthumously has re-emerged as the Democratic Party’s guiding intellectual light.

Known as the godfather of “community organizing” – a term that serves as a euphemism for fomenting public anger, political hatred, and in some cases, violence – Alinsky was a communist fellow-traveler whose monumental importance to the Democrats is underscored by the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama became devoted disciples of his political creed. He laid out a set of basic tactics designed to help radical activists and politicians destroy their enemies while gaining power for themselves.

Such radicals, said Alinsky, “must first rub raw the resentments of the people”[1] by selecting a particular political adversary and “publicly attack[ing]” him as a “dangerous enemy” of the people.[2] This foe, Alinsky explained, must be a clearly identifiable individual – “a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[3] The chief “personification” in the Left’s cross hairs today is Donald Trump; there isn’t even a close second.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Watching Human Rights Watch The organization has long since ceased to have anything to do with human rights. Bruce Bawer

By on January 24th, 2018

Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.

The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.

The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.

In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Obama Government’s Secret Societies Exposing the anti-Trump conspiracy within the DOJ. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 24th, 2018

A week after the election, groups inside and outside the government, some calling themselves Obama Anonymous, had begun meeting to plan the “resistance” to Trump. Unlike the angry protesters in the streets, this resistance wasn’t a new organization. It consisted of Washington D.C. government lifers.

At the CFPB, there was a group calling itself Dumbledore’s Army. Within the FBI and the DOJ, there was a nameless “secret society”. Its details are being derived from text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok, a disgraced member of Mueller’s team, and his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Previous Strzok texts had spoken of taking out “insurance” against a Trump win. This was all the more significant since Strzok had investigated Hillary and interviewed Flynn. He was a crucial figure in both the investigations of Hillary Clinton and President Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy revealed that the day after Trump won the election, texts between Strzok and Page suggested, “Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.”

Like the CFPB’s Dumbldore’s Army, the reference may have been meant to make the conspiracy seem more lighthearted, but joking names for secret organizations within the government don’t make their dangerously subversive nature a laughing matter. Meanwhile many of the text messages from Strzok and Page have fallen victim to the same technical glitch that claimed Lois Lerner’s emails, Hillary’s emails and the video where Obama’s State Department spokeswoman admitted lying to the media about Iran.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Inky Wretches’ Inky Retches

By on January 24th, 2018

According to members of the Fourth Estate, Donald Trump is a fascist or something close to it. As yet unreported is the charge that he roasts puppies over a slow fire, but given the media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome — a virus especially virulent at the ABC — it is only a question of time.

President Trump’s “fake news” awards last week inspire me to make some Trump Derangement Awards on our local scene. It was only last night (Jan 23), for starters, that the ABC’s $400,000-plus woman Leigh Sales on 7.30 was fawning over Michael Wolff, author of a hatchet-job book on Trump, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside account of the presidency. Sales’ questions were as soft as a week-old puppy’s tummy.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

For heaven’s sake, Ms Sales! The White House says Wolff never got one interview with President Trump. Wolff never claims he did. In a typical obfuscation, he says he has had three hours of conversation with Trump including during the election campaign.

And in terms of the ABC’s impartiality charter, how’s this for a smug, insulting question from Sales about the American President, our most powerful ally in a rapidly-shrinking free world?

LEIGH SALES: How did Trump’s advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do?

It’s almost beyond belief, except that this is indeed the ABC. Trump is such a total moron, Sales suggests, that he’s just a puppet of nameless advisers. Trump himself, Sales imagines, has had nothing to do with turning the US into an energy superpower, driving home the biggest US tax cuts in 30 years, and sending the Dow Jones soaring 30% in the year to date.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can the First Amendment Protect Us from the Ruling Class? By Angelo Codevilla|

By on January 24th, 2018

“Congress shall make no law” restricting the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, or of association. Aside from Christ’s distinction between duties to God and duties to Caesar, the First Amendment’s words are some of the greatest barriers ever erected against tyranny. But James Madison, who wrote them, warned how easily the ever-present temptation to tyrannize overcomes “parchment barriers.”

Until recently, the First Amendment was our Constitution’s least questioned, most treasured part. Today, growing calls for joining the rest of the world in criminalizing speech offensive to society’s most powerful groups remain anathema to most Americans. As the federal government applied the Bill of Rights to the states, the First Amendment was the first that it imposed upon them, in a 1925 Supreme Court decision called Gitlow v. New York. No one exercising government power at any level, no “state actor” may deprive anyone of his First Amendment rights. That’s how it works in theory, anyhow.

Nevertheless, most Americans sense that freedom to engage publicly in religious activity, to express ourselves, to choose with whom to associate (or not), is declining perhaps irreversibly. States, for example, have created “human rights commissions” that penalize businesses for refusing to take part in celebrating homosexuality. Public school employees are fired for praying on school grounds, and even children are punished for doing so. All know that certain opinions or attitudes, even casual remarks, deemed “offensive” by powerful persons preclude, derail, or end careers.

This re-prioritization naturally led to a re-defining of the First Amendment’s objective as ridding America of “discrimination” by private individuals. No one should be surprised that this change of focus, which initially led the courts to disallow laws permitting discrimination by private individuals against what came to be known as “protected classes,” ended in Justice Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court’s majority, damning and well-nigh criminalizing the very motivations of such discrimination. How easily did “Congress shall make no law” become “Congress really must make a law…” !

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Lester Holt sides with Kim Jong-un, mass murderer By John Dietrich

By on January 24th, 2018

Lester Holt’s travels in North Korea have given a favorable view of that dictatorship. This is unfortunate.

NBC’s Lester Holt traveled to North Korea in advance of the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea in order to inform the American public about the situation there. North Korea is possibly one of the most tragic examples of what 21st-century despotism is capable of. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2017 claimed, “North Korea remains one of the most repressive states in the world.”

Holt’s report can be described only as despicable. He follows a long line of Western reporters who have been willing tools of leftist dictators. They were and are accomplices in the mass murder of millions of people. Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty is perhaps the best example of this, as he tried to minimize the impact of Stalin’s policies in Ukraine. These policies led to the deaths of millions of people.

Holt reported from a Potemkin ski resort as apparently happy North Koreans were enjoying their time on the slopes. Holt also interviewed “people on the street.” To everyone’s surprise, they all mimicked the party line. Had he interviewed someone with suicidal tendencies who wanted to tell him the truth, the tape would never have gotten out of the North. Holt claimed, “It’s impossible to know what people on the street really think.”

Holt’s report covering the Olympics has the added benefit of attacking President Trump. It was an opportunity to portray North Korea in a favorable light while accusing the U.S. president of giving an adolescent response to the North Korean dictator’s threats.

In response to Kim Jung-un’s threat Trump tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” This “mine is bigger than yours” technique may sound undiplomatic, but it might just be a language Kim Jong-un understands.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Sinking of the FBI By William F. Marshall

By on January 24th, 2018

J. Edgar Hoover must be turning in his grave at what is happening to his venerable FBI. Then again, given Hoover’s own proclivities to abuse his powers as the director of that agency, perhaps the predicament in which the bureau finds itself is a natural stage of evolution on an arc of governmental hubris.

It’s increasingly clear that the FBI is taking on water at an accelerating rate as new revelations come, fast and furious, in the political scandals engulfing Washington. This week, for example, we see two adolescent-minded senior FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, involved in virtually all aspects of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation and the Donald Trump “Russian collusion” (or is it “obstruction of justice” now?) investigation, acting like hormone-fueled high school lovers, discussing a “secret society” of Trump-haters one day after President Trump’s remarkable election. We learned of this only because two patriotic congressmen, representatives Trey Gowdy and John Ratcliffe, former federal prosecutors both, revealed this stunning exchange to Fox News. Was the “secret society” a tongue-in-cheek reference? Given the mind-boggling behavior of the top echelons at the FBI and DOJ these days, one can’t be too sure.

The keel of the USS Federal Bureau of Investigation is starting to rise out of the water, like the RMS Titanic about 30 minutes after striking the iceberg. One can almost hear the bodies of top law enforcement bureaucrats crashing against each other, like so much china on a dying vessel sinking under the waves, as the embattled organization faces exposure after exposure of truly outrageous and un-American, if not illegal, conduct.

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