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June 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

James Clapper, piece of work By Richard Jack Rail

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/james_clapper_piece_of_work.html

Listening to James Clapper, erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, defend his actions during the 2016 presidential campaign can make you squirm with embarrassment, even if you start by supposing he’s telling the truth.

Asked why he didn’t advise the Trump campaign about the threat of Russian infiltration of his campaign that was being investigated by the intel agencies, Clapper averred that it wasn’t his place to do that, that he was reporting to the policymakers.

One may wonder what good is a Director of National Intelligence who doesn’t do something positive in such a situation, like urge the policymakers to inform the Trump campaign if he wasn’t going to do it himself.

Actually, that’s “policymaker,” singular, since Clapper reported directly to the president. Why didn’t Clapper advise the president that the Trump campaign should know about possible Russian infiltration of his staff?

Well, that would have involved actually doing something, taking action, making things happen, staking out a position and pushing it. And that sort of thing is entirely foreign to James Clapper’s character.

Clapper is, and always has been, a professional toady. His act has never been to do anything decisive but rather to look wise, waffle sagaciously and pretend to be informed. To alert Trump to what was going on would have run against the current of Clapper’s Deep State DNA.

A contemptuous shell of a man? Sure. A total waste of taxpayer money for his salary? Certainly. So what? He had his prestige, his sinecure and his fat pension and who are you, anyway?

Clapper and his Deep State should fill you with disgust. He embodies the characterless, soulless, Gollum-type ego that buries itself in the bowels of its host and, like a termite in a log, steadily rots it from within.

Clapper or Brennan, Comey or Mueller, McCabe or Strzok, on and on, their names are legion.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Soros becomes the kiss of death for his own handpicked DA candidates By Monica Showalter

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/soros_becomes_the_kiss_of_death_for_his_own_handpicked_da_candidates.html

Is Soros money becoming the kiss of death for candidates who take it? Sure looks like it, based on the miserable poll performance of Soros’s little pawn in the San Diego district attorney’s race.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

A political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros that has pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign of Genevieve Jones-Wright for district attorney canceled all of its planned television advertising Wednesday for the candidate, just six days before voters go to the polls.

The move by the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, confirmed by two local television station managers, is a blow to the Jones-Wright campaign in the run-up to election day. The PAC had been running saturation-level television advertisements for the past several weeks over county airwaves.

The money-yanking is clearly the result of polls showing that Genevieve Jones-Wright, his 30-something handpicked candidate, is failing miserably in the polls against her opponent, Summer Stephan, another leftist who is no prize but doesn’t take Soros money and probably will enforce the law at least some of the time, when there’s no political risk.

A scientific poll conducted by 10News and the San Diego Union-Tribune shows that Stephan has a 45-25 lead over Jones-Wright.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Muslim Authoritarian Mentality By Amil Imani

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_muslim_authoritarian_mentality.html

For thousands of years, Arabs lived in an authoritarian paternalistic culture. There was always a headman, a chief, a dictator, or a know-it-all who had the answers or resources who had to be followed and obeyed. This “follower mentality” had great heuristic value. It freed the masses from the often arduous task of thinking for themselves, taking responsibility, and tackling problems. It was always easier to let someone else do all those chores and simply follow his directives. This type of mentality was ideal for Muslims who did not want to think for themselves.

Authoritarian paternalistic culture ruled the Arabs for as far back as historical records show. Arabs were always headed by an autocratic man. At times, there were councils, all male and usually advisory in function with no or little executive power. The headman embodied in himself all authority: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive.

The system was a top-down hierarchy, where all directives and decisions were dictated from the top, and all people were to serve the top and at the pleasure of the top.

A father in the family and a father figure of some kind in the larger group always ruled. The man on top, a father or a father figure, was adhered to as the authority, followed, and obeyed.

Islam is custom-made and perfectly suited for people who are accustomed to being treated like children. Being a Muslim is a bargain of sorts. The believer continues to remain in a child mentally while aging. His part of the bargain is the total surrender to Islam. In return, Islam promises to supply him surefire answers as well as a perfect roadmap for this life and guaranteed bliss in the afterlife.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Duke Erodes Liberal Education By Peter Berkowitz

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/02/duke_erodes_liberal_education_137167.html

On May 8, the Duke University student newspaper published a stirring letter addressed to the school community that was co-signed by 101 students and former students. The letter protested the decision of the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy to decline to renew the contract of Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice of public policy and political science, and called on the provost to reverse the decision.

To no avail. On May 23, incoming Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley informed Charney that Provost Sally Kornbluth rejected his appeal.

Duke’s termination of Charney, a productive scholar with wide-ranging interests in ethics and politics who has taught at Duke for 19 years (and with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was an assistant professor), has all the earmarks of faculty and administration acquiescence to the swelling forces of campus intolerance and anti-intellectualism. At the same time, the legions of grateful students who have rallied around Charney show that a reservoir of love for learning survives at Duke — among the young.

“Professor Charney’s teaching style is wonderfully thought-provoking and challenging,” according to the Duke Chronicle letter. In his classes, the students explained, “ideas are vetted and sharpened through rigorous debate and discussion on issues ranging from physician assisted suicide to the legalization of sex work.” Charney treats all opinions equally: “No thought goes unexamined; no assertion goes unchecked.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

OBAMA: “MY ONLY FLAW IS BEING TOO GOOD:

By on June 3rd, 2018

THAT’S LINE FROM A PHILIP ROTH NOVEL….BUT HERE EVEN MAUREEN DOWD CRITICIZES HIS TERMINAL SELF RIGHTEOUSNESS. RSK
Obama – Just Too Good for Us By Maureen Dowd https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/opinion/sunday/obama-ben-rhodes-world-as-it-is.html

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of peak Spock.

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book, “The World as It Is,” Obama asked his aides, “What if we were wrong?”

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.

We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.

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