RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump made a smart move in visiting the CIA on his first full day on the job, but he and his staff are going to have to raise their game if they want to succeed at governing. This was not a presidential performance.

The visit made sense to repair any misunderstandings from the campaign and transition when Mr. Trump sometimes seemed to attack the entire intelligence community for the leaks that Russia tried to help his campaign. Those leaks were almost certainly put out or authorized by the Obama White House or senior intelligence officials appointed by President Obama. The rank and file didn’t do it.

“I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country towards making us safe, towards making us winners again,” Mr. Trump told employees assembled in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall for those have died in the covert service. “I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job, and we’re going to start winning again and you’re going to be leading the charge.” So far so good.

But Mr. Trump also couldn’t resist turning the event into an extended and self-centered riff about the size of his campaign rallies, the times he’s been on Time magazine’s cover and how the “dishonest” media misreported his inaugural crowds. He all but begged for the political approval of the career CIA employees by suggesting most there had voted for him.

Such defensiveness about his victory and media coverage makes Mr. Trump look small and insecure. It also undermines his words to the CIA employees by suggesting the visit was really about him, not their vital work. The White House is still staffing up, but was it too much to ask National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s staff to write up five or 10 minutes of formal remarks that had something to do with the CIA?

I watched U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on TV in Israel, alternating ‎between Hebrew- and English-speaking channels, so as not to miss any detail or piece of ‎commentary.‎

The buildup to the momentous event had been dramatic. Until late in the race, it ‎appeared that Hillary Clinton was going to strut away with the Democratic nomination ‎and beat Republican candidate John McCain with one hand tied behind her back.‎

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, an unknown senator from Illinois emerged and ‎proceeded to crush her vision of re-entering the White House as its master, not simply first lady.‎

Mrs. Bill Clinton was understandably livid to see the effect that Obama had on her party ‎and its supporters. Not only was he everything she was not: tall, dark, handsome and ‎charismatic; he also outranked her in minority status. She may have had hopes of ‎becoming the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. But he was black.‎

In addition, though Clinton had a political record that could be critiqued — and a spouse ‎whose blatant infidelities led to his impeachment, but not to her divorcing him — Obama ‎possessed a picture-perfect nuclear family and no visible blemishes on his enigmatic past.‎

Both had been Saul Alinskyites in their youth, but Clinton had long since sold her ‎radicalism to the highest bidder, exchanging ideology for financial opportunism and ‎power lust. Obama, on the other hand — considerably younger than his rival — was still in ‎the throes of his late mentor’s teachings. ‎

For Clinton, America’s greatness and abundance were there for exploitation. Obama ‎viewed the country and its institutions as a lump of unappealing clay he was anointed to ‎pummel and remold in his image. His motto of “hope and change” disguised this agenda, ‎but it invigorated a disgruntled public hungry for Utopia. Neither Clinton nor McCain ‎stood a chance.‎

When Obama was sworn in — his hand disturbingly on the Bible whose passages he had ‎spent 20 years hearing in sermons preached by his anti-American, anti-white and anti-‎Semitic pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright — I longed to join in the festivities. ‎

Indeed, it was a truly historic occasion for a country in which segregation was still ‎practiced in my lifetime, to be electing a black president. As cameras zoomed in on Oprah ‎Winfrey weeping tears of joy, I wanted to join her. I wished to be cheering, rather than ‎mourning what I anticipated was going to be a concerted effort to destroy the great ‎United States from within and appease its external enemies to the point of endangering ‎Israel.‎

I am no stranger to protesting, having marched so often in the sixties and seventies that I sometimes felt as if I were chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ” in my sleep. But I have come to think over the years that too much demonstrating can get to be a bad habit, like smoking.

Now I’m not talking here about the Gloria Steinems and Michael Moores, for whom protest is so much a way of life they couldn’t exist without it. Or the Madonnas who, like other entertainment stalwarts, have business reasons for constantly reminding us they are still have their “edge” even as they age, liberally dropping the f-bomb and speculating about bombing the White House in the process.

I’m talking about the rest of us, especially, this weekend, a fair percentage of the women of America who descended on our nation’s capital and elsewhere in impressive numbers.

Excuse me if I don’t get it. What exactly was motivating them?

Oh, right, Donald Trump, that vulgar misogynist who bragged about pu**y grabbing (asterisks to dissociate myself from Madonna, even though I’m aging too). I’m going to skip over the obvious – these same women almost all ignored Bill Clinton actually doing (not just mouthing off about) similar activities in the Oval Office, not to mention on numerous other occasions, some of which we know about and some of which we may not. Further, these women didn’t have much to say — no demonstrations, no marches, maybe a few hashtags — when radical Islamists of various stripes regularly kidnapped large numbers of women (Nigerians, Yazidis, Kurds, etc., etc.) from their homes and took them as sex slaves, often beheading them after they finished raping them. Nor did they even pipe up when honor killings were going on in their own backyard.

I could go on. But those are just, shall we say, a few of the minor inconsistencies mixed with, perhaps, a soupçon of cognitive dissonance. Something more must be motivating these hundreds of thousands of women.

Oh, yes, reproductive rights. Break out your clothes hangers. The Donald is going to bring back the era of backroom abortions

Rubbish.

The idea that Trump, given his life and background, is a social conservative is almost silly. His primary issues were — need I reiterate what must be drilled in all our brains — bringing back jobs, lowering personal and corporate taxes, cutting excessive business and environmental regulations, ending illegal immigration, repealing and replacing Obamacare, rebuilding the military, extreme vetting of immigrants from countries where terrorism is prevalent, an America-first foreign policy (no nation building) and revived infrastructure.

On the campaign trail, the social issues were almost completely ignored. I listened to at least twenty of his speeches (probably a lot more) and can’t recall his mentioning same-sex marriage even once. (He was known to be favorable to it years before Obama and Hillary “evolved” on the issue.)

As for abortion, Donald has evolved toward being pro-life to some extent, but so have, apparently, a majority of Americans. They have shown this by their actions. According to a recent report from the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate in America has decreased precipitously from 29.3 per 1000 women in 1980 to 14.6 in 2014. Whether this steep decline was caused by the advent of advanced sonograms making the emergent human being more visible and palpable in the womb or because of more accessible birth control (probably both), these facts-on-the-ground are far more important than any legislation or judicial ruling. Abortion is gradually disappearing as fewer and fewer want it. It’s hard to imagine Trump expending any political capital to speed up this process, assuming he wanted to and if it were even possible, both of which are highly unlikely.

So back to square one. What was the purpose of Saturday’s demonstrations? None, I think, meaning nothing substantive in the provable sense. They were propaganda. Basically the protests were media and social media ginned-up events intended to continue opposition to the myth, not the reality, of a Trump administration for political purposes. (Some were even claiming he was about to put people in concentration camps.)

The success of the demonstrations in terms of size attests to the power of mutually reinforced paranoia. This paranoia is of course magnified by the extraordinarily fractured nature of our society with almost everyone living inside their own echo chamber with fears building upon themselves, much in the manner of the Salem Witch Trials.

This makes demonstrations to a great degree pointless because the demonstrators make little attempt to reach out beyond the converted and convince their opponents of the rightness of their cause. If fact, they rarely even try. Instead, they parade their “rightness,” their superiority, to impress themselves, as did the myriad women in the pink pudenda beanies Saturday. They are mostly showing off.

Ironically, these women’s marches are strangely behind the times in today’s America and therefore largely irrelevant, though the participants may not realize or acknowledge it. More women have been going to college than men for several years and are just now surpassing them in law school as well. Hillary Clinton may have lost the election but women are well on track to win the war. Within a very few years, historically we may be living in a matriarchy of sorts. Instead of freaking out over an election, these women should relax and enjoy their coming power. It’s manifested all over the Trump administration already in the persons of Kellyanne Conway (she could run for president herself — and win) and Ivanka Trump (so could she).

Imagine Ivanka allowing her father to backpedal on abortion rights. Not happening.

Which leads me to a final point — people who demonstrate all the time should consider they risk morphing into a collective version of the boy who cried wolf. When there’s something really worth protesting, no one believes them anymore.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. Follow him on Twitter @rogerlsimon

JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — Former President Obama declared to staffers and members of the military that “yes we did, yes we can” after taking his last helicopter ride around the Capitol and before departing for California.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump walked the Obamas down the Capitol steps after the inauguration, as is customary, and waved as the now-former first couple took off in the Marine helicopter.

It took a spin around the Washington Monument before heading to Andrews, where Obama quipped that he and Michelle have “really been milking this goodbye thing.”

“Some folks didn’t think we could pull it off. There were those who felt that the institutions of power and privilege in this country were too deeply entrenched,” he said. “And yet, all of you came together in small towns and big cities, a whole bunch of you really young, and you decided to believe. And you knocked on doors and you made phone calls, and you talked to your parents who didn’t know how to pronounce Barack Obama.”

“And you got to know each other. And you went into communities that maybe you’d never even thought about visiting. And met people that on the surface seemed completely different than you — who didn’t look like you or talk like you or watch the same TV programs as you. And yet once you started talking to them, it turned out that you had something in common.”

Obama said his change movement was “infused with a sense of hope,” and his staff and supporters “proved the power of hope.”

“And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you in the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military’s not a thing, it’s a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it,” the former president said.

“As cool as the hardware is, and we’ve got cool hardware, as cool as the machines as weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people, some of them a lot closer to Malia’s age than mine or Michelle’s. Well, the same thing’s true for our democracy. Our democracy’s not the buildings, it’s not the monuments, it’s you being willing to work to make things better and being willing to listen to each other and argue with each other and come together and knock on doors and make phone calls and treat people with respect.”

We last saw these women – liberal, largely white, and middle- or upper-middle-class – sobbing their eyes out in the early morning hours of November 9. Now here they are again in the streets of D.C., channeling Lena Dunham – not posing for the camera while squatting on a toilet bowl eating cake, but close, giving everybody the finger while chanting obscene, filthy slogans and screaming about how powerful they are and how they’re not going away.

Well, they’re not that powerful, because otherwise they would have carried the election for Hillary. And they certainly aren’t tough – not tough like the many male police officers who make it safe for them to run this way, and that in the streets of our nation’s capital, in order to pretend they are. Not tough like the really tough women either running or helping to run American farms and ranches and an endless variety of other endeavors across this land. Not tough like my immigrant grandmother, who, if she were alive today, would likely be arrested for washing their mouths out with Kirkman’s soap. Not tough like my tough wife, my tough daughter, and my tough granddaughter, who keep kicking my can down the road. Not tough as Mother Teresa was tough or Margaret Thatcher or Joan of Arc was tough, or, God bless her soul, Edith Cavell.

And certainly not tough like “Mad Dog” Mattis, who might just save their sorry butts from some pretty bad hombres even less impressed with them than we should be.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD. See it here. He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here; and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.

The plagiarism allegations CNN leveled against conservative commentator Monica Crowley were part of a “political hit job,” according to a publishing law attorney with expertise in plagiarism cases.

Crowley, a popular TV pundit and Washington Times editor who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, previously worked for former President Richard Nixon years after he resigned his office.

Trump’s transition team stood by Crowley when the controversy erupted, stating, “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”

Crowley has suffered mightily because of the allegations. President-elect Donald Trump had asked her to become a national security spokeswoman but she backed out of the job offer. Her publisher has withdrawn one of her books, and critics of Crowley have raised the possibility that Columbia University could revoke her doctoral degree. The university hasn’t weighed in on the matter publicly.

It is significant that CNN’s smear vehicle is written by Andrew Kaczynski, formerly of BuzzFeed, the cat video-loving so-called media outlet run by Ben Smith, a gossip-loving left-wing former Politico reporter. Kaczynski quit BuzzFeed to join CNN in October.

The attorney who has weighed in on this case is Lynn Chu, a member of the New York State Bar who earned her juris doctor degree from the University of Chicago in 1982.

In a report this week about Crowley’s alleged plagiarism, Chu establishes her expertise by explaining that she has “over 30 years of experience in the field of publishing and publishing law.” She notes that she has “often reviewed literary materials with an eye to issues of quality and … [is] well familiar with sourcing and attribution standards in both university press and commercial publishing.”

Chu said she looked at Crowley’s work and “found CNN’s splashy ‘plagiarism’ accusation to be ill-supported—a heavily exaggerated, political hit job.”

The “CNN list [or plagiarized passages] was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.”

Chu also revealed that CNN had deliberately misrepresented evidence. In two dozen of the supposed examples of plagiarism cited by the cable TV network, “CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source,” she said.

“I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall,” Chu said. There were “relatively few examples of unsourced copying” that should simply “be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.”

At first glance, the case CNN’s Kaczynski makes against Crowley in his Jan. 7 article seems damning.

Kaczynski writes:

The review of Crowley’s June 2012 book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” found upwards of 50 examples of plagiarism from numerous sources, including the copying with minor changes of news articles, other columnists, think tanks, and Wikipedia. The New York Times bestseller, published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside Books, contains no notes or bibliography.

He continues:

Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.

Crowley also lifted word-for-word phrases from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, and Yahoo News.

But closer examination reveals Kaczynski to be at best a hairsplitter, and at worst, a liar.

Do black lives matter?

Hispanic lives? Muslim lives? Gay lives? Women’s lives?

Black lives matter – to me, at least – if blacks adhere to reason, lead productive, non-parasitical lives, do not demand the unearned, and, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., if blacks judge others, blacks, whites, Asians, Arabs, Hispanics, Muslims (not actually a “race,” just as Islam is not a “race,” either), Mexicans, Cubans, and so on, that is, judge an individual by the content of his character. This is how I expect to be judged, and how I judge others. I otherwise place no importance on a person’s color.

But this is not what Black Lives Matter (BLM) means. BLM is grounded on race and a hatred for whites and the police. The hatred is so severe that BLM has declared war on the police. It is a terrorist organization, whether or not the government recognizes it as one. It has declared war on the police to effect “change” in how the police handle blacks in their encounters. Often it is black policemen who shoot or “mistreat” violent blacks in the course of self-defense, and these policemen have also been deemed “fair targets” by BLM for murder and harassment. Their “blackness” does not exempt them from murder.

It is a black subculture, perpetuated by the government and the welfare state, which rejects civilization, which BLM perceives as an oppressor. Although what blacks as a “collective” would replace it with has never been answered except for a “racial supremacy of blacks.” In that respect it is similar to Islam’s goal of dominating every country in the world.

Readers should be reminded that nothing like Locke’s Two Treatises of Government ever came out of the Congo or Egypt or the Sub-Sahara. Whatever there is to value in the West that serves as a benchmark of life-affirming progress was produced in the “lily-white” north – across the Mediterranean.

Some historians and cultural writers contend that climate played a big role in the development or Western civilization, so that blacks living in deserts or in fetid, smothering jungles were at a disadvantage to improve agriculture or invent steam engines and even to study the skies.

This is not an endorsement of the racist notion (advanced by creatures like the Aryan Nation and others) that whites are genetically superior to blacks or any other race.

Left out of the narrative is the role of reason.

This will not be the central subject of this column, but I am repelled by today’s black subculture. It is anti-reason, anti-esthetics, anti-everything that comports with a civilized society, and is a belligerent expression of self-hatred projected onto the “white race.” Today’s black “entertainers” are not of the caliber of past black singers and musicians as Cab Calloway and Louis
Armstrong and Billy Holiday.

For once, Donald Trump was guilty of understatement. “Our airports are like from a Third World country,” he said during a debate year. It’s a common complaint but inaccurate: Comparing America’s airports with the Third World’s is unfair to the Third World.

Even in the poorest countries, a traveler can expect to reach the terminal by car. At New York’s LaGuardia Airport, traffic is so nightmarish that passengers jump from cabs along the highway and schlep their bags on foot. In the Third World, people typically fly out of their home city. At Newark Airport, the landing fees are so high that New Jerseyans often drive hours to Philadelphia to find affordable fares.

The highest-ranked American airport on the list of the world’s top 100, as determined by the Passengers Choice Awards, is Denver—at 28. Atlanta comes in at 43, Dallas at 58, Los Angeles at 91.

Why do American passengers pay so much to get so little? Because their airports, by global standards, are terribly managed.

Cities from London to Buenos Aires have sold or leased their airports to private companies. To make a profit, these firms must hold down costs while enticing customers with lots of flights, competitive fares and appealing terminals. The firm that manages London’s Heathrow, currently eighth in the international ranking, was so intent on attracting passengers that it built a nonstop express train to the city’s center. It’s also seeking to add another runway, as is the rival firm running Gatwick Airport.

American airports are typically run by politicians in conjunction with the dominant airlines, which help finance the terminals in return for long-term leases on gates and facilities. The airlines use their control to keep out competitors; the politicians use their share of the revenue to reward unionized airport workers. No one puts the passenger first.

New York City’s problems are even worse. All three of the major airports serving the city are under the control of a single agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Because the governors of those two states appoint the Port Authority’s executives and board, no single politician ever gets blamed.

Freed of competition, the Port Authority spends $156,000 in wages and benefits per worker. It also diverts profits from the airports to other projects, meaning passengers’ money isn’t reinvested in better terminals or additional runways. Federal law generally requires that airport revenues be spent on aviation, but that statute, passed in 1982, contains a grandfather provision excluding the Port Authority.

That was fast. Less than an hour after President Trump’s swearing in, his Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the Obama Administration’s last-minute gift to the housing lobby to cut mortgage insurance rates.

Former Secretary Julian Castro announced last week that HUD would lower by 0.25% what the Federal Housing Administration charges on a risky mortgage backed by taxpayers. On loans exceeding $625,000, the premium cut would have been 0.45%. The reductions were scheduled to take effect next Friday.

Mr. Castro promoted the reductions as a way to lower costs for homeowners as he went out the door, but the move was a classic example of the clout of the housing lobby. Realtors, home builders and “fair-housing” advocates have been lobbying for the cut as interest rates begin to rise. They hoped the lower cost of this government subsidy would help them originate more mortgages. Mr. Castro, who has future political ambitions, also didn’t mind doing a favor for potential campaign donors.

The suspension of the premium cut is good government and good for taxpayers. HUD said the suspension is indefinite, which will give the new Trump team time to inspect the FHA’s books and make its own decision. Mr. Trump’s nominee as HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, isn’t even on the job and might not be for a while if Democrats continue to stonewall confirmation votes.

FHA has become a giant guarantor of mortgages with too little scrutiny. Homeowners can score FHA mortgage insurance with a credit rating as low as 580 and a mere 3.5% down payment. When home prices are rising, too few people pay attention when politicians put taxpayers more at risk. But we learned from hard experience in the previous decade that these policies can come back to haunt.

Washington’s housing-industrial complex may squawk, but the new Administration has sent the right message in reversing a bad Obama decision.

Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.

We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.

Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come. We will face challenges, we will confront hardships, but we will get the job done.

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent. Thank you.

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you.

It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.