RUTHFULLY YOURS

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Apart from the Cubs winning the World Series, the biggest news of the month was Donald Trump winning the Presidency.

The surprise was not that Republicans won, the surprise was that the Presidential race was as close as it was. A year and a half ago, when the race began to heat up, it was apparent, despite Mr. Obama’s personal popularity, that many of his policies were not working. The economy was sputtering along at the slowest growth rate in the post-War period. Federal debt had doubled to just under $20 trillion, while unfunded liabilities (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc.) had risen from $56 trillion to an estimated $100 trillion in 2016. Debt and entitlement obligations have compounded at 9% over the past eight years. GDP (the nation’s income) has compounded at two percent. When debt expands faster than income, bad things happen. Racial animosities have intensified. Internationally, Russia and China were in ascendancy and the Middle East in shambles. Islamic terrorism showed no signs of abating. Democrats were set on crowning an ethically challenged woman, an individual who epitomized a corrupt Washington establishment and a notoriously poor campaigner to boot. It was expected to be a “Republican year.” Eighteen months later the situation had not improved. What an opportunity for Republicans!

But, in nominating Mr. Trump – the most non-political Presidential nominee ever – Republicans almost blew it. While Trump appealed to vast numbers of working Americans who no longer felt they had access to the American dream, his character was alien to what many people thought proper for a President. But we underestimated the degree of estrangement so many felt toward a government that had practiced identity politics, favored a few special interests and had grown distant from a majority of the American people. Trump’s instincts were more acutely attuned than those of political professionals. He did win, and Republicans held the Senate and the House. Additionally, they control 33 governorships and 32 State Legislatures. While the country remains split, his support was far broader than most Democrats would have one believe. The great irony is that it may take a strong and independent leader to re-energize Congress into resuming its traditional role, as a body that is supposed to check excesses in the Executive, and to work through the ideological posturing that sometimes holds government hostage. Since winning, Mr. Trump’s policy determinants have begun to take shape. The most consequential response – apart from protesters and cries of denial – has been a rise in optimism: Since November 7, the DJIA has risen 4.7%, the U.S. Dollar is up 3.9% and the University of Michigan Consumer Index rose from 87.2 in October to 93.8 in November. It is the prospect of tax and regulatory reform that has the juices flowing.

Elections are partisan. Candidates, with very rare exceptions, represent their party’s divergent issues on foreign and domestic policies and vow that if elected they will implement the issues they ran on.

Senator Schumer of New York, a liberal prototype, just won re-election, became Minority Leader and was off and running by threatening President elect Trump with “severe vetting” of all his Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments, and vowed to block all efforts to repeal Obamacare. He then had the effrontery to claim that Trump won on Democratic party issues. (Huh?) He pledged that Democrats will not compromise with Trump “for the sake of working with him.”

The Democrats were ecstatic even after their humiliation at the polls. They crowed that Schumer would “Reid” Trump the riot act, restore unity to his traumatized party, and salvage much of the Obama legacy and strategize for the elections of 2018.

His advocates got what they voted for.

Trump’s response? “I have always had a good relationship with Chuck Schumer. He is far smarter than Harry R and has the ability to get things done. Good news!”

And now the buzz is that Romney whose rant against candidate Trump was epic, and Corker who was more tepid than cold to the Iran deal, and Petreaus whose faulty zipper led to disclosing classified information are on the “short lists” for major cabinet appointments.

So far it is only buzz but my eagle-eyed friend and observer Janet Levy Ross sends me daily notes with troubling information about the President elect’s putative appointments.

There is an old saw, “you gotta dance with the one that brung you.” I hope Donald Trump will avoid the pitfall of reaching across the aisle to partisan Democrats and RINOs and heed the advice of Kellyanne Conway who ” brung” him to victory rsk

In anticipation of a Trump loss, Hillary Clinton and her cohorts professed that anything other than graceful acceptance of the loss would “threaten democracy.” But now that Trump has won, the left has hypocritically become unhinged. After violent protests, petitions to eradicate the electoral college, and coddling college age students to miss class, delay exams and obtain psychotherapy to deal with the “trauma” of the election results, liberal political elites are in fear that the left will at last, calm down and accept the results. They cannot accept such complacency.

Democrats got defeated in a sweep across the nation, with Republicans winning over two thirds of the governorships and making a record number of wins in state legislatures, 32 of which will have Republican control in both of their legislative chambers. But this isn’t enough to convince far leftists like Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein, that those who are upset by the results should just get a grip and learn to accept them. After all, every election, there is a winner and a loser. That’s our system. Instead, Stein is demanding recounts in several key blue states that have swung in favor of Trump this year. In order for the results to yield a different outcome, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan would all have to be overturned. That is not going to happen. Despite Stein’s efforts, the result is a foregone conclusion: Trump will still be President.

This is how it works: if the states are within a very small margin of error, the recounts in some states are automatic and free (meaning the candidates do not have to pay for a recount). That did not happen in any of the states at issue. Therefore, Jill Stein, who is obviously not in the running no matter what, had to file a lawsuit in Wisconsin to get the recount and pay for it herself. The legal basis on which she stated the recount should proceed was something to the effect of “possible hacking” into the machines. Unfortunately, this has been granted and so will be recounted. Stein has raised at this point $6.5 million dollars to go toward the recounts. She is also requesting recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

When the election results are announced on election night, that’s really just a “projection.” The actual results have to be certified by the Secretary of State of each State by December 13th of this year. The recount effort is facing a tight deadline, and now there is a chance that it will not be done on time. Jill Stein has further now asked that the votes be counted by hand which would obviously delay the certification even longer. Wisconsin has refused, saying that Jill Stein would have to get a court order for this. She has now sued to pursue this.

In the meantime, let me say that the machines are not hooked up to the internet so the chances that they were “hacked” (by whom — Russia?) are approximately zero. But she’s stated that she’s very concerned about voter “integrity”. Ironically, in her quest to maintain this “integrity”, be advised that there are not going to be any challenges to the legitimacy of any of the votes. In other words — and this is important — they are not checking for voter fraud, for dead people’s votes, illegal immigrants’ votes, voting dogs, or duplicate votes — they are simply recounting the votes to make sure they counted right the first time. (How’s that for a waste of time and money?) And Hillary, Miss “We owe Trump an open mind,” has now made a decision to have her campaign participate in the recount challenge.

After years of studiously ignoring it, dismissing it, whitewashing it, excusing it and even justifying it, progressives have rediscovered anti-Semitism. With this amazing archeological find the intrepid Indiana Jones’ of the left dug up anti-Semitism, brushed it off and put it up on the shelf right behind Islamophobia, transphobia, racism, homophobia and sexism (in that order of importance).

Anti-Semitism on the left has been abruptly transformed from an excuse that Jews use to silence discussion about whether the Jewish State should be nuked or merely boycotted, to an issue worthy of concern. Assorted liberal celebrities with Jewish last names have surfaced to voice amazement that they had “not expected to see anti-Semitism return in my lifetime.”

As if anti-Semitism had been vacationing in the Alps until it came to their attention. The truth is that anti-Semitism never went anywhere. The left just endorsed it. And therefore it ceased to be a bad thing.

There was plenty of anti-Semitism to find even on the local college campus. Almost every synagogue I have been to in the past few months has armed guards outside giving visitors the TSA treatment. Jews are fleeing to America, Canada and Israel from major European cities because of Muslim persecution. The largest Jewish population in the world faces an endless war against a genocidal ideology that not only calls for their extermination, but works toward it, from suicide bombers to nuclear weapons.

But there is a progressive gentleman’s agreement not to discuss that real wave of anti-Semitism which has cost thousands of Jewish lives and ethnically cleansed cities because of the left’s complicity in it.

The recent interest in anti-Semitism across editorial pages and social media carefully avoids discussing the anti-Semitic past of Keith Ellison, progressive favorite for DNC chair, and his time with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam cult whose ugly views and hatred he had defended. The left isn’t interested in Muslim anti-Semitism. It is greatly interested in discussing and promoting a small group of loathsome neo-Nazi trolls who recently held a conference in D.C. attended by a few hundred of history’s losers.

These Twitter troll babies cling to Trump’s legs almost as eagerly as he tries to shake them off. The “Hail Trump” stunt was a calculated gesture based on the certain knowledge that the media will only give their movement publicity if they try to smear Trump by associating him with their failed movement.

Despite the media’s lies, they’re not President-elect Trump’s allies, but his needy desperate stalkers.

The mix of politics and culture is far too complex to be predictable. Even the best-laid political plans can lead to unintended consequences, both good and bad — what we sometimes call irony, nemesis, or karma.

Take the election of 2008, which ushered Barack Obama and the Democrats into absolute control of the presidency, House, and Senate, also generating popular goodwill over Obama’s landmark candidacy.

Instead of ensuring a heralded generation of Democratic rule, Obama alienated both friends and foes almost immediately. He rammed through the unworkable Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. He prevaricated about Obamacare’s costs and savings. Huge budget deficits followed. Racial polarization ensued. Apologies abroad on behalf of America proved a national turnoff.

By the final pushback of 2016, the Obama administration had proven to be a rare gift to the Republican party. The GOP now controls the presidency, Congress, governorships, and state legislatures to a degree not seen since the 1920s. “Hope and change” ebullition in 2008 brought the Republicans salvation — and the Democrats countless disasters.

The Republican establishment hated Donald Trump. So did the conservative media. His unorthodox positions on trade, immigration, and entitlements alienated many. His vulgarity turned off even more. Pundits warned that he had brought civil war and ruin to the Republican party.

But instead of ruin, Trump delivered to the Republicans their most astounding political edge in nearly a century. The candidate who was most despised by the party unified it in a way no other nominee could have.

Obama proved Israel’s best friend — even though that was never his intention. By simultaneously alienating Israel and the Sunni moderates in Jordan and Egypt, and by warming up to the Muslim Brotherhood, appeasing Iran, and issuing empty red lines to the Assad regime in Syria, Obama infuriated but also united the entire so-called moderate Middle East.

The result was that Arab nations suddenly no longer saw Israel as an existential threat. Instead, it was seen as similarly shunned by the U.S. — and as the only military power capable of standing up to the soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy in Iran that hates Sunni Arabs and Israelis alike.

Today, Israel is in the historic position of being courted by its former enemies, as foreign fuel importers line up to buy its huge, newly discovered deposits of natural gas. As the Arab Spring and the Islamic State destroyed neighboring nations, Israel’s democracy and free market appeared as an even stronger beacon in the storm.

Almost every major initiative that Obama pushed has largely failed. Obamacare is a mess. He nearly doubled the national debt in eight years. Economic growth is at its slowest in decades. The reset with Russia, the Asian pivot, abruptly leaving Iraq, discounting the Islamic State, red lines in Syria, the Iran deal — all proved foreign-policy disasters.

Yet Obama has been quiet about one of the greatest economic revolutions in American history, one that has kept the U.S. economy afloat: a radical transformation from crippling energy dependency to veritable fossil-fuel independence. The United States has become the world’s greatest combined producer of coal, natural gas, and oil. It is poised to be an energy exporter to much of the world.

The revolution in fracking and horizontal drilling has brought in much-needed federal revenue, increased jobs, weakened Russia and our OPEC rivals, and given trillions of dollars in fuel savings to American consumers.

Yet Obama opposed the energy revolution at every step. He radically curtailed the leasing of federal lands for new drilling, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, and subsidized inefficient and often crony-capitalist wind and solar projects. Nonetheless, Obama’s eventual failure to stop new drilling ended up his one success.

Hillary Clinton, in her presidential bid, did everything by the playbook — and therefore her campaign went catastrophically wrong. Her campaign raised more than $1 billion. She ran far more ads than did Trump. She won over the sycophantic press. She got all the celebrity endorsements. She united the Democratic party.

Logically, Clinton should have won. The media worked hand in glove with her campaign. Her ground game and voter registration drives made Trump’s look pathetic.

Yet all that money, press, and orthodoxy only confirmed suspicions that Clinton was a slick but wooden candidate. She became so scripted that even her Twitter feed was composed by a committee.

The more she followed her boring narrative, the more she made the amateur Trump seem authentic and energized in comparison. Doing everything right ended up for Hillary as doing everything wrong — and ensured the greatest upset in American political history.

The ancient Greeks taught us that arrogance brings payback, that nothing is sure in a fickle universe, that none of us can be judged successful and happy until we die, and that moderation and humility alone protect us from own darker sides.

In 2016, what could never have happened usually did.

Yesterday (11/29/16), in an essay published at Pajamas Media, I urged POETUS Trump not to name either Generals Petraeus or Mattis to his cabinet, based upon the proven failure of the see-no-real-Islam COIN doctrine these men concocted, and implemented in Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Today (11/30/16), M.G. Oprea, writing at The Federalist, gushes, in her headline, that General James Mattis, who remains under serious consideration for Secretary of Defense by POETUS Trump, “Could Bust Our Deathly Political Correctness About Islam.” Ms. Oprea then proceeds to make a factually-challenged distinction between the Islam of her title, and “Islamism,” deeming the latter “political Islam,” a basic error given the designed, intractably political nature of Islam, and its quintessence, the Sharia. Notwithstanding this erroneous conception, she continues apace linking to a brief extract from a Heritage Foundation speech General Mattis gave last year (2015) which also alludes to “political Islam,” and “whether it is in America’s best interest.”

Mattis elaborated on these remarks during a March 2015 extended interview with Peter Robinson, which included the same “political Islam” comment, prefaced by the General’s more revealing observations on the alleged “root” of Islam’s—not Islamism’s—“problem.”

The problem with Islam goes back to the days of “The Prophet” [note: Mattis’s reverent usage]…when he dies and it splits into two halves and at that point they’ve got an internal war…that’s kept waxing and waning over the years…between the Sunni and the Shia…obviously it’s in a waxing phase

Thus Mattis’s formulation of Islam’s central “problem” ignores nearly 14 centuries of brutal, often genocidal jihad war—initiated by Muhammad, Islam’s prototype jihadist—against non-Muslims, ongoing to this day, which included decimation of Iraq’s residual Assyrian Christian population, during the General’s own tenure. Mattis essentially regurgitates the Muslim apologetic narrative which rivets on the alleged “breach of Islam’s political innocence”—the internecine struggle which punctuated Muhammad’s succession, including the assassinations of three of the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who followed Muhammad, and the ensuing violent Sunni-Shiite sectarian carnage after Caliph Ali’s killing, which persists to this day.

Despite reflexive mainstream media contempt for the practice, on the campaign trail, President-elect Trump frequently invoked iconic U.S. World War II Generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to “emphasize the need to strengthen the U.S. military, talk less and do more to protect America.”

Mr. Trump, albeit unfortunately, in somewhat mangled fashion, also referenced MacArthur/Patton era predecessor General Pershing’s successful early 20th century campaign against the Filipino Moro’s jihad “insurgency.” The irrefragable truth which our president-elect inartfully alluded to was that Pershing “materially reduced” Moro jihadist attacks in the rural Philippines (~1911), employing, as described in Pershing’s autobiographical account:

[A] practice that Mohammedans held in abhorrence … The bodies [of slain jihadists] were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would be assassins.

Retired Army Major General Jerry Curry, who served as both President Carter’s deputy assistant defense secretary, and acting press secretary to the secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, writing August 5, 2016, after the GOP convention, opined on the Trump-Patton connection:

Mr. Trump has more than the normal amount of fire in his belly. Like General Patton, he is not happy unless he is fighting and winning. The American people deserve to be led by someone like him. It is time the political elites in Washington realized this and subordinated themselves to the will of the American people.

According to military historian Rick Atkinson, a young George Patton “caught the eye” of General Pershing during the 1916 U.S. Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa, Pershing declaring, “This Patton boy! He’s a real fighter.” Patton, the consummate “fighter” and “winner,” having sojourned in North Africa, also shared his former commander Pershing’s unbowdlerized early to mid-20th century American wisdom about Islam, observing:

One cannot but ponder the question: What if the Arabs had been Christians? To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab [Muslims]. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. Here, I think, is some text for an eloquent sermon on the virtues of Christianity.

Tragically, these informed, experience-based understandings shared by Generals Pershing and Patton have been replaced with the self-delusive (and self-destructive) see-no-real-jihad/Sharia-based Islam “COIN” Counterinsurgency doctrine, jointly “catalyzed” — and evangelized — by two men President-elect Trump is considering in earnest for his cabinet: Generals Mattis and Petraeus.

From the drama over Donald Trump’s cabinet you’d think the only position in government is Secretary of State. Yet Mr. Trump will need advice elsewhere, not least in taming the regulatory state. Newt Gingrich said he won’t serve in a Trump cabinet but would like to contribute. How about tapping the former House Speaker to lead a Gingrich Commission to modernize and shrink the federal government?

The models for this project would be the Hoover Commissions of the 1940s and early 1950s. President Harry Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover to look for ways to streamline government in 1947, and Dwight Eisenhower did it again in 1953, and about 70% of the proposals were adopted in the two Administrations. Congress combined several agencies into what is now the General Services Administration, which reduced paperwork and federal procurement costs.

There’s also the 1980s Grace Commission, which made nearly 2,500 recommendations on everything from farm-credit rules to Pentagon hardware. The Grace Commission accomplished less than its predecessors thanks to a Democratic Congress, but it provoked a public debate about the role of government.

A Gingrich Commission would have an opening for greater progress with a GOP White House and Congress. There’s always a chance that the effervescent Mr. Gingrich would careen off course by proposing a military base on the moon. But he talks all the time about updating government for the 21st century, and he published a book on “winning the future” that covers everything from education to balancing the federal budget. This would be a chance to do it.

The feds over the decades have piled program atop program regardless of results, and a commission could highlight failures and duplications. Unlike previous eras, much of the work has already been done by think tanks or other commissions. The commission could work fairly rapidly, perhaps in a few months.

For example: Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda has identified some 80 welfare programs run by 13 federal agencies, and inevitably many overlap in benefits and eligibility. That seems ripe for a closer look. President-elect Trump has singled out civil-service reform as a priority, and Paul Light of New York University has suggested ideas on these pages that the Gingrich Commission could review.

Over the next year Congress and the new Administration will be preoccupied with daily squalls and the rough and tumble of passing legislation. There’s no time for research. A Gingrich Commission could do that work and serve up ideas to plug into the budget over the next two years and beyond. Government is at its lowest standing with Americans in decades, so even progressives should support an effort that might improve its functioning and lay the basis for more public confidence.