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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Trump May Herald a New Political Order Seldom does a presidential election mark a permanent shift. The last time it happened was 1932. By John Steele Gordon

For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.

Denied the presidency in 1824 by what he called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson swept to a landslide four years later. He was the first president from west of the Appalachians—indeed, the first from anywhere other than Virginia or Massachusetts. Born dirt-poor, Jackson was also the first president to rise to affluence solely by his own effort.

It soon became clear that the country had entered a new political era. “Jacksonian democracy” moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.

Jackson created the modern Democratic Party, and the intense opposition to his policies coalesced into the Whig Party, establishing the two-party norm that prevails to this day. No wonder the great 19th-century American historian George Bancroft considered Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers.

The next great shift came with Abraham Lincoln. By the 1850s, slavery had become the dominant issue in American politics. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an expressly abolitionist party, grew rapidly as the Whigs collapsed. When Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the presidency in 1860, the Union quickly came apart. South Carolina seceded barely a month after the election. Six more states were gone by Feb. 1, 1861, with a month still to go before Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration.

It would take the greatest war in American history to reunite the country. By the time the Civil War was over, the nation had been transformed. The South, impoverished and politically crippled, would be effectively a Third World country inside a First World one for 100 years. The North, with its rapidly expanding industry and growing population, was politically dominant. More than half the antebellum presidents had been Southern. In the century after the war ended, only two Southerners were elected to the White House: Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native who made his career in New Jersey, and Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson.

Presidential elections in the decades after the Civil War tended to be close. Grover Cleveland barely beat James G. Blaine in 1884. Four years later, Cleveland earned a popular-vote plurality while losing to Benjamin Harrison. In an 1892 rematch, Cleveland narrowly beat Harrison, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms.

But William McKinley’s decisive victory in 1896 marked the dawn of an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than a generation. McKinley ran on a platform of “Sound Money, Protection, and Prosperity,” a doctrine that suited the interests of the nation’s fast-rising affluent classes. His opponent, the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, was one of the great orators of American politics. Bryan railed against the gold standard and called for an inflationary monetary policy, which would have benefited debtors, including most farmers in the West and South.

Hillary’s E-mails and the Justice Department The DOJ Inspector General’s review will focus on the FBI, not DOJ. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey’s public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign.

These were the three highly unusual announcements describing the status of the investigation in which no charges were filed: (1) the detailed presentation on July 5 of: the evidence uncovered against Hillary Clinton, a legal analysis of the applicable criminal statute, Comey’s determination that an indictment was not warranted, and his opinion that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with his assessment; (2) the October 28 letter to Congress indicating that the Clinton e-mails case was being reopened owing to newly discovered evidence (derived from the separate investigation of disgraced former representative Anthony Weiner [D., N.Y.], and specifically from a computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin); and, finally, (3) the announcement on November 6 – virtually the eve of the election – reaffirming Comey’s decision (announced July 5) not to seek an indictment.

It is undoubtedly appropriate for Michael Horowitz, DOJ’s inspector general, to consider whether these actions departed from law-enforcement protocols – as I have previously explained. But it is worth noting what the IG will not be reviewing: the Justice Department’s conduct.

The IG’s press release makes no mention of the Justice Department’s decision not to open a grand-jury investigation, despite significant concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing – the decision that deprived the FBI of the use of subpoenas to compel the production of evidence. Neither will the IG be reviewing the multiple irregular immunity agreements granted by the Justice Department in a case in which no criminal charges were filed, including agreements that reportedly called for the destruction of evidence (laptop computers of top Clinton aides) after a strangely limited examination of their potentially incriminating contents.

There will similarly be no inquiry into why the Justice Department allowed subjects of the investigation (who had been granted immunity from prosecution) to appear as lawyers for the main subject of the investigation – despite ethical and statutory prohibitions on such conduct. Nor, evidently, will the IG be probing why the attorney general furtively met with the spouse of the main subject of the investigation – the spouse who just happens to be the president who launched the attorney general to national prominence by appointing her as a district U.S. attorney in the Nineties – on an airport tarmac just days before Mrs. Clinton submitted to a perfunctory FBI interview, after which came Comey’s announcement that charges would not be filed.

Immigration Failures vs. Americans How law enforcement failures undermine our citizen’s civil rights. Michael Cutler

Immigration anarchists have repeatedly drawn false analogies between their efforts to block the enforcement of immigration laws and the heroic action of those whose hard-fought efforts for decades provided black Americans with civil rights, but at great cost.

These anarchists emulate Jimmy Carter, creator of the Orwellian term ‘Undocumented Immigrant’ by referring to advocates for fair and effective immigration law enforcement as being “Anti-Immigrant.” This despicable tactic is now being used to falsely attack Senator Jeff Sessions, the nominee for Attorney General, accuse his support for such effective enforcement of our immigration laws as running contrary to civil rights and being against immigrants.

These anarchists refuse to concede what should be obvious, while aliens illegally present in the United States are entitled to human rights and due process, they are not entitled to broad civil rights protections. It is an outrageous contradiction in concepts to claim that aliens whose mere presence represents a violation of law should be provided with opportunities equal to those provided to American citizens and lawful immigrants.

In reality, immigration anarchists are, themselves, responsible for undermining the civil rights of Americans, particularly American minorities who suffer the greatest harm because of the failures of our government to enforce the immigration laws. Those immigration anarchists also are responsible for undermining the civil rights of lawful immigrants.

For the sake of clarity and to prevent any potential misunderstandings, illegal aliens, not unlike others, are entitled to human rights and are properly entitled to due process when accused of committing crimes. There are two reasons why due process must be devoid of consideration as to the immigration status of the accused. First of all, it is a matter of fairness and justice.

Creating a lower standard for convicting illegal aliens for committing crimes would undermine the judicial system.

Additionally, unscrupulous prosecutors who simply wanted a “quick kill” would be encouraged to seek the conviction of illegal aliens who did not actually commit the crime. This is immoral and unjust. Secondly, under such circumstances, law enforcement authorities would stop looking for the actual criminal who would therefore remain at large and continue to pose a threat.

Civil rights laws were initially enacted to address the wrongs visited upon black Americans beginning with slavery and then segregation.

Today those laws are focused on providing citizens, irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity or orientation, with equal protection under our laws and equal opportunities, thereby enabling them to be full participants in the communities where they live and throughout our nation.

The Inauguration War The Left prepares its counter-attack on American democracy. January 13, 2017 David Horowitz

According to Gallup, the average presidential honeymoon lasts seven months. This is a window when the losing party declares a partisan peace, allows the incoming president to pick his cabinet and launch the agenda his victory mandates. Presidential honeymoons are not only a venerable American tradition they are one of democracy’s pillars. For generations they have been ceremonial supports for the peaceful transition of power, and the peaceful resolution of partisan conflicts.

Not this election year. There will be no honeymoon. This year even before Trump arrives in the Oval Office, the opposition cry has been Resist! Block! Reject! It is not just anti-American radicals like Michael Moore, who has indeed called for “100 days of resistance” to the Trump presidency, but by the leadership of the Democratic Party which has vowed to fight Trump’s appointments, has attacked the election result as an expression of popular racism, attempted to discredit the Electoral College by falsely calling it a legacy of slavery, and even accused Trump of being a Russian agent, a pawn in the chess game of its dictator Vladimir Putin. It is a sad day for America when the world’s oldest political party, whose name proclaims it a partisan of democracy, comes out in force as a saboteur of that same system.

Nor is all this simply a fit of Democratic absent-mindedness. Instead, it is the culmination of a long developing shift in Democratic Party politics, a shift symbolized by the current favorite to become its next leader. Keith Ellison is a Muslim radical who spent his formative adult years as a vocal supporter of the anti-American, anti-Semitic racist Louis Farrakhan. Ellison reflects the power of the Bernie Sanders radicals in the Democratic Party who according to recent Gallup polls now represent its majority, even though they lost a rigged primary election which would have made him the party’s presidential nominee.

The face of this new Democratic Party was revealed during a seminal moment in the second Clinton-Trump presidential debate. It came when Trump turned to the cameras and said, “Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart.” He was referring to her now notorious statement that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” which was followed by her iteration of those she had in mind: “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Andrew Harrod: Islamists Find Willing Allies in U.S. Universities

Two graduate students and two undergraduates recalled personally experiencing the July 15, 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government at a December 7, 2016, Georgetown University panel, before a youthful audience of about fifty. As crews from Turkey’s TRT Haber television network and Anadolu Agency (AA) filmed/recorded, the panelists praised the coup’s popular foiling as a democratic victory, irrespective of Erdogan’s dangerous Islamist policies.

Such willful blindness mirrors that of other American-educated Middle East studies scholars whose actions and pronouncements lend a veneer of legitimacy to Erdogan’s dictatorial policies, including mass purges and arrests of academics and teachers throughout Turkey. Erdogan’s personal spokesman is Ibrahim Kalin, a George Washington University Ph.D. who serves as a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He joined Juan Cole of Michigan, Cemil Aydin of UNC Chapel Hill (Harvard Ph.D.) at an October 2016 conference in Istanbul even as innocent educators languished in prison or faced academic ruin.

Islamism certainly colored the experiences of the panel’s two graduate students, Harvard University Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations doctoral student Rushain Abbasi and his wife Safia Latif, who were in Istanbul during the attempted coup. Abbasi is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated Muslim Students Association and a former teacher at the Boston Islamic Seminary, an affiliate of another MB group, the Muslim American Society. His previous writing stereotypically attributed Islamist violence to the “histories of colonialism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that still plague the non-Western world,” maintaining, “[i]t is not the texts of Islam . . . that are in need of reform.”

Latif, a Boston University doctoral student in religious studies who earned an M.A. in Middle East studies from the University of Texas, was like-minded. She previously participated in a conference chaired by the notorious Islamist and UC-Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian at California’s Zaytuna College. Having witnessed Egyptians in 2013 overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of President Mohamed Morsi, she despaired of the same thing happening in Turkey. “To see another democratically elected government with an ostensible Islamist president fall was almost too much to bear. My first reaction was a religious one; I took to the prayer mat and I began praying for the Turkish people.”

The Evolution of Terrorism Prosecutions: My Speech at the Federal Bar Council By Andrew C. McCarthy

Next month, we will mark the 24th anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The prosecutions that followed, including the one I was privileged to lead against the terrorist cell of Omar Abdel Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”), were pivotal in the development of American national security policy. Up until the 9/11 attacks, almost all of these prosecutions took place in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

On Wednesday night, I participated in a Federal Bar Council program on “The Second Circuit and Terrorism” along with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey (the former chief judge of the SDNY who tried the Blind Sheikh case), Judge Joseph Bianco (my former SDNY colleague who later served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Justice Department), and Roger L. Stavis (who represented Sayyid Nosair, one of the principal defendants in the Blind Sheikh case) in a panel moderated by Fordham Law School Professor Karen Greenberg (who directs Fordham’s Center on National Security). Below is my speech at the start of the program.

Since I don’t get back to my old haunts nearly as much as I’d like to, it is a thrill to be here in our grand courthouse in the Southern District of New York, among so many old friends and colleagues. It is a real privilege to participate in this panel on “The Second Circuit and Terrorism,” with people I’ve learned so much from over the last — I don’t even want to think about how many years have gone by. Let’s just say there was a lot more hair on my head, and a lot less of, well, me, when I first met most of them.

My role at the beginning of this evening is to give a brief overview of how terrorism prosecutions have evolved. What happened here in the Second Circuit, and particularly in the cases that originally sprung out of our SDNY office after the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993, is ingrained in the foundation of American national security policy — both in terms of what the judicial system could achieve, and where other components of government needed to step up and fill security voids.

In addressing this topic, I’ve always thought it important to point out that when terrorism arrived in our homeland in the systematic way we have experienced it in the last quarter-century, nobody sat around the table and thought about how we should respond to it. There was no grand policy debate asking, “Is this a crime, or is it a war?” “Is our civilian process of criminal prosecution up to this, or do we need to resort to military justice and the ancient laws and customs of war?”

What happened, instead, was an explosion.

When a critical incident occurs domestically, regardless of whether it appears to be terrorism, a major accident, or a natural disaster, it is the first responders who answer the call — police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and the like. Back in 1993, we didn’t even think about the military or our intelligence community, which are restricted by various statutes and regulations from operating inside the homeland.

Sen. Tim Scott DESTROYS N-Word Attacks for Supporting Sessions By Tyler O’Neil

When South Carolina Senator Tim Scott endorsed Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, liberals attacked him on Twitter as inauthentically black. Scott shot down their racist attacks with dignity and class, winning widespread admiration.

Racism is still alive and well in this country, and perhaps more in politics than in the police force. If a black conservative dares to rear his head, racist liberals will silence him on account of his race. Or so it proved for a sitting U.S. senator.

“William Smith and Tim Scott are house niggas,” tweeted @Simonalisa, whose tweet (and even her Twitter account) has been deleted. Scott shut her down with one word: “Senate.”

Other liberals attacked Scott as a “house boy,” an “Uncle Tom,” and worse.

“Alabama housenigger tim scott comes through for his massa great grandson,” tweeted R T.E.D., an account whose tweets are private, Twitchy reported. To this, Scott replied, “Just BTW – SENATE.”

Another Twitter account (which presently has no tweets at all) described the South Carolina senator as “a White man in a black body” for supporting Sessions, according to Twitchy. Here, Scott revealed both grace and wit.

“Is that like a Liger?” Scott asked, without missing a beat. Helpfully, he included a link to Google search results on the word “Liger.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Getting It Right By David Solway

I like to joke that I am never wrong, then correct myself: oops, yes I was wrong once, that was on March 25, 2008, around ten in the morning. Nonsense, of course. But I do want to say, however arrogant it may appear, that I have been generally right in my political predictions. The point is not to assume a peculiar form of dispensation, but to show that being right requires only a little practice.

Here are just three examples.

1. Terror. Returning to London from a literary symposium at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in mid-June 2005, I entered the Tube station at King’s Cross on the Piccadilly Line and immediately saw that this would be an ideal place for Islamic terrorists to strike. Considering the growing Islamization of the U.K., the atmosphere of threat, the wariness of authorities to move against Islamic supremacism or even to name it, the proliferation of terror preaching imams at radical mosques, and the fact that a heavily trafficked, unsecured public transport site is a perfect venue for urban mayhem, King’s Cross seemed an obvious target. I wrote as much in the then-in-progress manuscript of The Big Lie. The attack occurred shortly afterward, on July 7, 2005. My editor Malcolm Lester had me cancel the passage prior to publication lest readers assume I had inserted it retroactively to surreptitiously affirm my prescience.

2. Obama. I wrote to my Jewish friends — some of them prominent figures in literature and journalism who were ecstatic over candidate Obama’s comforting July 23, 2008 Sderot address to the Israeli people — that the man was not to be trusted and would assuredly go back on his word. Although he was riding a wave of popularity and goodwill, I predicted that despite his syrupy phrases and consoling manner he would eventually show his true colors as Israel’s devoted enemy and would do everything he possibly could to harm the Jewish state. All that was needed to arrive at this conclusion was a modicum of research into Obama’s history, his mentorship by Marxists and Muslims reflexively sympathetic to the Palestinian victimhood narrative, and a close reading of body language and exaggerated inflection. My colleagues were amused and not a few disturbed by my evident cynicism. “Israel has a true friend in Obama,” one well-known commentator opined. To another I wrote: “Nothing this fellow says can be believed, not a single syllable. He is a liar from the womb. How can you not see that?” His reply was to accuse me of advanced paranoia.

My debate with Alan Dershowitz, hosted on FrontPage Magazine a few years later, followed the same pattern. Proud of his president for having visited the embattled Israeli town of Sderot and for having Israel’s back, he fell for every lie that escaped Obama’s lips. (As I write this, Obama has perfidiously refused to use the once-reliable American veto in the December 23, 2016 U.N. Security Council resolution against Israeli so-called “settlements,” doing major damage to the Jewish state.) As with many of my Jewish friends, Dershowitz could not admit he was wrong, but merely kept repeating a series of flabby clichés and fixed talking points, never once addressing my arguments showing that Obama was a hypocrite and an enemy-in-friend’s-clothing. It is only quite recently that the redoubtable Dersh has reversed himself, but that is always easier after the fact. “Experts” like Dershowitz, shackled to belief and convinced of superior insight, are people who learn late what was obvious early — assuming they learn at all. Thinking is harder than rethinking, which is why they are almost never right.

No More Hyphenated Americans By E.W. Jackson (Amen)

Every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we confess that we are “one nation,” but there is less and less cultural evidence of that. In fact, after eight years of perhaps the most divisive president in American history, we are more balkanized than ever. Not only have the ethnic divisions been exacerbated by the constant allegations of racism and white privilege, but we now contend with a whole new set of tribal identities. We are not only segmented by racial classifications of black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, but shoehorned into the mix are sexual categories of gay; lesbian; bisexual; transgender, and, according to Facebook, 56 other gender identities.

With the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the time has come to take a bold step toward unity. To borrow from the president-elect, it is time to make America unified again. We will never be perfectly unified, but we can reverse the politics of division and reorient our culture toward unity.

Since the election, Mr. Trump has called for solidarity. We need to make that sentiment tangible. The left’s identity politics fosters the narrative of victim versus oppressor, white male versus everyone else, white privilege versus black “empowerment,” capitalist versus worker, and now enlightened sexual liberators versus the bigoted, hateful traditional Americans.

It is an effective strategy for obtaining and holding power, but the whole country suffers for it. President Obama and his fellow liberals have unleashed racial hell on our country, moving us away from our vision of “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

Sixty-two police officers were murdered in 2016, twenty-one in ambush killings because of the false narrative that police are hunting down and killing unarmed black men. The mainstream media, liberal elites, and the president have promoted this cancerous myth, and it has metastasized. In the latest racial horror, four young black suspects filmed themselves torturing a victim because he was white and disabled. They made him recite phrases such as “I love black people.” They taunted him for alleged support of Donald Trump and hurled profanities against Mr. Trump and “white people.” These are the inevitable results of the left’s destructive strategy of identity politics.

Dumpster Diving for Dossiers The team that created the Trump file went digging for divorce records in 2012. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Washington and the press corps are feuding over the Trump “dossier,” screaming about what counts as “fake news.” The pity is that this has turned into a story about media ethics. The far better subject is the origin of the dossier itself.

“Fake news” doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by people with an agenda. This dossier—which alleges that Donald Trump has deep backing from Russia—is a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade. Team Trump needs to put the scandal in that context so that it can get to governing and better defuse the next such attack.

The more that progressives have failed to win political arguments, the more they have turned to underhanded tactics to shut down their political opponents. (For a complete account of these abuses, see my book, “The Intimidation Game.”) Liberals co-opted the IRS to crack down on Tea Party groups. They used state prosecutors to launch phony investigations. They coordinated liberal shock troops to threaten corporations. And they—important for today’s hysteria—routinely employed outside dirt diggers to engage in character assassination.

This editorial page ran a series in 2012 about one such attack, on Frank VanderSloot. In 2011 the Idaho businessman gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The following spring, the Obama re-election campaign publicly smeared Mr. VanderSloot (and seven other Romney donors) as “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.”

This national shaming, by the president no less, painted a giant target on Mr. VanderSloot’s back. The liberal media slandered him daily on TV and in print. The federal bureaucracy went after him: He was ultimately audited by the IRS and the Labor Department. About a week after the Obama attack, an investigator contacted a courthouse in Idaho Falls demanding documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as any other litigation involving him. We traced this investigator to an opposition-research chop shop called Fusion GPS.

Fusion is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson. When we asked how he could justify dumpster-diving into the divorce records of private citizens, he said only that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target. He refused to tell us who’d paid him to do this slumming, and federal records didn’t show any payments to Fusion from prominent Democratic groups or campaigns. The money may well have been washed through third-party groups.

Why does this matter? Guess who is behind that dossier against Mr. Trump: Fusion GPS. A Republican donor who opposed Mr. Trump during the primaries hired Fusion to create a file on “the real estate magnate’s past scandals and weaknesses,” according to the New York Times. After Mr. Trump won the GOP race, that donor pulled the plug. Fusion then seamlessly made its product available to “new clients”—liberals supporting Hillary Clinton. Moreover, it stooped to lower tactics, hiring a former British spook to help tie Mr. Trump to the Russians. (Fusion GPS did not respond to a request for comment.)

No media organization has so far been able to confirm a single allegation in the dossier. Given Fusion’s history and tactics, trying arguably isn’t worth the effort. Truth was never its purpose.

The point of the dossier—as with the dredging into Mr. VanderSloot’s personal life, or the smearing of the Koch brothers, or Harry Reid’s false accusation that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes—was to gin up the ugliest, most scurrilous claims, and then trust the click-hungry media to disseminate them. No matter how false the allegations, the subject of the attack is required to respond, wasting precious time and losing credibility. Mr. Trump should be focused on his nominations, his policies, disentangling himself from his business. Instead his team is trying to disprove a negative and prevent the accusations, no matter how flimsy, from seeping into voters’ minds. CONTINUE AT SITE