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POLITICS

Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts By Roger Kimball

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why can’t the Clintons just go away? By Maureen Callahan

Since losing the most winnable presidential election in modern American history, Hillary Clinton has, among other things: given a series of high-profile speeches, joined Gov. Cuomo at his public unveiling of tuition-free college, refused to rule out a run for mayor of New York and issued an online video message exhorting fellow Democrats to fight on in her name.

“The challenges we face,” she said, “as a country and a party, are real.”

Clearly, Hillary still sees herself as the leader of the Democratic Party. And why shouldn’t she? Democrats have been locked in an abusive relationship with the Clintons for decades, enabling, explaining, convincing themselves that next time will be different. Party faithful hew to Hillary’s excuses for losing to Donald Trump: It’s James Comey’s fault, plus the Russians, white supremacists, misogynists, the deplorables and immobilized millennials, among other things.

Her losses in 2008 and 2016 have been framed as things that happened to Hillary — not one, but two Black Swan events that stymied her historic destiny.

How is it that Democrats have fealty here, let alone sympathy? How is it that Hillary routinely walks into standing ovations at Broadway theaters? Where is the realization that Hillary is to blame or the rational rejection of a two-time loser?

Any debate about what happened last November ends with Tuesday’s publication of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes spent the past two years talking to Hillary’s most trusted advisers, and what emerges is damning.

Every mistake made in her 2008 run was compounded in 2016: the paranoia, the staff infighting, the underestimation of the intra-party wild card, the self-righteousness, the failure to connect with average voters, the belief that because it was her turn the presidency would be hers. It’s “Groundhog Day” with global consequences.

Clinton’s Towering Fiasco

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of “data analytics” now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

Politico swooned that computer algorithms “underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” Computer guru Elan Kriegel had crunched the numbers for campaign manager Robby Mook, allowing Team Clinton to precisely target her potential voters and thus not waste one dime on appealing to the deplorables.

“Clintonites saw it as their secret weapon in building an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders,” Politico reported. And come the general election the Clintonistas were downright giddy about the edge Big Data was giving them. With the hopelessly old-school Trump team “investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage.” Ah, hubris.

We were reminded of that Politico article in reading the first of what promises to be a sizable library of books autopsying the Clinton campaign, Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The consensus among the Clintonites interviewed is that Mook and Kriegel and all their overhyped whizbang hooey are to blame. Fair enough: That’s what they get for taking their victory lap too soon.

But don’t put all the blame on the geek squad: The reason Hillary Clinton lost, first and foremost, is that Hillary Clinton was the dismalest, dreadfulest of candidates. That said, the emphasis on data analytics was of a piece with Hillary’s overall awfulness. Understanding the data approach, Politicowrote before the election, “is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign—precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational.” The reporter was more right than he knew.

Still, the Clinton team’s overconfidence in data analytics was a typical error made with new technologies. It isn’t just overconfidence in what the technology can achieve, it is that the people using the technologies are ever tempted to push out to the edge of what the technologies can do as a way of proving not only the power of the new machines and methods and materials, but the prowess of the technologists themselves.

CIA’s Brennan Conspired with Foreign Spies More proof of Democrats’ seditious impulses. Matthew Vadum

Although Russians may have aspired to influence the November election, the real election meddlers were Democrats in the Obama administration who conspired with foreign intelligence agencies against Donald Trump’s campaign, new media reports suggest.

The key player, we are learning, is the already infamous John O. Brennan but FBI Director James Comey also played a role. From January 2009 to March 2013, Brennan was Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 until Obama’s last day as president.

George Neumayr explains at the American Spectator how pro-Islam, pro-Communist Brennan appears to have masterminded the operation.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to [then-National Security Advisor] Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

Drawing from a news article in the Guardian (UK), Neumayr adds:

Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.

Estonians were indeed tense after Trump’s seeming ambivalence about NATO on the campaign trail and the prospect that as president he might leave that former Soviet province at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin. British spy agencies, too, were rife with Trump-haters.

The Guardian reports that Robert Hannigan, then-head of the British foreign surveillance service, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), “passed material” to Brennan in summer 2016.

The claim about GCHQ involvement surfaced a month ago.

On March 16, Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano accused GCHQ of working with the Obama administration to spy on Donald Trump, citing unnamed sources. The United States and United Kingdom are in fact parties to a multilateral intelligence cooperation pact. This five-way intelligence alliance among the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is called Five Eyes (FVEY). It obligates the countries to work together in the area of signals intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is the gathering of intelligence related to communications between individuals (COMINT) and or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (ELINT).

When Brennan took over the CIA, he brought along fellow-travelers.

He dragged along “a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump,” Neumayr writes. He also “bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as ‘non-partisan.’”

An official in the intelligence community told Neumayr that “Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with ‘Hillary for president cups’ and other campaign paraphernalia.”

Elizabeth Warren’s book says socialism will work like it’s never worked before By Ed Straker

Elizabeth Warren’s new book, “This Fight is Our Fight”, says that ordinary folk can do better economically if we only had more government control and less individual freedom.

As a liberal writer in the New York Times says:

She rails against the growing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite;

Is Warren referring to the US government? Perhaps the “tiny elite” she refers to are the legislative, judicial, and executive branch which have more and more of our hard earned money, and more control over us than any corporation ever could.

She argues that this concentration of economic rewards has also undermined our political system;

Warren’s right about that, in a way; when one group of citizens can vote themselves the money of another group of citizens, our political system is undermined.

and links unequal wealth and power to the stagnating incomes, growing insecurity and diminishing opportunities facing ordinary families.

Warren’s right about that too, in an unintended way. The more government spends, the less is available to the private sector. Out of control government spending and over $200 trillion in unfunded government obligations will eventually crush the economy.

She puts a face on these stresses with capsule portraits of middle-class travails: a Walmart worker who needs to visit a food pantry, a DHL worker forced to take a huge pay cut, a millennial crushed by student debt.

Getting Over Hillary Democrats need to comprehend the Electoral College. James Freeman

Among the more remarkable aspects of Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016 is that a political rookie seemed to have a better grasp of the rules of the election than his highly experienced opponent. Specifically, Mr. Trump’s message to voters was premised on the idea that the Electoral College would decide the winner. More than any candidate in recent memory, he offered an explicit pitch to the Midwestern voters he needed to secure an electoral win, while making almost no effort to build a constituency in states he was likely to lose. The losing side in 2016 is still struggling to come to grips with this fact, as it explores various reasons to explain away its failure.

“Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton ?” is the headline on a recent Andrew Sullivan column for New York magazine that blames Mrs. Clinton for her 2016 loss. Mr. Sullivan writes that he’s amazed by the hold that the Clinton family “still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general.”

It might seem obvious to blame a loss on the loser, but Mr. Sullivan observes:

…everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were.

This column has heard other explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, including fake news and the WikiLeaks publication of Clinton adviser John Podesta’s private emails. But Mr. Sullivan is urging Democrats to stop making excuses:

Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment… the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union… She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one… And yet she still managed to lose!

Elizabeth Warren answers a question no one has really asked by Andrew Malcolm

An extremely large percentage of America’s 326.5 million citizens did not run for president last year. Only one of us non-candidates, however, decided to write a new book to explain why.

If you’re one of the many Americans who hadn’t thought to wonder why Elizabeth Warren did not run for president — or don’t really care — join the crowd. Warren’s new book about her non-candidacy comes out next week and would-be buyers are not yet lining up.

The book is heavily biographical, which means Warren is definitely running for the presidential nomination of what’s left of the Democrat Party in 2020. First, of course, she needs to win reelection next year in Massachusetts.

Warren is the darling of far-left Democrats, who are running the show way out there nowadays. The book and attendant publicity appearances will provide a bully pulpit to explain her progressive views publicly and more private opportunities to fundraise and meet and chat up donors in those same cities.

And the book will give MSNBC and CNN easy excuses to have her on many times to talk about it and to fret about the country’s endangered middle class. Warren may not have enough time, you understand, to go into how badly the middle class suffered with stagnant wages and lost jobs during the long eight years of the most recent Democrat president and how as a result last fall so many millions of those voters opted instead for the uncertainty of an outlandish Republican.

Warren will lay blame for hard times on Donald Trump, who’s rolling back the regulations she fought so hard to impose as a government bureaucrat. Warren probably will not explain either what an awful candidate Hillary Clinton was. Nor how the 2016 Democratic nomination was a rigged gimme for Clinton.

But Warren will have nice things to say about fellow New Englander Bernie Sanders, who shares her views on evil banks, Wall Street and big business rigging everything for the wealthy.

If all works out as planned, every single media interviewer will ask about the 2020 presidential race. And Warren can smile and say, Oh, no, she hasn’t thought that far ahead. She just wants to serve the good people of Massachusetts.

The “Resistance” Democrats are a Terrorist Party The Democrats have committed to overthrowing our government. Daniel Greenfield

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.

In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.

This time around it’s “radically” different.

The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.

This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.

The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.

The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.

Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.

That is what “Resistance” actually means.

Lindsey Graham: The crazy man of the Senate By Monica Showalter see note please

I agree that McCain and Graham are idiots, but I would not say that about Mitch McConnell who did usher through the nomination of Neil Gorsuch…and does not make ludicrous policy statements….rsk
When will this jackass get the hook from the voters?

Every time Senator Lindsay Graham opens his mouth, crazy things fly out. Is there something wrong with this guy?

It’s not for nothing that a MorningConsult poll released Tuesday pegged him at the third-most unpopular senator, trailed by only John McCain and Mitch McConnell.

But there are methods to the madnesses of McCain and McConnell. In Graham’s case, the loathing is justified, given his out of control statements, signalling an unserious mind, unmoored from reality.

His latest was a call for 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. ground troops in Syria, backseat-driving the Trump administration, which seems to already have a handle on the situation. He told Meet the Press:

“We’re relying too much on the Kurds. More armed forces, 5,000 or 6,000, would attract more regional fighters to destroy ISIL.

“You need a safe haven quickly, so people can regroup inside of Syria. Then you train the opposition to go after Assad. That’s how he’s taken out by his own people with our efforts. And you tell the Russians if you continue to bomb the people we train, we’ll shoot you down.”

and

“I want more American troops, 5,000 or 6,000, like we have in Iraq, to help destroy ISIL.”

It’s like the Bush years never happened with this guy. All of those things have been tried. They’ve all been found wanting. The Syrian charmers we trained as freedom fighters back then took their shiny new weapons and joined Isis. Now this armchair general wants to risk 6,000 more American lives for this scheme? Why 6,000? Why not 20,000? Why not 1,000? Does he know what he’s talking abou? And a war with Russia? Like it’s some trivial afterthought? How blithely he puts American lives on the line for his been-there-done-that ‘prescriptions.’

UPDATE: Oh wait, I erred – Graham’s latest verbal diarrheaic was his new recommendation that barrel bombs be President Trump’s new red line with Assad, not chemical weapons. Keep on micromanaging, fool.

Less than a week earlier, he was calling for 7,000 troops. He was an easy target for Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Time for John McCain to retire By J. Marsolo (Amen) see note please

And he can take Lindsay Graham the undistinguished Republican Senator from South Carolina with him…..rsk

John McCain served our country in Vietnam and was subject to horrific torture as a POW.

Since then, his career as a Republican senator has been undistinguished, to be charitable. He calls himself a “maverick,” primarily because he opposes his own Republican Party. For example, he voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts, probably because Bush beat him in the 2000 primaries.

His major legislation, McCain-Feingold, intended to restrict political contributions by corporations and others, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Dems complain about this in every election because they do not want businesses to contribute to Republicans.

Lately, McCain seems more unhinged than usual.

First, on Sunday, April 9, he blamed the Trump administration “partially” for the chemical attack on civilians by Assad in Syria because the administration sent “mixed” signals to Assad. This is preposterous.

Second, on Sunday, April 2, he criticized House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, alleging that Nunes could not conduct an impartial investigation because he viewed and discussed intelligence reports that confirm that Trump was surveilled by the Obama administration. McCain told Martha Raddatz on ABC:

This is obviously a schism between Republican and Democrats, let alone that bizarre fashion with which all of this happened. If we’re really going to get to the bottom of these things, it’s got to be done in a bipartisan fashion. And as far as I could tell, Congressman Nunes killed that.