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Is This The End Of The Road For The Democratic Party?

Posted By on July 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/19/is-this-the-end-of-the-road-for-the-democratic-party/

Now that the Republicans have wrapped up their hugely successful convention and as calls for President Joe Biden to step down are accelerating, the question that must be asked is: Can the Democratic Party survive? Donald Trump made one key decision this week that could seal the party’s fate.

First, some history.

When Ronald Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination in 1980, Democrats were in a similar bind as they are today. The party was in disarray, the nation fed up with clueless leaders, and voters were ready for the bold conservative leadership Reagan promised.

But Reagan made one fatal mistake.

After he’d won the nomination, he still hadn’t decided on a running mate, and a scramble ensued. Reagan had the chance to nominate a smart, talented – and young – conservative who shared his vision and would build on it. Instead, he listened to party insiders who said he needed to “broaden his base” by naming an establishment Republican and he picked George H.W. Bush.

This was the worst possible choice. Bush was an establishment hack, an inside-the-Beltway elitist, and the guy who had handed the left its best attack line – “voodoo economics.”

As soon as Reagan was gone, establishment Republicans regained power, shoved conservatives to the side, and systematically undermined Reagan’s achievements, all while mouthing conservative platitudes they knew could win elections.

They turned the GOP from a landslide-winning party to one that has managed to win the popular vote only once since 1988.

We are at a similar crossroads today.

Despite having won five of the last eight presidential elections, the Democratic Party today is in far worse shape than it was in 1980.

It has been completely overrun by its America-hating, DEI-ESG-CRT-socialist-Marxist-spewing radical fringe, which obsesses over things such as “transgender” rights and a phony climate crisis instead of jobs and opportunity.

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James B. Meigs “I Represent Science” Anthony Fauci’s autobiography unwittingly reveals his transformation from an open-minded scientist to an imperious, unaccountable public-health bureaucrat.

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-on-call-a-doctors-journey-in-public-service-by-anthony-fauci

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, by Anthony Fauci (Viking, 480 pp., $36)

At the 1996 meeting of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver, a group of researchers presented the results of a much-anticipated study. The scientists had tested AZT, the first drug approved to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in combination with two newer anti-viral drugs. HIV is a particularly devious infection. When AZT or other antiviral medications were administered individually, the virus would soon find a way to evade them. But when the three drugs were prescribed together, something almost miraculous happened: the combination therapy suppressed HIV to undetectable levels, even in patients with advanced AIDS. And the virus did not bounce back.

Anthony Fauci was sitting in the audience that day. The Brooklyn-born doctor had joined the National Institutes of Health as a researcher in 1968 and began focusing on AIDS in 1981, soon after the baffling new disease emerged among gay men in New York and California. In 1984, when Fauci was named director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, a division of NIH), he made developing effective HIV medications one of the agency’s top goals. It was “a long, tortuous, and incremental quest,” Fauci writes in his new memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. Twelve years later, “AIDS was no longer an inevitable death sentence,” he writes.

In retrospect, that would have been a fine time for Fauci to retire from his federal post. If he had chosen that moment to return to private practice or join a top medical school, he would be remembered today as one of the greatest public health leaders of the twentieth century. The HIV therapies he championed brought the AIDS epidemic under control and saved tens of millions of lives around the world. But Fauci remained in his NIAID role for almost three more decades. During that time, he would have more successes, including fighting emerging threats like Ebola and Zika. But he would also build up more institutional power, presiding over vast research budgets and becoming increasingly isolated from divergent views or criticism.

Fauci finally retired at age 83 in January 2023, after five decades with the NIH. It must have seemed like a propitious time to write his memoirs and take a valedictory promenade. The media widely celebrated Fauci for his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic. In On Call, he writes that his constant Covid press appearances—along with his well-publicized differences with President Donald Trump—had made him “an instant hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” In short, Fauci had become something like a secular saint, at least in liberal circles. His image would soon join those of George Washington, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King in the National Portrait Gallery. And collectible Fauci bobbleheads and figurines were available in fine gift shops everywhere.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Tonight, We Fight Back’: Harvard Graduate Slams Campus Antisemitism in Blistering RNC Speech Zach Kessel

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tonight-we-fight-back-harvard-graduate-slams-campus-antisemitism-in-blistering-rnc-speech/

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School who is currently suing the university over its failure to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination on campus, took aim at left-wing antisemitism in a Republican National Convention speech that drew raucous cheers from the Milwaukee audience.

“I came to Harvard to study religion, the foundation of Western civilization,” Kestenbaum said. “What I found was not theology but a contempt for it. My problem with Harvard is not its liberalism but its illiberalism. Too often, students at Harvard are taught not how to think but what to think. I found myself immersed in a culture that is anti-Western, that is anti-American, and that is antisemitic.”

Kestenbaum stressed to the convention crowd that antisemitism does not exist in a vacuum. Those who hate the Jewish people and the state of Israel, he argued, abhor the United States and the West as well.

“Students and professors have openly called for new Hamas-style attacks against the United States, and perhaps most damning, when Hamas terrorists butchered 45 American citizens on October 7 — when they took twelve Americans hostage — Harvard refused to immediately and unequivocally condemn this atrocity,” he said.

Formerly a member of the progressive Left, Kestenbaum explained to the audience how he went from being a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the 2020 Democratic presidential-primary race to understanding what he deemed the deep rot at the core of left-wing radicalism.

“Although I once voted for Bernie Sanders, I now recognize that the far Left has not only abandoned the Jewish people but the American people,” he told the crowd. “The Democratic Party — the party I registered to vote for the day I turned 18 — has become ideologically poisoned. And it is this poison, it is this corruption, that is infecting far too many young American students. Let’s be clear: The far Left’s antisemitic extremism has no virtue, and the radicalism on our campuses and on our streets has no moral legitimacy.”

After describing the threats antisemitism and support for terrorism pose to American society, Kestenbaum turned his attention to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.

“Tonight, we fight back,” he vowed. “I am proud to support President Trump’s policies to expel foreign students who violate our laws, harass our Jewish classmates, and desecrate our freedoms. Let’s elect a president who will instill patriotism in our schools. Once again, let’s elect a president who will confront terrorism and its supporters.”

Kestenbaum ended his speech by affirming the tight-knit bond between the Jewish tradition and the principles upon which the United States was founded and a reminder not to forget the American citizens still held in Hamas captivity.

“Let’s elect a president who recognizes that although Harvard and the Ivy Leagues have long abandoned the United States of America, the Jewish people never will, because Jewish values are American values, and American values are Jewish values,” he said. “God bless the United States, God bless the land of Israel, God bless, protect, and return the American hostages in Gaza.”

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Can We Let the Voters Decide—Not the FBI, CIA, DOJ, Lawyers, Prosecutors, and Judges? Why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/18/can-we-let-the-voters-decide-not-the-fbi-cia-doj-lawyers-prosecutors-and-judges/

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.

What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.

The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.

In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.

Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.

Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.

The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.

Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.

Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.

The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.

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The Mother of Big Lies “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-mother-of-big-lies/

The Democrat press agents known as “the media” are frantically attempting to convince us that until the June 27 presidential debate, they didn’t know the extent and severity of Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. That’s why since 2020 they smeared thousands of columns and videos documenting the decline as “disinformation” or “deep fakes” manufactured by the MAGA Ministry of Information. Essentially, they’ve been relying on the Marxist––of the Chico variety–– question, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

But for over a century we’ve known that the left is the mother of Big Lies, ones so preposterous that it takes an arrogant and outrageous shamelessness to tell them. That’s what sets them apart from the ordinary lies that pretty much every politician tells.

The Dems’ current fantastical narrative––that they were unaware of Biden’s deterioration–– is itself an obvious Big Lie. The signs were there during the 2020 presidential election, when the Dems went to great lengths to keep Biden hidden away from voters, conducting a campaign––unprecedented for the Modern Age––from Biden’s basement with limited travel. So, if Biden’s decline was “fake news,” why were they keeping him from the voters? You’d think that the media’s shills would want to debunk the “lies” by highlighting Joe’s vigor and mental acuity as much as possible.

Another problem for the current mendacious special pleading in order to explain their dereliction of duty, is that millions of Americans are intimately familiar with the signs of dementia and can judge for themselves. Currently there are about six million people afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease––and millions more with personal experience of cognitive diseases, from living with or tending family members or patients.

As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Well, the American people knew, since they are not oblivious to evidence they can see. They have said so in every poll for a year. Special counsel Robert Hur knew. His account exposed what many Americans have suspected based on Mr. Biden’s many public misstatements and faltering physical presence. He couldn’t recall which years he was Vice President or even when his son Beau died. He said an ally in the Obama Administration’s debate over Afghanistan was on the opposite side.”

Millions of Americans know the signs: difficulties with speaking, memory, word recall, walking, climbing stairs, and maintaining focus, along with sudden angry outbursts, and a tendency to wander––with a zombie shuffle and a slack-jawed thousand-yard stare, as was obvious in the footage of Biden at the G-7 conclave. Those of us who have witnessed all these signs haven’t needed doctored videos or “deep fakes,” just Occam’s Razor to get what’s going with the president. The regime media’s claim that they were unaware is a Big Lie they’re trying to spin.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Response to Terror by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20790/israel-response-to-terror

Hamas, designated a terror group by Western nations, is an Islamist fundamentalist group whose 1988 Covenant openly supports a Sharia law-based paradisical Caliphate free of non-believers and a world free of Jews (end of Article 7).

Despite Israel’s compliance with humanitarian concerns, rules of war, and attempts to avoid Palestinian civilian deaths, the perception remains that Israel should be the one to make concessions for a ceasefire, not Hamas, which should immediately release the hostages it took.

Hamas, like other Islamic groups from a different culture, does not accede to the West’s laws of war – this much is clear from their treatment of hostages. Freed hostages tell of “cages, beatings and death threats.” Hamas, in violation of the truce agreement, has not permitted the Red Cross to see the hostages. One can imagine how come.

The conflict therefore becomes one between a Western state, ultimately seeking peaceful coexistence and adhering to the ethics of a just war, assaulted by terrorist groups pursuing total conquest and seeming to be driven by an ideology of unquenchable animosity toward “unbelievers.”

Most Western leaders apparently desire to divide Israel, even further than it already has been divided, into two sectors: one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians — all in the name of human rights, social justice, and supposed fair play.

At its core, these proposals are anti-Zionist and in practical effect, anti-Semitic. For a start, more than half the land promised to Jews by the 1917 Balfour Declaration was reallocated by the British authorities to what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon. Jewish rights to what remains of their historic land is continually denied, along with stupefying proposals that the Jews should be forced to be ruled by the very people desiring their extinction.

What accommodation, however, can there possibly be between two conflicting core narratives, in which one party seeks the ideal of martyrdom — “We love death as our enemies love life” — while the other desires to live in peace, without constant threats to its existence?

Israel is not only fighting to prevent long-term future attacks from Gaza, but also to defeat terrorists from overwhelming the Judeo-Christian values that have been achieved over centuries with much sacrifice.

Israel has actually been singled out for implementing “More measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history.”

Israel is the “only country in world,” the British journalist Douglas Murray pointed out, “who are never allowed to win a war, which is a reason why wars keep occurring.”

US President Joe Biden and his ministers of state try their utmost to impose unacceptable cease-fire agreements upon Israel. Fortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the Churchill of the Middle East,” will have none of it. Israel stands firm against prematurely ceasing military action: their ultimate aim is not only to destroy Hamas’s military capability and to rescue remaining hostages, but to defeat terror for the future of the Free World.

“It is left to little Israel to make the first stand against radical evil and the new axis of nations dedicated to the demise of the West. With resolve, courage, and dedication, but, alas, with much more sacrifice, Israel will show the way.” — Professor Leon R. Kass, aei.org, November 3, 2023.

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Cackling While America Burns

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/18/cackling-while-america-burns/

The campaign by Democrats to force President Joe Biden to drop out waned a bit after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But it quickly resumed as Biden stumbled and bumbled through the week. Just yesterday, news broke that Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Biden to step aside, as did Calif. Rep. Adam Schiff.

While there’s not a single person on any list of possible replacements who wouldn’t continue the decline of the U.S. under Biden, one stands out as more frightening than the rest: Kamala Harris.

There’s an easy explanation why Harris is one of the most unpopular vice presidents. She is an unserious person and a classic midwit, defined by the Urban Dictionary as:

​​Someone who is around average intelligence but is so opinionated and full of themselves that they think they’re some kind of genius. Midwits have a shallow understanding of things and at first can seem a bit smart, until you dig deeper and realize they’re just posers.

But let us skip any further preambling and go right into the reasons why Harris would be a wreck in the White House.

First off, if she were elected president, there would be at least another four years of the Biden administration, which in reality would be Barack Obama’s fourth term. Little good has come from the combined 11 1/2 years of Obama and Biden. “Fundamentally transforming” this country has not improved it but instead drained it of its identity, independence, cohesiveness, and perpetual optimism.

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The End of Joe Biden—and the Democratic Establishment For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived. By Martin Gurri

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/end-of-joe-biden-democratic-establishment?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president, and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities. 

Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 44, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproved. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and parts of a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.

Thanks to a few very big, very lucky breaks, this human weathervane eventually found himself in the White House. Just a few years later, however, President Biden’s luck looks to be running out. A disastrous performance in last month’s presidential debate pulled back the curtain, in the style of The Wizard of Oz, to reveal the president as the sad, confused old man most of us already knew him to be. Then the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and the former president’s courageous reaction in the moments following the incident, cast Biden’s shortcomings and infirmities in an even more glaring contrast. Biden is now increasingly alone, abandoned by the very establishment that created him. For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived. 

How Biden Became a Magnificent Replica of Himself

Biden spent 36 years in the Senate but never rose to any kind of power or influence there. His hour in the sun came in 1991 when, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was charged by Democratic Party grandees with the destruction of Clarence Thomas as a nominee to the Supreme Court. He failed. Thomas’s eloquence and intellectual firepower easily overwhelmed the woodenly partisan Biden.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The shameful treatment of veterans in Canada and America Diane Bederman

Posted By on July 18th, 2024

https://dianebederman.com/the-shameful-treatment-of-veterans-in-canada-and-america/

You have perished; but, Oh! Not in vain! Through your sacrifice an ideal was maintained, a cause was saved, freedom is still a reality, the dreams of your brothers and sisters, perhaps the child who will not know you, are still possible.

We who have returned and who knew you-we are grateful From the Book “Burma” from the 435 Squadron

Not anymore.

What kind of country devalues their veterans in favour of paying off student loans and housing illegal immigrants? What kind of country provides state delivered death to veterans as a way of taking care of them?

We have devolved.

Veterans, the men and women, who fought for freedom are not even second class in Canada and America.

How did we get to a place where military and political leaders prioritize sexuality over bravery and merit? Why does Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau spend time and money placing tampons and sanitary napkin dispensers in military men’s rooms?

Thirty days to celebrate being gay! Wow. What an accomplishment!

WATCH

One day to celebrate our veterans.

Says it all.

WWII was the greatest exhibit of courage and bravery after the horrific trench wars and devastation of WWI.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

International ‘Hostage Diplomacy’: Kidnapping for Fun and Profit by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

Posted By on July 17th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20789/hostage-diplomacy-iran

That Iran can, through hostage-taking and extortion, force countries such as the United States, Belgium and Sweden to hand over a convicted criminal who has clearly violated international law shows that gangster methods, used by the Iranian mullahs and others, evidently carry more weight than international law.

This blackmail essentially teaches rogue states that through violence and extortion they can get Western states to make concessions, massive payments, and to de-prioritize and deviate from international law.

If a state takes foreign visitors hostage, and all power then lies with those who kidnap the most, threaten the most and have the largest capacity for violence — including the imminent probability of nuclear weapons — then international law will soon mean nothing.

Apart from effectively having a public budget to support terrorism, Iran’s regime acts as lawlessly as the regimes of Russia or North Korea, and behaves in general as terrorists.

It seems clear that hostage diplomacy is a deliberate strategy for Iran and Russia’s current regimes. Why should it not be? It works!

Countries in the West might do well to communicate this situation and disclaim responsibility for anyone who, despite that lawlessness, chooses to travel to Russia, Iran or other such states. Hostage diplomacy must be stopped.

On June 15, the Swedish government announced that it had conducted a prisoner exchange with Iran’s regime. An Iranian citizen, Hamid Noury, was exchanged for two Swedish citizens, Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi.

Noury stood convicted by a Swedish court of the torture and mass execution of political prisoners he had committed in Iran’s Gohardasht prison in the late 1980s, following a fatwa from Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.