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The swamp’s secrets, lies and media leaks. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

How Hillary’s FBI Allies Undermined Trump Before the Election

Peter Strzok wanted some insurance.

The senior FBI figure, who had participated in the Hillary email investigation, interviewed Flynn and had been part of Team Mueller, wasn’t looking to State Farm for his insurance needs.

Chatting with his mistress, an FBI lawyer who worked for Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok worried that Trump might win. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he wrote.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

It was the summer of an election year. The official odds all favored Hillary. But a failed FISA request had already been made. And the real insurance was still coming. Its policies would include a second successful FISA request, the Steele dossier, the mass unmasking of Trump officials and the Mueller witch hunt. The insurance still hasn’t paid off, but the men and women behind the coup are betting that it will.

By the time October rolled around, the cost of the insurance was still rising. In late October, as Election Day was coming up, Strzok and Page were looking over their own leaks to the media. They discussed the stories in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that they had allegedly helped shape.

Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

“Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can’t read it,” Strzok’s mistress texted him.

“Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I ‘find’ it and tell the team?” he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

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Donald Trump—the Grownup in the Room on Immigration By Roger L Simon

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

Donald Trump gets called crazy a lot. Or infantile. Or senile. More than a bit of projection may be operative in these allegations, however. Watching Tuesday’s televised discussion of immigration (video here) with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, which the president opened to the media, it was hard not to come to an opposite conclusion.

Donald Trump was the real grownup in the room.

Yes, he made occasional jokes, but that’s what grownups do to relax tense situations. To get politicians from both sides of the aisle talking to each other cordially in the current hyper-partisan atmosphere is no easy feat. But Trump did that. He showed himself to be what many of us have thought him to be from the outset, whatever the attendant melodrama — a pragmatic businessman with moderately conservative views, even, dare I say it, sometimes weirdly wise. Above all, he is a man who likes to make progress, who wants to move things forward to a better day while recognizing that there is no perfect. How adult is that.

And, yes, it’s possible this event was arranged to counteract the bad publicity from Michael Wolff’s bilious, factually challenged book, but so what? Basically, Trump (with the help of the cameras) shamed his fellow and gal politicians into civility and evidently cajoled them into at least a partial solution, later, in closed session, to that most intractable of problems – immigration. If Trump were anything like his detractors say he is, he couldn’t have done either. He even urged them on to a more global solution on immigration, reminding the politicians at the table they were closer to that goal than they realized. If that’s crazy, maybe we need more of it.

But what of this partial solution? By its very nature, ideologues of the left and right will not be satisfied. (Are they ever?) Lefties want to solve DACA first and then, once the “Dreamers” have their “pathway to citizenship,” the left promises to deal with border security and such things as chain migration and the trendily named Diversity Visa Lottery later. Of course, that’s nonsense. They have no intention of doing anything to mitigate the latter two and to the former they will only pay lip service.

Every politician in the room knew that and so, of course, did Trump. He made sure it didn’t happen.

On the right, Anne Coulter and others of her ilk will doubtless be disappointed, to put it mildly, that an impregnable border wall will not immediately be erected across the entire Southern border and all eleven million illegal aliens summarily ejected from our country. They will claim Trump promised this during the campaign, and he did at moments, but if you were listening carefully, you knew where he was ultimately going — he hinted at it and more many times — compromise.

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Hungary’s PM: Migrants Aren’t Refugees, but Muslim Invaders By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

In an interview with German newspaper Bild, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that the “the migrant crisis” is, in effect, “an invasion.”

When asked by Bild why Hungary hasn’t deemed itself able to welcome two thousand refugees while Germany has let in two million of them, Orban answered: “[T]he difference is: you want those migrants. We do not. We do our job by closing the Schengen-border with Serbia. Doing so has cost us one billion euros since 2015 and Brussels pays us nothing for it.”

“The solution to this problem isn’t to divide people who are illegally in the EU among EU member states. We believe that we have to solve the root of the problem instead of bringing these immigrants here [Europe],” the prime minister continued.

“We do not consider these people as Muslim refugees. We consider them as Muslim invaders. To travel to Hungary from Syria they have to cross through four other countries that are, although not as rich as Germany, certainly stable. They don’t flee for their lives. This proves that they are economic migrants seeking a better life,” Orban concluded.

Bild then asked Orban whether this makes those migrants inferior in some way. “If someone wants to come to your home,” the PM answered, “then he knocks on the door and asks: ‘Can we come in, can we stay?’ They did not do that. Instead, they broke through the border illegally. That was not a wave of refugees, that was an invasion.”

He then lashed out at Germany for welcoming these illegals. “I have never understood how in a country like Germany — which we see as the best example of discipline and the rule of law — chaos, anarchy and the illegal crossing of borders can be celebrated,” Orban declared.

Orban then continued to blame Germany’s political leaders (rightfully) for the refugee crisis. “Although the refugee crisis is a European problem,” he explained, “sociologically it is a German problem. When your government addressed the EU refugee quota [the EU wants every country to welcome a specific amount of refugees], why did the Portuguese prime minister cry out: ‘Welcome!’? Because not one single refugee actually wants to go to Portugal. They all want to go to Germany. The reason why these people are in your country isn’t that they’re refugees, but that they want to experience the German way of life.”

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Iran and Daesh Lite in North America By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

Recent mass demonstrations in Iran, and the government’s violent crackdown has been met with a deafening silence by Muslim “civil rights” organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Why have they refrained from supporting the Iranian people’s uprising to overthrow the oppressive mullahs? After all, the same organizations have vocally and financially supported the mass demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010 and led to the rise of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government and caused turmoil and destabilized these regions.

American and Canadian Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the U.S. and Canada, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) (including its Canadian branch), share the similar agenda and boards and serve as umbrellas to many smaller associations and community-based groups. Their charities aim to expand the implementation of their agenda, and a few of them have been identified as unindicted co-conspirator in Islamist terrorist financing trials in the U.S. Their common mission: dedication to “da’wah” (proselytization), building “an Islamic way of life in North America[, and] commitment to Islam as a total way of life” by practicing sharia (Islamic law). This desire to impose any version of Islam on society to establish global Islamic theocracy via political activism, has been accurately described by Prof. Clive Kessler as “political Islam” or “ISIS/Daesh lite.”

Political Islam has been successfully enforced by the mullahs in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Over the years, they have increased their efforts to enforce and spread political Islam everywhere. Their efforts did not stop with Shite groups; rather, they extended especially to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoots such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the first foreign trip of Egypt’s now deposed Muslim Brother president, Mohammed Morsi, was to visit Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s short-lived government (June 2012-July 2013) has failed because the Egyptian people rejected its oppression early on.

The ousting of the M.B. government was followed with banning its activities in Egypt and later in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria. But by then, the global Brotherhood’s movement has been well entrenched in the West, where their activities are not limited and often encouraged. The leaders of the Islamist movement have doubled their efforts to spread and whenever possible, to enforce political Islam on Muslims and infidels alike.

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Winter Weather Climate Spin Contradicts Science By Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

Climate-change spinmeisters have been in overdrive since late December, hustling to explain how this spate of treacherous, winter weather is all due to global warming…just like they told us. (No doubt, the next thaw or blizzard will be mankind’s fault, too.) But their avowals mostly contradict scientific fact—including facts they have affirmed in reports they helped write themselves—not to mention current weather trends.

On January 4, as a “bomb cyclone” savaged the eastern seaboard, Al Gore tweeted this:

Al Gore
✔ @algore It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. http://ow.ly/Gdm230hAFv4

Gore, who oddly didn’t include clips of massive snowstorms and record-breaking cold temperatures in his films or paid lectures about global warming, linked to an article written by Michael Mann, a Penn State University scientist, author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph, and the media’s favorite climate mouthpiece.

In his customary, humble fashion, Mann appropriates the two-week stretch of brutal weather as evidence of exactly what he’s been saying all along: “Listening to climate contrarians like President Donald Trump, you might think this constitutes the death knell for concern over human-caused climate change. Yet, what we were witnessing play out is in fact very much consistent with our expectations of the response of weather dynamics to human-caused climate change.” The professor then throws in some maps and graphs to purportedly boost his claim, and concludes with, “so, to the climate change doubters and deniers out there, the unusual weather we’re seeing this winter is in no way evidence against climate change. It is an example of precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.”

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Sex vs. Political Correctness? By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

The Left has some reason to worry that the newfound solicitude for sexual propriety spread by #MeToo might overflow the traditional bounds of political-correctness-as-weapon.

No different from demands regarding race and identity politics generally, the strictures of political correctness concerning sex do not define rights and wrongs. Rather, they claim authority to suppress such evils as the powerful may impute to their enemies. They also serve the ruling class’s war against Western Civilization. But current demands for “sensitivity” for women’s sense of sexual self-worth, rather than merely enhancing the power of better-connected people over less-connected ones, might actually lead America to consider what proper or improper sexual behavior is.

Neither P.C.’s partisan nature nor its corrosion of our civilization are in doubt. Elsewhere, I showed that Communists originated the term to distinguish between the “correctness” of what serves the Party’s interest from that which is factually correct—and that the Party’s paramount long-term interest lies in overcoming the reality that human beings perceive through the senses and reason with the Party’s “correct” version thereof.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the most durably influential of Communist theoreticians, had argued that re-orienting the popular mind away from the cultural icons of Western Civilization would anchor the Party’s power to a cultural hegemony impossible to break. Gramsci’s argument is all too well rooted in modern thought since Machiavelli, and cultural destruction has been part of every revolutionary movement at least since the French Revolution.

The fundamental problem with cultural revolution is that it is easier to destroy cultures than to replace them. The end-states sought are inherently undefinable. Each and every revolutionary will have his own ideas of what is proper and improper. Since those ideas must be bound up with the struggles of each for his own power. As the revolutionaries clash, incoherence is guaranteed. Beyond that, No matter what the revolutionaries do to disorient people, human nature’s magnetic needles always end up pointing people away from that which is merely politically correct.

Of all human nature’s aspects, sex is among the most intractable to political power. Soviet teaching (see Marx and Engels’ “The Origins of the Family”) and policy reflected the Marxist notion that humans are animals, and the sexes are equally self-interested. As Soviet family policy see-sawed, natural families were wrecked. Powerful males lorded over females, as it is in the animal world, and females then acted defensively or manipulatively toward men. Russia is not a happy place, and its population is declining.

Here and now, a New York Times op-ed by Daphne Merkin reflects the sense growing among erstwhile P.C. revolutionaries of the feminist kind that they have been on the wrong path. Their most immediate concern is ordinary partisanship. Merkin and her friends find it “troubling” that men such as “Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Lizza and Al Franken” have been hurt by accusations they regard as unspecific and unproven. OK. But logic then leads to asking what behavior it should take to disqualify even such worthy people. Political correctness has no answers. “Scattershot, life-destroying denunciations” are not enough. “Due process is nowhere to be found.”

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North Korea’s Peace Games Kim Jong Un tries to drive a wedge between the South and the U.S.

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

Talks between North and South Korea Tuesday at the Demilitarized Zone have handed Kim Jong Un a propaganda victory. The two sides agreed that athletes from the North will compete in next month’s Winter Olympics in the South. The talks and the “Olympic truce” allow the young dictator to pose as a man of peace, even as he threatens to annihilate his enemies with nuclear weapons.

This is galling enough, but Kim has his eye on the bigger prize of driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. In recent days U.S. officials have expressed confidence that this won’t happen because the talks would be limited to the Olympics. But the onus is now on South Korean President Moon Jae-in to make clear that the North can’t divide and conquer.

Kim’s New Year’s Day speech with its proposal of talks with the South was surprising given Pyongyang’s longstanding policy of dealing only with the U.S. on strategic matters. According to the North’s propaganda, Seoul has always been a puppet of the American imperialists. The biggest exception came in 2000, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung secretly paid the North hundreds of millions of dollars to participate in a summit. That led to a brief period of entente known as the Sunshine Policy, lubricated with copious amounts of aid.

President Moon wants to revive some of the Sunshine Policy, including an industrial park that let the North earn about $100 million a year from South Korean companies. Contradicting U.S. policy that the North should first curtail its nuclear and missile programs, Mr. Moon has called for direct talks since taking office in May. The North snubbed those overtures as it sprinted to perfect its missiles, but now it thinks it can gain a political advantage by luring the South back into talks.

Mr. Moon now has his wish of talks, and the Trump Administration probably felt it had to oblige because of the Olympics. Seoul asked to postpone routine military exercises for fear the North might use them as an excuse to launch a conventional military strike during the games, and the U.S. acquiesced. In March 2010 the North sank a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors, and in November of that year it shelled the island of Yeonpyeong in the South, killing two soldiers and two civilians.

North Korea may hope the South will continue talks after the Olympics and break ranks with the U.S. Stricter United Nations sanctions are now coming into force, cutting the flow of fuel imports and preventing North Korea from earning hard currency with exports. That makes the prospect of a reconciliation with South Korea especially appealing.

But even if Mr. Moon wants to help the North, he faces greater constraints than his predecessors. The sanctions restrict his ability to offer monetary aid, and the heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula as a result of the North’s dash to become a nuclear-weapons state has increased the South’s dependence on the U.S. security umbrella.

The U.S. military has announced that the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its battle group will deploy off the coast of Korea during the Olympics. Such deployments are a more reliable guarantor of peace than the gestures of a young dictator who pretends to want peace even as he threatens war.

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About That Golden Globes Fiasco They should hand out awards for hypocrisy, preening, and lack of self-awareness. By Kyle Smith

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

On Golden Globes night, Hollywood preened in front of its black mirror as usual, but the degree to which it was blind to what was obvious to all observers was stranger than ever. It was like that time the pear-shaped Homer Simpson looked at his reflection and saw a torso rippling with musculature.

What was the most crystalline moment of self-unawareness?

Was it when Seth Meyers, a white guy like almost every Globes host before him, set up the first two introducers on the NBC broadcast by saying, “Please don’t be two white guys, please don’t be two white guys”? Or when the actress Connie Britton paraded around in a “Poverty is sexist” sweater that retails for $380? How about when James Franco, winning an award for his satiric portrayal of the shlock filmmaker Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, invited Wiseau up to the stage but then elbowed him aside when he dared to try to speak?

No, for me it was when the house rolled over for Oprah Winfrey, the nation’s most prominent retailer of quack medicine, the celebrity shill who made herself some $3 billion pitching supernatural wishful thinking and life-endangering crackpot pseudoscience to poor people and women, and NBC declared her our next president in a tweet. Oprah, friend to women and the oppressed, the coming anti-Trump? Say what you want about our president, but no one has linked him to a surge in whooping cough. Winfrey’s prominent place in the anti-vaccination movement is far more appalling than the behavior described in the Access Hollywood tape. If Trump kills, it’s only by tweet-induced apoplexy.

NBC, Oprah: The juxtaposition of those two brands is too perfect to pass without notice. If your memory stretches back even three months, you’ll recall that it was NBC that quashed a series of blockbuster scoops by its correspondent Ronan Farrow that, when he finally was forced to take them to The New Yorker, reported that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist. By coincidence, the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, moonlights as a screenwriter who wrote Jackie — the kind of arty, Oscar-bait fare that Weinstein often produced and shepherded to Oscar glory (or at least Golden Globes semi-glory).

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Why is Teen Vogue Sexualizing a 9-Year-Old Boy? by Sarah Rumpf

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

It’s hard to stay woke these days. The rules keep changing. And for the many conservatives like me who are supportive of gay rights, the activist left seems determined to make things as complicated and stressful as possible.

The latest eyebrow-raising story comes from Teen Vogue, in the form of a nine-year-old boy named Nemis Quinn Mélançon Golden they describe as “impressive and magical.”

You might be asking yourself, what could a 9-year-old boy do that a magazine geared towards teens would call “magical”?

Well, Golden is a drag queen who has gone by the name “Queen Lactatia” since he was seven:

When he was seven, this pint-size boy — who had a habit of wearing his sister’s tutus and princess costumes when he was two — officially transformed into a queen called Lactatia. Now he’s a miniature fixture on the Montreal drag scene. “I was always a drag queen, but I never knew it until my sister showed me RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Nemis explains. Drag, the subversive art of deconstructing gender through over-the-top aesthetics and performances, has become Nemis’s main source of empowerment and pride.

“All hail Queen Lactatia!” the short article declares triumphantly as it invites the reader to peruse a slideshow of Golden in various outfits.

Hang on just a minute here.

“Lactatia”? As in “lactating”? Why is a child being publicly paraded with a nickname related to breastfeeding?

Why is a child being publicly paraded like this at all?

Specifically, why is this child wearing makeup and costumes that are designed to be sexually attractive when worn by adults?

When a little six-year-old girl named JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family home in 1996, a significant portion of the media attention and public debate centered around her participation in child beauty pageants.

Were the makeup, costumes, and song-and-dance routines too sexualized to be proper for a child? Did they make her attractive to a pedophile, and is that why she was killed?

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From Resistance to Nullification to What Next? Trump’s critics ratchet up to insurrection, but Trump’s tax reforms and our growing economy could derail their dreams. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 10th, 2018

George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W. Bush — like Jerry Ford in 1977 and Ronald Reagan in 1989 — did the same when Barack Obama assumed power in 2009.

Unending Presidencies

Recent Democrats emeriti — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — apparently had a different vision of the post-presidency, unlike the quiet retirement of Lyndon Johnson back to his ranch in 1969. The three saw politics in more Manichean terms, as an existential struggle far too important to cease at the end of a presidential tenure.

Carter freelanced abroad for 30 years in successful quest for a Nobel Prize, but he often undercut presidential diplomacy. He regularly weighed in on the shortcomings of his successors — in a way he would have deeply resented had either Ford or Richard Nixon done the same.

No sooner had Bill Clinton left the presidency than he and Hillary Clinton began the grand plan for a return to the White House in 2009, and, after a setback, then again in 2017. Theirs was a two-decade long post-presidency of glad-handing, politicking, and, to use a euphemism, quid pro quo fund raising.

Barack Obama has already weighed in, including while overseas, on the shortcomings of his successor. His aides, led by Ben Rhodes, are at the forefront of the “Resistance” to thwart the Trump administration. Susan Rice and John Kerry comment regularly on supposed Trump foreign-policy blunders, as do James Clapper and John Brennan — usually in proactive fashion to deflect news accounts that may reflect poorly on their own past tenures.

Resistances

But all that said, we have never quite seen anything like the opposition of the so-called Resistance to the elected presidency that followed the Obama tenure.

There were the initial false charges that pro-Trump Russians had shut down power grids in Vermont. There were frivolous suits claiming that voting machines in three states were rigged. There was an organized, anti-constitutional effort to subvert the Electoral College so that it would not reflect the vote tallies of individual states. On Inauguration Day, there were congressional boycotts of the swearing-in ceremony. There were demonstrations at which, to take one example, Madonna envisioned blowing up the Trump White House.

An entire genre of assassination chic followed. Politicians, celebrities, actors, academics, and wannabees variously reenacted beheading Donald Trump, stabbing him to death, shooting him, torching him, hanging him, or, in the words of Robert DeNiro, dreaming of punching Trump in the face. Few in the media were bothered by the imagery or threats. Yet sometimes the hysteria became real violence — as when Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson’s shot prominent Republican politicians practicing for a charity baseball game, gravely wounding Republican House whip Steven Scalise, or when libertarian senator Rand Paul (present at the Scalise shooting) was attacked and injured by a disturbed neighbor and proponent of socialized medicine.