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Are Republicans Their Own Worst Enemies? Why conservatives shouldn’t fall for the latest left-wing scandal. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Here’s the good news.

It’s 2017 and Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House and more statewide offices than you can shake a big bundle of fake news papers at. And, potentially soon, a Supreme Court that takes its guidelines from the Constitution not Das Kapital and the National Social Justice Party.

Here’s the bad news, Republicans are still Republicans.

Whether it’s Flynn, Bannon, Gorka, Kushner, Clarke, they are all too eager to fall for the latest left-wing scandal. The media throws some chum in the water and watches the bloody fun as Republicans go after Republicans. Scandals are manufactured and strategically aimed to divide and conquer Republicans.

But the real target is the conservative agenda. Bogging down the White House in scandals keeps it from dismantling more of Obama’s regulations and orders. Every milligram of oxygen that foolish conservatives give the left’s narratives is a milligram taken from the lungs of the conservative agenda.

At the National Review, Jim Geraghty, who has loathed Trump since Day 1, seizes on the latest scandal targeting Jared Kushner. In recent days, the National Review has run four pieces on the fake scandal.

That’s an odd preoccupation for a conservative publication that ought to be more concerned with conservative policy priorities than parsing the shibboleths that the left is firing at President Trump.

But the National Review occupies a peculiar space between the Never Trumpers who have found cushy jobs on MSNBC and at the New York Times and mainstream conservative support for President Trump. It isn’t ready to leave the movement, but instead it insists on echoing media criticisms in a softer tone.

The Review takes the tone that it’s just asking questions. Those questions just happen to be the same ones that the media keeps on asking. If the mainstream media reads like an angry partisan blog, then the National Review sounds the way that the media used to when it was just biased instead of fake.

It just so happens that the Review is full of innumerable stories and posts about every media scandal. And its preferred pose is innocence. Like the rest of the media, it’s just asking questions.

What’s the big deal?

“What I don’t get is any reflexive defense of . . . Jared Kushner. Trump earned your vote, and presumably, some amount of trust. What did Kushner ever do for you?” Geraghty protests.

Presumably. In Geraghty’s world, winning the votes of conservatives, shouldn’t necessarily earn trust.

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Lefties now demanding statue of Sam Houston be removed from Houston Park By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Removing four New Orleans statues commemorating Confederate leaders was only the beginning of the campaign to rewrite American history. In the much larger City of Houston, Antifa activists are demanding the removal of a statue of that city’s namesake. KPRC TV reports:

The Sam Houston statue has been at Hermann Park since 1925, but a group that calls itself Texas Antifa has started a campaign to take down this and any other landmark that bears the name Sam Houston.

The statue has been a site to see for nearly a century and for some people, it’s a site they want to see for years to come.

“Honestly, I think they should keep it up. Yeah,” Nicole Nelson said.

But Texas Antifa group members want the Sam Houston statue gone.

On Thursday, the group posted on its Facebook page saying, “Texans agree the disgusting idols of America’s dark days of slavery must be removed to bring internal peace to our country.”

The group also suggested Mayor Sylvester Turner should back the removal of the statue, because of his ethnicity and political affiliation.

Mayor Turner is black, and apparently that is supposed to dictate his every thought and action. Too bad that the Antifa people deny him the moral right to reach his own decisions.

As the article points out, while Sam Houston did own 12 slaves, he was hardly an explicit supporter of slavery:

When Sam Houston was a senator in the 1800s, he repeatedly voted against the spread of slavery to new territories of the United States. He was also ousted as governor of Texas for refusing to align himself with the Confederacy.

Of course, if the statue is removed, then the city itself must be renamed by the same logic. Marcuse, Texas? Obama, Texas?

My gut instinct tells me that Texans will not put up with this nonsense.

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European Ignorance of War By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Poet, novelist, essayist, translator and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czeslaw Milosz died on August 14, 2004. He was born in Lithuania of Polish parents and lived under two totalitarian systems of modern history — national socialism and communism. In his 1953 work titled The Captive Mind he was asked

‘Are Americans really stupid?’ The question reveals the attitude of the average person in the people’s democracies toward the West: it is despair mixed with a residue of hope.

During the last few years, the West has given these people a number of reasons to despair politically.

World War II “destroyed not only [Eastern European] economies, but also a great many values which had seemed till then unshakable.”

Milosz describes how the average European during wartime was not accustomed “to thinking of his native city as divided into segregated living areas, but a single decree can force him to this new pattern of life and thought.” Thus, “Quarter A may suddenly be designated for one race; B, for a second; C, for a third.” And “…men, women, and children are loaded into wagons that take them off to specially constructed factories where they are scientifically slaughtered and their bodies burned.”

As these conditions worsen and “last for years, everyone gradually comes to look upon the city as a jungle, and upon the fate of twentieth-century man as identical with that of a caveman living in the midst of powerful monsters.”

Milosz asserts that the “man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because [Americans] have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.”

Although America suffered losses in the two world wars, mostly she was spared the experiences at home. Thus, according to Milosz, Americans take for granted that the natural order of things as we come to understand them, exists. The war and its attendant horrors were not in our backyard.

Yet, almost 80 years later, I humbly posit a different question: “Are Europeans really stupid?” With Islamic jihadist violence besetting their natural order on a daily basis, how can so many countries across the pond forget that totalitarianism comes in many different forms — with Islamic jihadism its latest manifestation?

At the site Bare Naked Islam, one learns that in 2017 alone, a terror attack has been attempted in Europe every nine days. In fact, “the UK Government reports that there are approximately 23,000 Islamic jihadists in Britain, not 3,000 as previously reported.”

But will the British government act upon the “recommendation of Anthony Glees, the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies director… to double the size of MI5, as [they] did in World War Two, and expand the number of intelligence-led police by thousands?”

In fact, “Colonel Richard Kemp, a former member of the COBRA committee and Joint Intelligence Committee, as well as commander of British forces in Helmand, Afghanistan, has also called for robust action, saying that all foreign nationals on the terror watch list who cannot be prosecuted should be deported or interned.” Will this occur?

Instead we hear that this is the “new normal” throughout Europe. In fact, the threat level is “Very Likely” in France, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Austria, and Macedonia. Paul Sperry writes that the “Manchester suicide bomber was on the British radar as a Muslim extremist, but they failed to stop him before he massacred girls at a pop concert. It’s a recurring problem on both sides of the pond.”

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The Non-Existent Case for the Paris Accord Getting out of Paris shouldn’t be a close call. By Rich Lowry *****

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

For a bull in the china shop, President Donald Trump has so far gingerly stepped around the Paris climate accord. That dance could end as soon as this week, with Trump deciding whether to stay in or opt out.

“Out” should be the obvious answer. No U.S. interest is served by remaining part of the accord, which even its supporters say is mostly an exercise in window dressing — that is, when they aren’t insisting that the fate of the planet depends on it.

The treaty’s advocates, hoping to forestall a Trump exit, are trying to save the accord by arguing that it is largely meaningless. In this spirit, a piece in the liberal website Vox explained, the Paris accord “asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.” In other words, “Nothing to see here, just us climate-change alarmists playing pretend.”

And there is indeed much to be said for the worthlessness of Paris. Beijing pledges that China’s emissions will “peak around 2030.” By one estimate, this is when its emissions would peak regardless. So the world’s largest emitter is using the accord as a platform for climate virtue-signaling.

According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, even if Paris is fully implemented and you accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s model for how emissions affect warming, it will produce a rounding error’s worth of decline in the global temperature by 2100 — .17 of a degree Celsius.

If Paris is such a nullity, why shouldn’t we simply pull out? This is where its supporters reverse field and contend that it will be a global disaster if the U.S. leaves. Supposedly the moral suasion involved in countries coming up with voluntary targets and having to defend their performance meeting them will drive an ever-escalating commitment to fight global warming.

Once upon a time, Paris was portrayed as a tool for steadily tightening restrictions on fossil fuels. The Obama team referred to one provision in the accord as “ratcheting up ambition over time.”

Whatever their opportunistic salesmanship at the moment, this clearly is still the goal of the treaty’s supporters and a reason why Trump should get out while the getting is good. International agreements acquire a dead-weight momentum of their own. Witness how hard it is to pull out of the Paris accord now, when it went into effect only last November. In another couple of years, it will acquire the sanctity of the Peace of Westphalia.

The treaty may be notionally voluntary, but climate-change activists will surely hunt for a judge willing to find a reason that the U.S. emission target in the accord is binding. Trump’s unhappy experience in the courts with his travel ban should make him highly sensitive to this judicial threat.

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It’s Long Past Time for Our NATO Allies to Meet Their Defense-Spending Commitments If they won’t beef up their military budgets now, they may soon find that the U.S. is unwilling or unable to bail them out in a pinch. By Jerry Hendrix

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Chancellor Angela Merkel, campaigning at a Munich beer garden this Memorial Day weekend, certainly delighted American citizens as they paused to remember their sacred war dead, including the 236,000 men who died in Europe’s 20th-century wars. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Merkel said. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.” Although Merkel meekly attempted to walk her initial statement back in the face of American complaints, she clearly intended it as a forceful response to the tongue-lashing the American president, Donald J. Trump, gave alliance members regarding their low levels of defense spending during their meeting at NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels last week.

Such a statement by the German chancellor would normally be viewed with concern by members of the American foreign-policy and national-security establishments, who view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a cornerstone of the post-war global order. But coming from Merkel, it was the height of arrogance.

Germany and the other European members of NATO have chronically underfunded the alliance for the past generation, as their defense spending dropped precipitously from an already low average range of 2–4 percent of GDP in 1991 to 1.2–2.5 percent today. Europe has spent the past 25 years focused on growing its social safety net and attracting new immigrants to offset lower birth rates, rather than on the more traditional threats to its east. Merkel’s Germany, the largest and most robust economy in Europe with a GDP of $3.8 trillion, could be contributing significantly to the alliance’s defense if it met the 2 percent of GDP defense-spending goal established at NATO’s Wales Summit in 2014. Instead, Merkel’s Ministry of Defense expends a miserly 1.2 percent of GDP, which ranks 16th among the alliance’s 28 member states.

A lot of ink has been spilled decrying President Trump’s failure to verbally commit the United States to the NATO Article V statement that an attack upon one alliance member shall be considered an attack upon all. This is troubling, especially since the only time that Article V has actually been invoked, it was on behalf of the United States, following the 9/11 attacks. This was a lost opportunity for Trump, to be sure. However, it should also be understood that many NATO members do not agree on meaning of Article V itself, which states that if an alliance member is attacked, each member state of the alliance will take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Many members have made it known that in the event of an attack their responses could range from a diplomatic note to a declaration of war. The United States has been one of the few members of the alliance to consistently state that it considers a military response to be its primary option in an Article V scenario.

The basic truth is that NATO leaders simply haven’t found the topic of their own security to be all that important. This is not true of the U.S. population, which still generally supports NATO and its mission. Nevertheless, President Trump’s skepticism of NATO also reflects the doubts of many Americans. While 80 percent of the nation backs NATO, 31 percent of the Republican party, which controls both houses of Congress and the White House, either opposes the alliances or remains ambivalent.

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Hillary Says Voter Suppression Cost Her the Election At the same time, real evidence of illegal-alien voting surfaces. By John Fund —

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

President Trump was understandably criticized last year when he tweeted out an accusation that he would have won the popular vote were it not for “three to five million illegal votes” being cast (a specific claim for which he provided no evidence). But contrast the blowtorch of skepticism he received with the virtual silence that came last week when Hillary Clinton made a similar charge, claiming that voter suppression cost her the race.

Both presidential candidates in 2016 want to make excuses for their own poor campaign choices. That’s why we need the bipartisan commission that Trump appointed this month to look at allegations about both voter fraud and voter suppression. Today, the Public Interest Legal Foundation released documented proof that in just 138 of Virginia’s counties and cities, voting officials quietly removed 5,556 voters from the rolls for being non-citizens in recent years and that a third of them had cast ballots. Virginia’s sloppy procedures are duplicated in many other states, making a national investigation imperative.

Hillary has clearly bought into a victimization model of her loss. She told New York magazine:

I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin. . . . Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.

What Hillary is talking about is a liberal theme spread by The Nation magazine and Priorities USA, a Clinton super PAC, that laws requiring voter ID and “other suppression rules” prevented many people from voting. Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who came within a hair of becoming the new head of the Democratic National Committee, got out in front on the issue shortly after the election. Just this month, he tweeted that “Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748) — via @AriBerman @thenation.”

But honest liberals haven’t let their brethren get away with such reasoning. Slate — in a story headlined “Did a Voter ID Law Really Cost Clinton a Victory in Wisconsin?” — quoted several election experts who poured “a big bucket of cold water” on the idea. The reliably liberal fact-checker Snopes ruled the claim “unproven,” noting that even if some people lacked the ID required to vote and didn’t bother to fill out provisional ballots, it didn’t mean they wanted to vote.

The liberal website Vox went further and pointed out that 1) Clinton lost in key states that didn’t have new voter-ID laws and 2) her margin of defeat was too big to be explained by any suppression. Even the New York Times filed a report from Wisconsin that found that black voters were far less excited about Hillary as a candidate than they had been about Obama.

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Donald Trump Puts Angela Merkel on Tilt If Europe loves NATO so much, why does the U.S. still bear the burden? By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A German leader in a beer tent announces a new indifference to the United Kingdom and America and a new determination to lead Europe into a glorious future, possibly delighting the expansionist strongman leading Russia. The result, a little over seventy years ago, was a calamity for civilization, before Germany was brought to repent of its ambition. In 2017, the replay was far less threatening, and the German leader in question began issuing comedowns and take-backs in about 72 hours. The only casualties were the excited opinion columns about Europe stepping forward to lead the world Trump’s America had abandoned.

But it was a mysterious statement. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Merkel lamented. “We Europeans must really take our destiny in our own hands. Of course we need to have friendly relations with the U.S. and with the U.K. and with other neighbors, including Russia. But we have to fight for our own future ourselves” Of course, she had electoral politics on mind. But something deeper is at work.

In poker, a player who has lost control of her emotions and the realistic assessment of the stakes at play is said to have gone on tilt. Donald Trump seems to put all of his opponents and some of his friends on tilt. The Democrats, the media, and foreign leaders often have good reasons to dislike Donald Trump’s leadership of the United States. Don’t we all? But what so often happens is that Trump’s opponents are goaded by the passions of their constituents, or their wounded sense of pride, or even deluded by their conviction that others must come to realize Trump’s presidency is some kind of cosmic mistake. And then they run out ahead of the evidence, or their own better judgment.

In global opinion-setting press clippings, German chancellor Angela Merkel and her new friend, French president Emmanuel Macron, outclass everyone on planet Earth. But in the real world, the thing that keeps cartographers sitting on their hands and reprinting the same European border maps year after year since the dissolution of the Soviet empire is the U.S. military, the one parked in Germany since 1945.

As one of her own party members said in an off-the-record comment to the Financial Times, “For Merkel, that was an unusually strong statement, Trump’s only been president for four months.” Perhaps a strategic partnership that has endured for the better part of a century isn’t so vulnerable to one tough speech by an American president, or so easy to change that the aspiration of a German chancellor remakes the world order.

Perhaps a strategic partnership that has endured for the better part of a century isn’t so vulnerable to one tough speech by an American president.

But that didn’t stop the gusher of enthusiasm for Merkel’s comments. The Europhilic Irish Times purred that Merkel was stating the obvious: “Faced with an erratic and unpredictable White House, with its purely transactional view of global alliances, and a United Kingdom rapidly turning inward, the EU can only achieve its goals by pulling closer together.” American opinion writers were not much more sober, declaring it the practical end of Atlantic alliance.

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Has-Been Hillary Hillary is retired, but courtiers help her maintain the appearance of importance. By Kyle Smith

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition. Her longtime loyalists are so happy to bustle around her in the service of maintaining the illusion that, after she takes an hour away from it all to exercise, her communications director, Nick Merrill, breathlessly updates her on everything that’s happened in the political world in the last threescore ticks of the minute hand. Her profiler, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, obviously a great admirer but one who declines to throw herself overboard from reality for the sake of giving Hillary more company bobbing about in the sea of fancy, writes that Clinton “listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on what’s happening, even though it does not.”

Ouch. Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesn’t know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments — too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesn’t need briefings. She doesn’t need to do interviews. She doesn’t need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesn’t need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comey’s firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. She’s done.

Clinton tells Traister, vaguely, “Take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I’m not running for anything,” and indeed she isn’t, right now, since this isn’t an election year. Yet nothing Clinton does these days makes sense unless you keep in mind that she actually thinks she could run again. Take her Wellesley address on Friday: utterly bonkers for a commencement speech. Newly minted graduates expect to hear something useful or at least funny or informative or, failing all else, sentimental. Clinton did a bit of this, then started lobbing word-mortars far over their heads at Donald Trump, making the kinds of Nixon comparisons that every Democrat, and lots of non-Democrats, have been making for months.

Why bother pursuing such a trite theme? Because Clinton was eager to show the Washington political hacks that she is still a tough operator, a leader of the anti-Trump movement, a player. She was, in other words, campaigning. To all appearances, the game is long over. Yet she is still on the field, because the game isn’t over to her. Hey, there’s another election in three and a half years, folks. And need we remind you who won the popular vote?

Clinton was eager to show the Washington political hacks that she is still a tough operator, a leader of the anti-Trump movement, a player.

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At Least 80 Killed in Blast Near Embassies in Afghan Capital Explosion strikes near U.S. military headquarters in Kabul’s Green Zone By Jessica Donati and Ehsanullah Amiri

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

KABUL—A bomb exploded near heavily guarded embassies and military bases in the Afghan capital on Wednesday, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 300 others, many as they headed to work on foot or in buses, the interior ministry and witnesses said.

The death toll from the blast, which officials described as a suicide attack, was expected to rise as more bodies were discovered in the debris and the critically injured were transferred to hospitals.

The Taliban, Afghanistan’s most powerful insurgency, denied responsibility for the bombing, which occurred as the White House considers a Pentagon recommendation to send an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to the Central Asian country to advise and assist its military.

There was no immediate response to the blast from the local branch of Islamic State, which has gained a foothold in the country since thousands of foreign troops were withdrawn from the country in 2014.

In the past year, the Islamic State affiliate has moved from its redoubt in the east of the country and carried out large attacks in the capital. Along with other Afghan militant groups, it has urged an escalation of attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, now in its fifth day.

Wednesday’s blast rocked the capital, sending a mushroom cloud high above the city.

“I was in the makeup room preparing for my morning show. A huge boom shook the room and everything collapsed. It was terrible,” said Taban Ibraz, a presenter for Afghan television network 1TV, located near the blast.

“The entire studio, newsroom and offices have been destroyed.”

An employee of Roshan, a mobile phone company, said many of his colleagues were killed and wounded in the blast.

“The two floors of office building collapsed completely as a result of the explosion,” he said. “Then office’s generators caught fire as well.”

The explosion struck near the entrance of the so-called Green Zone, which encompasses the U.S. military headquarters and the American embassy here.

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Fleeing Tyranny or Bringing it with Them? by Khadija Khan

Posted By on May 31st, 2017

Many newcomers to Canada and Europe are demanding laws similar to those from which they claim to be seeking refuge.

Newcomers soon start demanding privileges. They ask for gender segregation at work and in educational institutions; they ask for faith schools (madrasas), and demand an end to any criticism of their extremist practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriages, child marriages and inciting hatred for other religions. They call any criticism “Islamophobia”. They seek to establish a parallel justice system such as sharia courts. They are also unlikely, on different pretexts, to support any anti-terror or anti-extremism programs. They seem to focus only on criticizing the policies of West.

It is now the responsibility of Western governments to curb this growing turbulence of religious fundamentalism. Western governments need to require “hardline” Muslims to follow the laws of the land. Extremists need to be stopped from driving civilization to a collision course before the freedoms, for which so many have worked so hard and sacrificed so much are — through indifference or political opportunism — completely abolished.

Terror attacks and other offshoots of Islamic extremism have created an atmosphere of mistrust between Europe’s natives and thousands of those who entered European countries to seek shelter.

The situation is turning the Europeans against their own governments and against those advocating help for the war-torn migrants who have been arriving.

Europeans are turning hostile towards the idea of freedom and peaceful coexistence; they have apparently been seeing newcomers as seeking exceptions to the rules and culture of West.

In an unprecedented shift in policy after public fury about security, the German government decided to shut down the mosque where the terrorist who rammed a truck into a shopping market in Berlin, Anis Amri, was radicalized before hecommitted the crime.

The mosque and Islamic center at Fussilet 33 in Berlin had apparently also been radicalizing a number of other youths by convincing them to commit terror attacks in Europe and to join the terror group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The authorities had the mosque under surveillance for a time but did not make a move before 12 innocent civilians were butchered by Amri on December 19, 2016, while leaving around 50 others injured.

The police and counter terror authorities also conducted raids in 60 different German cities and searched around 190 mosques to target kingpins of another group called “The True Religion”.

Europeans appear to be seeking an alternative way to control this social disruption.