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The Brouhaha Over Trump’s ‘Treason’By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

That the national security threat we are talking about today is Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton illustrates the wayward state of our politics.

Mrs. Clinton operated unlawful, amateurishly non-secure email servers and mishandled classified information – including the nation’s most closely guarded defense secrets, involving deep-cover informants and highly sensitive intelligence-gathering methods. She did these things in such a criminally reckless manner that it is virtually certain the ruthlessly adept Russian intelligence services (to say nothing of the Chinese, the Iranians, other sinister regimes, and cyber savvy jihadist organizations) have easily penetrated her communications and obtained our intelligence. In addition, though her emails were government records, she destroyed thousands of them.

Clinton has thus committed serious felony violations of federal law. These violations are flagrant betrayals of her public trust, the essence of high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Nevertheless, tonight, one of our country’s two major political parties will nominate her to be the next president of the United States. That is atrocious … yet the story dominating today’s news is not Mrs. Clinton’s criminal and impeachable offenses; it is whether Donald Trump is guilty of treason.

Yes, treason – it’s apparently okay to use the word now. It is a word Republicans and their fellow ruling class Democrats would heretofore condemn any national security-minded American for using to describe the aid and comfort President Obama has given to our Iranian enemy. It is a word we still dare not utter in connection with the Obama/Clinton embrace of anti-American Islamists. But Trump’s own lack of restraint has evidently licensed Trump critique as a restraint-free activity.

And what on this occasion makes Trump guilty of treason rather than all-too-familiar Trumpian bombast? It is claimed that he has encouraged a hostile nation, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to conduct espionage against Mrs. Clinton for the purpose of influencing an American election.

This claim, it should be noted, comes from Democrats and Republicans who – it seems like only yesterday – have told us that Russia, far from being hostile, was our strategic partner. It comes from a Democratic nominee who, as secretary of state, enabled Russia to take control of one-fifth of the uranium production capacity of the United States while millions in relevant donations and speaking fees flowed to the Clinton Foundation and her husband. And as for the scourge of foreign influence on American elections, the money that came the Clintons’ way thanks to the Russian uranium deal is but a small fraction of the foreign “donations” that have poured into their “charitable” foundation – influence purchases from what donors hope will be the next Clinton administration.

The world is upside down.

Here is what Trump said:

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press… By the way they hacked, they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see.

On their face – silly as I feel for taking the time to analyze something this stupid – Trump’s remarks did not, even in a jocular way, do what his hair-trigger critics accuse him of.

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EDWARD CLINE: ON THE DESTRUCTIVENESS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

A guest essay by William S. Lind from An Accuracy in Academia Association meeting in 1998. TheWikipedia entry for him reads:

William S. Lind (born July 9, 1947) is an American monarchist, paleoconservative, columnist,Christian, and a light rail enthusiast.[1][2][3] He’s the author of several books and one of the first proponents of the Fourth-generation warfare theory. More recently Lind has advocated for police to have RPGs as standard issue, and for a return to death by hanging as a common sentence for crime in ‘urban areas’.[4][5] Lind is a key proponent of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, he asserts thatMarxists control much of modern popular media, and that Political correctness can be directly attributed to Karl Marx.[6][7] Lind also wrote Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War, in which a group of Christian Marines leads an armed rebellion against political correctness within the American government.[8] He revealed using the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes in a column for The American Conservative.

See also the Full Wikipedia on Lind. Here is his ALA paper on political correctness:

The Origins of Political Correctness

An observation from the late, great Barzun

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind (7/10/1998- 13th AIA Annual Summer Conference)

Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

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FBI’s Comey Warns ISIS Fighters Could Spread to U.S., Western Europe If Defeated in Middle East ‘Greater than any diaspora we’ve seen before,’ director says of possible outcome By Nicole Hong see note please

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Say what? Don’t fight them there or they will go to Europe and America? They already have. Is he dense or was he too busy trying to exonerate Hillary to have read the news about Orlando or France or Germany? Federal Bureau of Ineptitude? rsk

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey warned of a potential consequence of a future Islamic State defeat in the Middle East: a migration of the group’s fighters to Western Europe and the U.S.

In a speech at Fordham University on Wednesday, Mr. Comey said counterterrorism officials are focused on the prospect of hundreds of Islamic State fighters surviving the battlefield and flowing into Western Europe to commit attacks like the recent ones in Brussels and Paris. The ease of travel would also make the U.S. vulnerable to this threat, he said.

“This is an order of magnitude greater than any diaspora we’ve seen before,” Mr. Comey said. “A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is 10 times that or more.”

Mr. Comey said violence inspired and directed by Islamic State is the greatest current threat to the physical safety of Americans. Trying to stop such attacks is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack, he said.

“We have to figure out which pieces of hay may become a needle because there are troubled people consuming that propaganda all over the world,” he said.

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Hillary’s One-Candidate Race She’ll try to disqualify Trump because she loses if the election is a referendum on her. Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Conventions are useful for clarifying elections, and this week’s Philly confab notably so. A week of speakers—Democrat after Democrat beseeching the nation to please know that Hillary Clinton really is a good gal—has made something clear: This is, essentially, a one-person presidential race.

It’s Hillary against Hillary. This November is about whether Americans can look at 40 years of Clinton chicanery and nearly a decade of broken Obama promises, and still pull the lever for her. Not that Donald Trump doesn’t matter. He does, in that he can help sharpen those concerns. But Hillary is the main event.

The polls bear this out. Aside from his recent convention bump, Mr. Trump’s numbers have been largely consistent. Whether he leads or trails, and by how much, is mostly a function of voters’ shifting views on Mrs. Clinton. Lately her poll numbers have been devastating.

A CNN survey this week showed 68% of voters say she isn’t honest and trustworthy—an all-time high. CBS found virtually the same number: 67%. In the CNN poll, meanwhile, only 39% of voters said they held a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton. This is lower than any time CNN has polled Hillary since the spring of 1992—before she was first lady.

Mr. Trump’s poll numbers also bear this out. He is currently leading in the Real Clear Politics average despite no real ground game, little real fundraising, little policy message, a divided conservative electorate, and one of the messiest conventions on record. As of June 30, Mrs. Clinton and her allies had raised a stunning $600 million, which is already being spent to trash Mr. Trump. Yet to little or no effect. Mr. Trump is hardly a potted plant, but even if he were . . .

Mrs. Clinton’s problem is Mrs. Clinton. She is running against her own ethical morass. Already she was asking voters to forget about cattle futures and fake sniper fire and Whitewater and Travelgate. Then she chose to vividly revive the public nausea with her self-serving email stunt and her Clinton Foundation money grubbing.

Oh, she tried to roll out the usual Clinton defense: that this was just part of a renewed attack by political enemies. Yet the neutral inspector general of the State Department slammed her handling of official email; the FBI director (who works for Barack Obama) attested that she was careless with classified information; and she was caught on tape telling a series of lies about the situation. All of which makes it tough to blame the vast right-wing conspiracy. Tim Kaine’s many assurances that he “trusts” Mrs. Clinton was the campaign’s public acknowledgment that almost no one else in the nation does.

Hillary is running, too, against the reality of President Obama policies, which she promises not only to continue, but to build on. The president’s glowing appraisal Wednesday night of his time in office bore no relation to the country most Americans see—one in which health care costs more than ever, they struggle to pay the bills, and terror attacks on Western democracies are a weekly event. The state of the country might not be quite so grim as Mr. Trump painted it in Cleveland, but the mood is much closer to that grimness than to Mr. Obama’s forced optimism.

The president’s policies, which Mrs. Clinton now owns, have alienated significant tranches of voters that she needs this fall—in particular blue-collar Democrats. Coal communities are rejecting Hillary outright. Many union workers are too, whether they be Teamsters for Trump, or police officers appalled by the Democratic Party’s attacks on their profession. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hope Without Change Clinton is promising better results from more of the same policies.

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Democrats in Philadelphia extolled Hillary Rodham Clinton as a tireless warhorse with a lifetime of hard experience who also happens to be fresh and modern and historic. The contradiction shows how hard it is to sell a candidate who has been a national figure for 25 years when the public wants change.

The truth is that Mrs. Clinton accepted the nomination Thursday night as the most predictable Democrat in generations. Democrats have tended to nominate relative unknowns with strategically ambiguous goals, like Bill Clinton in 1992 or Barack Obama in 2008, who ran on hope and change and revealed his true ambitions in the White House.

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has been clear. She wants to serve as Mr. Obama’s political and policy heir, as she and he now admit. This won’t mean “change” unless the Clintons have an unusual personal definition of that word, as they do for “classified material.” A de facto third Obama term will mean the status quo, only more of it.

Also changeless will be Mrs. Clinton’s political and private character. Voters have seen enough of this national figure since 1992 to understand how she cuts ethical corners and then stonewalls and dissembles when discovered. This is why some 68% of the country believes she isn’t honest or trustworthy.

As divergent in temperament and worldview as Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump are, her average unfavorable rating (55.4%) is nearly as high as his (56.9%). If voters do decide they’re “with her,” no one can claim they didn’t know what they were getting—the same policies that have produced slow growth and stagnant incomes, and no doubt more scandal.

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No International Pariah Israel is successfully expanding its global network at a time of strained U.S.-Israeli relations over Palestine. Lawrence Haas

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Israel’s growing diplomatic, military, and economic ties across the Middle East, Africa and Asia should shatter an enduring myth: that the Israel-Palestinian conflict will make Israel an international pariah.

These ties reflect not only the foresight of Israel’s leaders, the doggedness of its diplomacy and the strength of its economy, but also the rise of Iran in the region and the spread of terrorism beyond it.

Consider the irony. Israel’s ties to the United States and Europe are strained over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, particularly with Washington, the Iranian nuclear deal – even though Israel is the lone nation in the turbulent Middle East that shares the West’s values of freedom and democracy.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ties to regional states, African nations and Russia and China are growing due to shared military challenges or economic opportunities – even though Israel has little in common with them.

To be sure, the U.S.-Israeli relationship remains a paramount concern in Jerusalem. Israel relies heavily on U.S. aid as well as America’s backing at the United Nations and other global bodies. The two nations share intelligence and work together on mutual concerns in the region and beyond.

Nevertheless, Israel’s growing global network is enhancing its flexibility on the world stage and reducing Washington’s leverage over Jerusalem. That’s good for Israel at a time of strained U.S.-Israeli relations, and it leaves America and Europe looking obsessed with an issue of reduced global concern.

Consider the contrast. Early this month, the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) warned that Israeli settlements threaten the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, echoing the repeated warnings of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande, who hosted 28 nations in Paris last month as a “first step” toward organizing an international conference to restart peace talks, told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week that he’s committed to leading global efforts to find peace.

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UPDATE FROM FRANCE: NIDRA POLLER

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Hervé Morin said it’s time to Israelize the French security apparatus. Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas accuses Nicolas Sarkozy of trying to Guantanomo-ize it. In the July 29th update, I will give a brief outline of the range of debate in France, touching on the secular “high ground,” marked by exquisite concern for democratic principles and the sensitivities of the Muslim community; the Catholic position of pardon and pacifism; opposition proposals for increased security, represented by an interview with the former and potentially future President Sarkozy.

In a condescending article about “bleeding heart France,” Stephen Brown [http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263652/frances-bleeding-heart-stephen-brown] assures us “the only French leader who appears not to have surrendered is Marine Le Pen.” Confusing the president of the Front National with her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen—who has indeed announced she will join the National Guard —he blithely delivers us into the hands of the Le Pen party. There is much to be said on this subject, but I already said it in 2014. [Dispatch International, NER]. And, by the way, the Daesh soldiers did not “do a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic.” They swore an oath [serment]. It matters. At least to me, it matters to get things straight.

And now, two days after the atrocity committed in the St. Etienne du Vouvray church, the answers keep turning into questions. I do not have boots on the ground. I sift through the widest range of secondary sources, doing my utmost to sift out nuggets of reality from the sludge of approximations.

For example: the longwinded centrist François Bayrou (who supported François Hollande in 2012) is outraged at the absence of protection of the targeted church, situated, he says, right near a Salafist mosque. But, objects a journalist reporting on the affair, Professor Bayrou is mistaken: the mosque near this church is not Salafist. It’s another mosque near another church in the town that, sadly, had donated a piece of its land for construction of the mosque. God’s little acre? So there are two churches and two mosques for a population of 30,000? Latifa ibn Zlaten whose son Imad was executed by Mohamed Merah in 2012, lives nearby, the memorial service for her son was held in that mosque, built on land donated by the churchand, she says, it’s not extremist. Christians and Muslims get along beautifully. Mohammed Karabila, president of the mosque is absolutely disgusted by these accusations. Everything is done in his mosque, he says, to encourage worshippers to be good citizens, good neighbors, respectful and diligent..

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Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Make Her Economic Promises Impossible to Achieve Michael Cutler

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

On July 24, 2016, Hillary Clinton joined Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, her Vice-Presidential candidate for a joint interview by Scott Pelley, correspondent for the CBS News program, 60 Minutes. That interview has been posted under the title, “The Democratic Ticket: Clinton and Kaine.”

During that interview, when asked about her goals she said, in part:

“I want an economy that creates more jobs. And that’s a lot of jobs. I want an economy that gets back to raising incomes for everybody. Most Americans haven’t had a raise. I want an economy that’s going to help lift millions of people out of poverty. Because, given the great recession, we have fallen back in the wrong direction.”

Pelley should have asked how her adamant support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) would help unemployed Americans find jobs and raise the wages of millions of American workers who are fortunate to still have jobs. CIR would result in the dumping of millions of newly authorized foreign workers into an overflowing labor pool that, by Clinton’s own admission, has not seen incomes rise, with millions of people currently live in poverty.

In point of fact, already the number of authorized foreign workers who enter the United States each month exceeds the number of new jobs that are created.

Clinton frequently has called for achieving “wage equality.” When making this goal the topic of her discussions, she invariably links achieving wage equality to raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. If you do the math, this works out to just $21,008 annually. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour results in an annual wage of $31,200. This is certainly not a middle-class wage.

The question never asked about wage equality is with whom would she make American workers equal?

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Islamist Terrorism, European Denial by Yves Mamou

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

Europeans have delegated to the State the exclusive right to use violence against criminals. But Europeans, especially in France and Germany, are discovering that some kind of “misunderstanding” seems actually to be at work. Their State, the one that has the monopoly on violence, does not want to be at war with its Islamist citizens and residents. Worse, the State gives off the feeling that it is afraid of its Muslim citizens.

“The concept of the rule of law means that the citizen is protected from the arbitrariness of the State. … Currently, the rule of law protects the attackers above all”. — Yves Michaud, French author and philosopher.

If a group of Jewish or Christian terrorists in Algeria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia had committed the same kind of stabbings, car-rammings, throat-slittings and shootings that France and Germany are suffering now, they would have provoked an immediate reaction. Tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of enraged Muslims would have rushed into the streets to kill, stab or eviscerate the first group of Jews or Christians they met. Within 24 hours, no church or synagogue would be able to open its doors: all of them would have been burned to cinders.

These words are not to stigmatize anyone; they are meant to explain what terrorists want.According to Gilles Kepel, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and a specialist of Islam, “ISIS calls for stabbing dirty and evil French people… because they want to trigger a civil war.” Muslim terrorists behind the wave of terrorist attacks apparently assume that thousands of French, Germans or Belgians will rush out into the streets, as they would do themselves, to kill, stab or eviscerate Muslims. Muslim sponsors of terrorism may not even be able to imagine that Europeans may not wish to participate in the pleasure of bloodthirsty riots.

The fact is that even if millions of Arabs and Muslims live in Europe today, Europeans are not Arabs and do not act as Arabs do. Westerners in Europe have delegated the “legitimate use of physical force” — commonly, if controversially, known as the “monopoly on violence” — to the State.

Max Weber, in his 1919 essay, “Politics as a Vocation”, claims that the State is any “human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In other words, Weber describes the State as any organization that succeeds in having the exclusive right to use, threaten, or authorize physical force against residents of its territory (“Gewaltmonopol des Staates”).

For French and Germans citizens, the mission of the State is to fight Islamist terrorists — harshly if necessary. But today, instead of the “legitimate violence” of the State, German and French citizens are encountering only denial. The State keeps denying that Islamist crimes are being openly committed in its territory. This denial comes in different forms:

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Water Madness by Tom McCaffrey

Posted By on July 29th, 2016

The federal government is draining Folsom Lake, one of California’s larger reservoirs-in the midst of a historic drought. We had a good Sierra snowpack this year, so the lake was almost full at the end of May. In the past when the lake was full, we could leave our boat in its berth at the marina until December, when the Bureau of Reclamation drains the lake to make room for the winter rains. But this year the Bureau is already draining the lake-to benefit the salmon in the Sacramento River, so we must pull our boat out in July.

One good snowpack is not enough to make up for four years of bad ones. Last summer faucets ran dry in some communities in the Central Valley, irrigation water to farmers was cut off, and thousands of farm workers were put out of work. You can see dead or dying orchards up and down Interstate 5. This summer the State-imposed restrictions on water use remain in place. Dead lawns and dying trees abound in our neighborhood. But still the feds are draining the lake. And they expect the rest of us dutifully to abide by the restrictions they have imposed on us.

The standard response to this sort of madness, among those able to recognize it as madness, is to blame it on radical environmentalists. But this is not the work of ideologues operating on the fringes of the environmental movement. This is standard-issue, mainstream environmentalism as practiced by the green establishment in Washington and Sacramento. This is not to deny that draining a major reservoir in the midst of a drought is a radical act. The point, rather, is that mainstream environmentalism is itself a radical ideology, and the current water shortage in California is Exhibit A.

From its beginnings in the 1960s, as I argue in my book Radical by Nature, environmentalism has been about preserving natural landscape where it exists, and restoring it where it does not. In California, this has meant, among other things, halting economic growth and development as much as possible. And what better way to halt growth than to restrict the supply of new water?