The Biden Basement Strategy Backfires Jeffrey Lord

https://spectator.org/biden-trump-debate-joe-lockhart/

Call it an unforced error — a potentially serious backfire.

Over there at CNN, former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart outs the Democrats’ greatest fear: that Joe Biden will be a disaster in the scheduled presidential debates with President Trump. So Lockhart’s recommendation to Biden? Don’t debate.

Lockhart’s stated reason for a Biden refusal to debate is, no kidding, this:

Whatever you do, don’t debate Trump. Trump has now made more than 20,000 misleading or false statements according to the Washington Post. It’s a fool’s errand to enter the ring with someone who can’t follow the rules or the truth. Biden will undoubtedly take heat from Republicans and the media for skipping the debates. But it’s worth the risk as trying to debate someone incapable of telling the truth is an impossible contest to win.

Let’s leave aside the amusing irony of someone who worked for Bill Clinton complaining that “It’s a fool’s errand to enter the ring with someone who can’t follow the rules or the truth.” Donald Trump did just that in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and won the debates going away.

The Containment of China by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16300/china-containment

After China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years… the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World.

Countries could also be enjoined to cancel all commercial activity with China. Why fund one’s enemy and make him stronger?

China’s walk-in-the-park takeover of Hong Kong — an illegal appropriation — undoubtedly served to whet China’s expansionist appetite.

The firm tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s July 13 declaration that the U.S. rejects China’s fake claims in the South China Sea as mostly illegal will probably be seen as “just words.” The U.S. might need to convince Beijing that the U.S. and its allies have the political will to implement this containment.

China’s leaders are surely hoping that the current U.S. administration’s aversion to war will enable the Communists to pick off new territory with relative ease; the U.S. should not even let them think of such a possibility.

The Chinese Communist Party’s narrative is that the U.S. administration is threatening all the people of China. One Chinese state CCTV anchor added that the “U.S. fights for greed and arrogance,” but that “China will fight for a new world.” It certainly will — if we let it.

After China’s many transgressions over the past 50 years — including the theft of $600 billion of U.S. intellectual property each year; Beijing’s malignant cover-up of the Covid-19 virus; the Communist regime’s attempts to blind US airmen with lasers; constructing military islands in the South China Sea, and last month sending a massive fleet of 250 Chinese fishing vessels near the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, to name but a few — the military containment of Chinese expansionism and Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s stated goal of world domination needs to be the highest foreign policy priority of the Free World.

Portland: What Does It Mean? The issue that will re-elect Donald Trump in November. David Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/portland-what-does-it-mean-david-horowitz/

Perhaps the most emblematic moment in the battles raging in American cities came the other day when Bernie Sanders attacked President Trump’s decision to send federal agents to quell the riots in Portland Oregon. His alleged reason: they bear the earmarks of a “police state.” This, from a man who spent the entire sixty years of his adult life supporting every ruthless, communist police state on the planet – and there were many – and who to this day declares his solidarity with the police states in the West Bank and Gaza run by his terrorist comrades in the PLO and Hamas. Of course these twisted values have made him the most popular Democrat leader.

Our cities are under siege by communists like Bernie and other self-declared enemies of America who have made eminently clear that they are Marxists and their goal is the destruction of our democracy, which they hope to replace with a communist gulag. In the last two months these violent criminals have torched 400 American cities, injured more than a thousand police officers, killed more than a dozen individuals, looted and destroyed billions of dollars worth of downtown real estate and merchandise, all the while demanding the defunding of police departments. This has led to a violent crime wave resulting in the deaths of scores of individuals including at least eight children – all of them black.

Portland is the epicenter of this insurrection, the extent of which America hasn’t witnessed since the Civil War. Every night for the last two months thousands of criminals have attacked Portland’s downtown, firing explosives and wielding machetes, terrorizing its inhabitants, setting fire to its hall of justice, smashing public monuments and calling for the abolition of the United States. Like every other major American city that has been victimized, Portland’s mayhem has been made possible by the actions of a seditious mayor and city council who have refused to perform the first task of government, which is to keep its citizens and their property safe.

The Two Horsemen Of The Apocalypse: Fauci And Redfield by Michael Fumento

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/04/the-two-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse-fauci-and-redfield/

America’s number one health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, because of those ballgame photos, should be the most notorious unmasked person since the Phantom of the Opera. But, he insisted to Fox News “I had my mask around my chin. I had taken it down. I was totally dehydrated and I was drinking water, trying to rehydrate myself,” Fauci. Actually, the published ones either show his hands together or wrapped around a cell phone. Further, in a virtually empty stadium, he also found no room for “social distancing,” sitting between two others seat-to-seat.

Still, it may be hard to accuse the director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, “the nation’s most trusted disease expert,” of hypocrisy on anything since he has been all over the map on masks, epidemic severity, and pretty much every other aspect of COVID-19.

Further, in fairness he should be sharing the stage of infamy with America’s other top health official, CDC Director Robert Redfield, both of whose antics I have been documenting since they “blossomed” during the first epidemic hysteria of our time, that of heterosexual AIDS. Yet Redfield is virtually never found culpable for anything.

Let’s start with Fauci.

The Fallacious Dr. Fauci

The left-wing publication Vox.com notes it was not coronavirus but, “an earlier crisis that shaped (Fauci’s) career — and that’s crucial to understanding his position today.” Indeed. Nobody did more to kick off the U.S. AIDS alarm than Fauci, who was sole author of a 1983 piece in the prestigious JAMA in which he declared the disease might be transmissible by “routine close contact, as within a family household.”

One Swedish Model To Copy: No More COVID-19 Lockdowns

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/04/one-swedish-model-to-copy-no-more-covid-19-lockdowns/

We’re getting an awful lot of very bad advice from public officials about how to handle the resurgent coronavirus pandemic. All of a sudden, we’re told, we must lock down the economy again, for our own good. Common sense and experience, it seems, have flown the coop. Just look at Sweden, which avoided a lockdown and slashed its daily COVID-19 death rate.

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari is the latest to create a stir by saying he favored a “really hard” four-to-six week lockdown of the economy to get the virus under control and help the economy rebound later.

The only problem is, we already had lockdowns. We were told it would be a couple of weeks, so we could “flatten the curve.” Then, even as the infection rate fell, governors and big city mayors decided to keep their economies shut.

It didn’t work, unless you count destroying people’s dreams, small businesses, jobs and life savings.

Another “really hard” lockdown? Sorry. Recent research shows the lockdowns didn’t do anything but make Americans miserable by killing small businesses by the hundreds and laying off millions of workers.

A Fed president should know better.

As economist Abigail Deveraux, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Economic Growth, noted in a report for the American Institute for Economic Research, “it’s obvious that if you restrict and ban certain businesses, they will suffer for it. Some business owners who made it through the first wave of lockdowns are saying their businesses won’t be able to survive another. This isn’t rocket science.”

She has data to back it up here, showing that, as the title of her piece says, “Longer Lockdowns Associated with Much Worse Economic Outcomes.”

Nancy Pelosi Stands with Anti-Semites By Edward Davis

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/nancy_pelosi_stands_with_antisemites.html

Last Wednesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi endorsed Rep. Rashida Tlaib in her August 4 Michigan Democratic primary rematch with Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, whom Tlaib narrowly defeated in 2018. 

Similarly, for the August 11 Minnesota primary, Pelosi endorsed another of Congress’ three Israel-boycotters, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been enthusiastically praised by David Duke, and was voted 2019 Antisemite of the Year in a poll by stopantisemitism.org.

What is Pelosi’s motivation in supporting them?  Is it identity politics?  In Omar’s race, Pelosi had the option of endorsing her progressive African-American opponent, who opposes the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) campaign to isolate and destroy Israel.  In Tlaib’s race, where opponent Brenda Jones is a staunch ally of Rev. Louis Farrakhan, Pelosi had the option of staying neutral.

Even Brenda Jones said she’s had enough of Tlaib’s flamboyant divisiveness and emphasized the need for working with President Trump and the Republicans.  “I am interested in opening a dialogue with people that I do not always agree with for the good of the district,” Jones said.  She has criticized Tlaib for vowing, within hours of taking office, to “impeach the m—–f—–.” 

Perhaps Pelosi, who seems increasingly consumed with hatred of Trump to the point of fulfilling Tlaib’s vow of impeaching him for no good reason, prefers the Squad over conciliatory Democrats because she has reached the point where she shares their militancy.  Whatever Trump does, she predictably does the opposite. 

Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles By Mollie Hemingway

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/03/media-silent-as-christopher-steele-hero-spymaster-narrative-crumbles/

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier. That didn’t stop corporate media.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.

The American Left’s Media Purge By Lev Stesin

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-media-purge/

 The American Left is intensely frustrated by President Donald Trump’s ability to penetrate their monopoly on the news cycle. When the Left is frustrated, it acts out, up to and past the point of violence. A powerful weapon at its disposal is its ability to silence its perceived enemies. Much of the mainstream US media, cowed by the Left, reflexively capitulates to its demands to “cancel” individuals who express opinions that go against Leftist orthodoxy.

In the wake of the riots and destruction that coursed across the US after the killing of George Floyd, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was left with no choice but to resign after allowing the paper to publish an op-ed by US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas). Cotton argued in his piece that the military should be mobilized to restore order, and the airing of such a view is now verboten in the pages of the Times. Similarly, Stan Wischnowski, long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was pushed out of his job for daring to print a piece with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Both were victims not of careful reviews conducted by their papers but of the demands of the mob, which is now in control of the American newsroom. Along the same lines of this trend, Twitter made the executive decision to begin “curating” President Trump’s tweets.

To an extent, these events are simply eruptions coming from a large group of individuals who have not been educated in the norms of liberal democracy, but there is more to it than that. The demand to shame and ultimately silence perceived political opponents reflects the Left’s deep frustration that it has lost its monopoly on the news and is unable to beat Trump at its own game.

MSNBC producer resigns from network with scathing letter: They block ‘diversity of thought’ and ‘amplify fringe voices’By Joseph A. Wulfsohn

https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-producer-ariana-pekary-letter

A former MSNBC producer wrote a scathing open letter explaining why she recently left the cable news network.

“July 24th was my last day at MSNBC. I don’t know what I’m going to do next exactly but I simply couldn’t stay there anymore,” Ariana Pekary wrote on her personal website. “My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.”

Pekary provided a number of examples of why she wanted to leave the cable news network.

“It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate.’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day,” Pekary said. “Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”

She then quoted someone she described a “successful and insightful TV veteran” who said: “We are a cancer and there is no cure… But if you could find a cure, it would change the world.”

The Policing Crisis in New York City-The city is sinking into lawlessness, and the mayor blathers on about ‘sensitivity.’ By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/new-york-city-policing-crisis-mayor-bill-de-blasio-blame/

O n Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, cops carried out a routine arrest of an 18-year-old New York activist who is suspected of disabling police cameras by spraying paint on them. The person is suspected of this for very good reason: There are videos starring the perpetrator carrying out the act in question. (Allegedly.) The arresting officers were plainclothes members of the NYPD. The video of the arrest, in which plainclothes officers and uniformed police using bikes as barriers efficiently collar the subject, went “viral,” meaning it became attractive to stupid people who evidently have never seen Serpico or The Wire and insisted this was a “kidnapping” carried out by “stormtroopers,” presumably acting at the behest of Darth Trumper.

Plainclothes officers, in unmarked vehicles, are an essential crime-fighting tool and have been deployed for a very long time. Even a lintbrain such as Mayor Bill de Blasio, or Governor Andrew Cuomo, knows this. Yet what did they both do? Explain to the public how policing works? Of course not. They both denounced the police.

Cuomo was especially obtuse, calling the cops’ actions “outrageous,” because when you’re governor of New York, you’re at a remove from municipal police activity. But de Blasio should know better than to react as he did, which was to mewl support for the leftist street agitators of whom the arrestee was one. De Blasio has been badly burned before for issuing various no-confidence votes in the police force yet he called the arrest “insensitive,” adding that “we’re in a particular historical moment where there has to be sensitivity where folks are understandably worried about what they’re seeing coming out of Washington about the defense of democratic rights.”