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Trumping right along by James Piereson A review of The Case for Trump by Victor Davis Hanson.

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/trumping-right-along

EXCERPTS: “Democrats across the board, along with many “never Trump” conservatives, still do not accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and they have worked incessantly for the past two years to nullify the verdict of the voters for daring to elect him in the first place. Some left-wing critics, including a few Hollywood celebrities, have openly hoped for the assassination of the President or for violence against his supporters and family members, while at the same time attacking him for violating established political norms. Well-known authors have turned out one book after another purporting to show that the President’s administration is in chaos, that he is unfit to hold office, or that he has committed crimes deserving impeachment. Those lonely Trump voters—some sixty-three million of them scattered across the land—have so far waited in vain for a prominent writer to step forward to make the case for the candidate they elected in the hope that he might stem the loss of their jobs, the collapse of their communities, and the overall decline of their country.Their wait is now over, thanks to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Case for Trump, an insightful, informative, and much-needed account of Donald Trump the upstart candidate and precedent-shattering president.1 Hanson, the author of many books on the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the history of warfare, including a comprehensive history of World War II published last year, writes in defense of President Trump with a degree of depth and sophistication that readers will not find in the carelessly written and unsourced broadsides attacking the President.

“After two years in office, Trump’s vocal critics are having a difficult time denying his many achievements, including a bustling economy, foreign policy successes, judicial appointments, regulatory reforms, energy independence, and a strong effort to curb illegal immigration, to name the most obvious ones. Will he succeed in rekindling the fortunes of the American worker, taming the establishment, and re-balancing U.S. national interests against international pressures? It is still too soon to tell. But, as Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates in this fascinating analysis of the past three years, no matter how things turn out this year and next, President Trump has made a good start in addressing issues in America that have for too long been ignored by both political parties.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris gains momentum among Democrats with proposal to legalize prostitution By Seth McLaughlin

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/3/kamala-harris-prostitution-decriminalization-propo/

Decriminalizing prostitution — an idea gaining momentum among some Democrats, including at least one 2020 presidential contender — may one day be traced back to the hookers plying their trade under the elevated train along New York City’s Roosevelt Avenue.

That open-air market of prostitutes and johns in Queens, undeterred by the constant threat of arrest and incarceration, has been cited by New York state lawmakers mulling whether it’s time to wave the white flag in the war on the world’s oldest profession.

The decriminalization debate among Democrats spilled into the 2020 presidential race last month when Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California said she was supportive of the idea — although the legalization crowd complained that she was still too timid.

It was less than a decade ago that the Democratic Party embraced same-sex marriage and just three years ago that it formally adopted a platform plank to legalize marijuana. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona, chairman emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said decriminalizing sex work is on “that same trajectory.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

President Trump’s approval rating continues to climb William Cummings

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/04/president-donald-trumps-approval-numbers-continue-climb/3053565002/

President Donald Trump’s job approval numbers continue to climb, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls.

After an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published Monday put Trump’s approval rating at 46 percent among registered voters, his RCP average rose to 44.4 percent, his highest mark since October 2018 following the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Trump’s highest RCP average of his presidency was 46 percent, just after his inauguration. Two months later, it dropped below 44 percent and stayed there, only briefly returning above that level in May, June and October of 2018.

Despite that improvement, the numbers still indicate the president is vulnerable heading into the 2020 election.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 41 percent of registered voters plan to vote for Trump while 48 percent said they plan to vote for whoever ends up becoming the Democratic candidate. By contrast, at about this point in former President Barack Obama’s presidency, 45 percent of voters said they planned to vote for Obama while 40 percent preferred a generic Republican candidate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

House Democrats open sweeping corruption probe into Trump’s world The House Judiciary panel is requesting documents from more than 80 people or entities in Trump’s orbit, including his adult sons. By Andrew Desiderio and Darren SamuelsOHN

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/04/nadler-trump-investigation-1201488

A key House committee with the power to impeach President Donald Trump kicked off a sweeping new investigation on Monday with document demands from the White House, Trump’s namesake company, charity, transition, inauguration and 2016 campaign, as well as several longtime associates and the president’s two adult sons.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, opened his much-anticipated probe with letters to 81 individuals, companies and government entities seeking a wide range of materials that go to the heart of allegations against the president — including abuses of power, corruption, and obstruction of justice.

“This is a critical time for our nation,” Nadler wrote to each recipient, all of which his staff noted have already been ensnared in investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller or other federal prosecutors. “President Trump and his administration face wide-ranging allegations of misconduct that strike at the heart of our constitutional order.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Donald Trump the paradox Trump’s election caused a self-created contradiction: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://spectator.us/victor-davis-hanson-trump-paradox

John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is the unloved Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion, the community he has saved symbolically closing the door on him.

If he is lucky, President Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate. By his very excesses, Trump has already lost in conventional terms of being admired or considered presidential, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.

No one can still quite calibrate whether Trump’s combativeness and take-no-prisoners management style always hurts him as president, or is a necessary continuum of his persona that ensured his unlikely election and early political effectiveness as president. And no one quite knows either whether Trump’s inexplicable outbursts are sometimes planned by design to unnerve his critics and the media, or are instead spontaneous expressions of indiscipline and crudity. Conventional wisdom squares these circles by concluding that Trump’s ferocity shores up his base, but his base is not large enough to give him a reliable 51 percent popularity rating among voters. Most also have concluded that Trump’s unorthodox style, speech, and comportment likewise are designed to advance his agendas, but are usually overtaken by his fury. But how often the last three years has conventional wisdom been right?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Steele Dossier’s ‘Corroborated’ Claims Were Old News By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-russia-steele-dossier-claims-old-news/

It spun old facts. It didn’t give us new ones.
Ross Douthat had an excellent column in Times on Sunday about the state of the Trump-Russia investigation. He homed in on the Steele dossier and its four major claims (or, as he put it, the four “big possibilities” it raised). The first of these “was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.” Ross adds that this big possibility was “soon well corroborated.”

I want to take issue with both the suggestion that Steele should get any credit for this claim and the implication that the corroboration of it is in any way a corroboration of Steele. On the matter of Russia’s culpability for hacking the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, Steele was just following the crowd. His vaunted Russian sources clearly gave him no foreknowledge about it, notwithstanding that he’d been poking around for Trump–Russia conspiracy evidence for well over a month by July 22, 2016, when publication of the DNC emails began.

This is worth exploring because it highlights an insidious aspect of the dossier that has gotten too little attention: This opposition-research screed produced by the Clinton campaign did not, through Steele’s purportedly well-placed sources, foretell events. Rather, after events occurred, Steele wove them into the Democrats’ Trump-Russia conspiracy narrative.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: No Peace or Reconciliation with the ‘Infidels’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13827/palestinians-peace-infidels

The ruling by the Palestinian Scholars’ Association is also aimed at sending a message to the US administration that the Palestinians and the Muslims will have nothing to do with the “Deal of the Century.” Moreover, it serves as a reminder that even if some Arabs do sign peace treaties with Israel, there will always be those Muslims who will denounce them as “traitors” and accuse them of acting against the Koran and the rulings of Islam.

Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, is acutely aware that Muslims will condemn him — and perhaps issue a fatwa calling for his death — if he ever dares to make peace with the Jews. That suspicion might explain his recent comment during a visit to Egypt, when he was reported to have said that he does not intend to end his life as a traitor by making concessions to Israel

In a recent move, Palestinians have begun resorting to Islam to justify their vehement opposition to normalization of relations with Israel. Palestinian leaders and activists have long cited political and nationalist reasons to explain their opposition to any form of normalization with Israel — but Islam is a new factor in the mix.

The increased talk about the possibility of some Arab countries normalizing their relations with Israel has prompted the Palestinians to wage a campaign aimed at pressuring Arab leaders to refrain from embarking on such a move. The most recent campaign is titled: “Normalization is a Crime.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/pigs-on-two-

Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community.

In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.

Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.

Now even the divine Obama is having his ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Trump Has Saved the Free Speech Movement By Troy Worden

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/trump-has

He took a hard punch in the face for all of us.”

With these words, President Donald Trump transformed Hayden Williams, the young conservative campus activist who was viciously punched in the face at UC Berkeley last month, from a victim to conservative folk hero.

Trump went further. With Williams looking on in starstruck awe, the president announced at the Conservative Political Action Convention on Saturday that he would sign an executive order that would oblige American universities to comply with the First Amendment’s free-speech protections or risk losing federal funding.

For President Trump, it was an old refrain: his words echoed sentiments he expressed exactly two years and one month ago on Twitter, the day after the city of Berkeley was set ablaze in a riot over conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s planned speaking engagement on campus.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Making Korean Lemonade By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/making

Donald Trump bought a Korean lemon in 2018. Last week, he made some lemonade.

By walking out on his second summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump stepped out of the policy trap that he had entered the previous year. By showing seriousness in a negotiation that seemed likely to continue along the previous three U.S. administrations’ fanciful pattern, Trump lent force to America’s dealings with China as well as others.

Ending the North Korean “denuclearization” charade is honest and sobering. But it does nothing to meet our dire our need for protection against ballistic missiles, including from Korea.

Making nice with Kim at the 2018 Winter Olympics was among the foolish legacies of Trump’s original foreign policy team. With regard to Korea, as with China, Afghanistan, Europe, and everything else, the intellectual horizon of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was bounded by George W. Bush’s Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama’s Ben Rhodes. Like their predecessors, Tillerson and McMaster followed “the allies,” and believed in “progress.” Hence, they lent themselves to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s campaign to use the Seoul Olympics to advance his leftist party’s attempt to legitimize the North Korean regime.

Moon knew that America’s buy-in to that campaign was essential to legitimizing it with South Korean public opinion. Kim, for his part, put on his lugubrious charm. And, for the umpteenth time since his father started building nukes and missiles three decades ago, Kim offered to give them all up. This time, for sure!