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The Only Good Thing About Donald Trump Is All His Policies A U.S. president who is a boor presents a problem. The presidency, after all, has a symbolic aspect. By Joseph Epstein

Posted By on February 27th, 2018

My son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives. “I approve of almost everything he has done,” my son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”

Second the motion. I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often-strangling regulations from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax-reform law, and more.

I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity. America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.

In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.

The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.

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Alarmist Climate Researchers Abandon Scientific Method H. Sterling Burnett

Posted By on February 27th, 2018

It’s reasonable, and even expected, for educated people to disagree with one another on this issue in the way described above. I think this back-and-forth exchange is common historically, and often occurs when science is operating as it should.

Where many AGW believers abandon the scientific method is when they revert to various logical fallacies to manipulate the average person’s emotions in order to gain support for AGW and its associated anti-fossil-fuel political program. AGW advocates commit the fallacy of ad hominem when they call researchers who disagree with their assessment of the strength of the case for AGW “deniers” — an obvious attempt to link them in the public’s mind with despicable Holocaust deniers. That is not science, it’s rhetoric. I know of no one who denies the fact that climate changes, but there are legitimate disagreements concerning the extent of humanity’s role in present climate change and whether it will be disastrous. Scientists who refuse to admit that highly regarded scientists disagree with AGW are the ones who should be labeled “deniers,” and thus suffer the opprobrium rightfully attached to that label.

AGW proponents also commit the fallacy of appeal to numbers, when they say the case for dangerous human-caused climate change is settled because some high percentage of a subset of scholars agrees humans are causing dangerous climate change. Consensus is a political, not a scientific, term. The world once thought Earth was flat. Galileo said he disagreed and that he believed it was round (and he suffered for saying so). And you know what? He was right and the consensus of the time was wrong. At one time, the people, including the intellectual elite, believed Earth was the center of the universe and the Sun revolved around it. Copernicus said just the opposite. He was right, and everyone else was wrong.

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Worse Than Watergate: Part 3 — The Schiff Memo Jed Babbin

Posted By on February 27th, 2018

Democrats scramble to misdirect in defense of their own as the Nunes memo remains unrebutted.

On Saturday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released his memorandum in an attempt to rebut the Republican memorandum that HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) released on February 2.

As I wrote on February 5, the Nunes memo describes the FBI’s and the Department of Justice’s abuses of their law enforcement powers to spy on the Trump campaign and its advisors during and after the 2016 election.

The Schiff memo is cleverly written, making several assertions by which it attempts to confuse and misinform on the issues. It flails and fails in Schiff’s effort to discredit the principal findings of the Nunes memo.

The key points made by the Nunes memo are:

(1) that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified, and swore to its truth to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), from which the warrants were sought, that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

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Obama’s Genie By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on February 27th, 2018

President Trump not only wiped out any shred of Mr. Obama’s so-called legacy, he effectively destroyed the fantasy of a magical genie that has guided the former community organizer’s lifelong obsessive mission to destroy America.

Imagine a guy in his mid-thirties walking on a beach in Hawaii and seeing an object that actually looked like the genie lamp he read about in his childhood—the kind of lamp he could rub until a genie popped out and granted his most fervent wish.

Being a pretty ordinary guy—you know, the kind who hung out smoking pot, who slacked off in school, who didn’t get the girl and actually hated and was jealous of the guys who did—he asked for power.

Poof—the Genie granted him his wish, power beyond his wildest dreams.

To be sure, the Genie certainly didn’t know that this ordinary guy didn’t want merely to embarrass the guys he was jealous of, he wanted to destroy them. And not through the ordinary methods—knives, guns, poison, et al, although all of them might play a part one day—but through politics!

The most important thing the Genie didn’t know was that all those cool, get-the-girl guys were only symbols for the thing Mr. Ordinary hated most—America!

But too late—the Genie had given him the power to mobilize the entire world against the country he claimed was the place of his birth.

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Foreseeing Zuma’s Fall South Africa’s corruption was prefigured in a pair of thousand-dollar loafers. Theodore Dalrymple

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

The downfall of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa suggests that there might be a limit to tolerable corruption even in the most corrupt of polities; or perhaps it is merely the indiscretion of the corruption that makes it intolerable. The rule should be “steal what you like, but do not flaunt it.”

I’m not surprised by the extremity of Zuma’s corruption: it is, rather, what I had expected more than 20 years ago. It was a pair of shoes that gave me a clue to the future.

I had gone to South Africa in 1990, shortly after the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela, to interview Joe Slovo, one of the ANC leaders and a hard-line, pro-Soviet Communist. He had spent much of his life in various states of exile, surveillance, and imprisonment, but he was now free, and I interviewed him in his office in the Shell Building (than which nothing could have been more emblematically capitalist) in Johannesburg.

He was an amiable man, and I could not but feel sympathy for someone whose wife had been murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of parcel bomb sent to Mozambique, where she had taken refuge. He was a true believer in the Soviet route to heaven, but on his many visits to Moscow, he had failed to notice the lack of freedom and of consumer goods there (he admitted this). Either he wasn’t very clever, or he found the absence of freedom and consumer goods attractive. There is nothing like a shortage of sugar or lavatory paper, after all, for increasing the powers of political patronage—which he assumed, not totally erroneously, would shortly be his. It was his reward: he had been in the wilderness long enough.

I was briefly optimistic about South Africa’s future. Until the Soviet Union’s downfall, an event much underestimated in the peaceful evolution of South Africa, I had assumed that political violence there was inevitable; but a few experiences changed my view.

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Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg: Leon Kass on Politics as Moral Endeavor By Emina Melonic

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

A review of his searching new collection of essays, Leading a Worthy Life

Our present age has been marked by various forms of collectivism. People follow trends. They rarely think or ask questions. The idea of examining one’s life has become foreign, even old-fashioned, and yet the question of what it means to live a worthy and virtuous life persists, despite social pressures to live this or that “lifestyle,” as opposed to an authentic life. That question, seemingly simple, is what drives Leon Kass in his new book, Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times.

Kass, a philosopher and bioethicist, has devoted his life to asking what it means to be human. In this collection of essays, he explores that question in detail. Most of the essays in the book were previously published in a similar form in various magazines, although they have been updated here.

These are not just simple musings by a philosopher. Kass lives what he philosophizes. I saw that when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and attended a seminar that he taught on the Book of Exodus. U of C, as we call it, is all about the “life of the mind.” The approach to learning and arguing there is incredibly rigorous. It was there that I learned how to think critically, how to construct an argument, and especially how to take responsibility for that argument.

That was certainly true of Kass’s seminar. But it wasn’t just that. He is a superb teacher who treats every one of his students with the utmost dignity and respect. He challenged us and yet also encouraged us to be independent thinkers, skeptical of superficial and final pronouncements, and, more than anything else, to free ourselves from the shackles of ideology. In the chapter titled “The Aims of Liberal Education,” he writes that “thinking — all thinking — seeks to liberate us from slavish adherence to an unexamined opinion and an unreasonable trust in our own perceptions and experiences.”

Being the true philosopher and teacher that he is, Kass offers no final answers, which are impossible anyway. To be sure, he makes value judgments, and he challenges groupthink. But the book reveals a man with an open mind that lives in concert with an open heart, always learning, seeking wisdom, and striving to be a good human being in every sphere of his life. What binds the essays together is the author’s rightful insistence to remind us of the dignity inherent in every human being. Knowing and recognizing that dignity — in other words, refusing to engage in the dehumanization of another — should always be a starting point for both contemplation and action.

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North Korea’s Cheerleaders Are Forced to Have Sex with Party Leaders By Wesley J. Smith

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

North Korea wins the gold medal for evil regimes. Its people are starved. There is almost no electricity outside the capital. There reportedly are concentration camps. Its leader threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

But who cares? Too many in the media went gaga over Dear Leader’s wicked sister — after all, at least she’s not Pence! — and they cheered on the cult-victim North Korean cheerleaders as if they had something to cheer about.

Now, it turns out, those cheerleaders are forced to have sex with party leaders. From the New York Post story:

Members of the North Korean national cheerleading squad — who have been featured gleefully rooting at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics — are systematically forced to have sex with high-ranking members of Kim Jong Un’s twisted regime, according to a disturbing report.

Behind the scenes, the troupe — dubbed the “Pleasure Squad” by insiders — are forced to perform sex acts on party leaders during their trip to the Olympics, a defector with knowledge of the sexual slavery told Bloomberg News.
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“[The] troupe came here and performed with dances and songs, and it might seem like a fancy show on the outside [but] they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services,” said defector Lee So Yeon, a military musician who fled the country in 2008, during Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” said Yeon, 42.

Those poor young women. Imagine the agony and fear they hide behind their rigidly choreographed smiles.

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The Schiff Memo Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.

Maybe Adam Schiff has more of a sense of humor than I’d have given him credit for. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat begins his long-awaited memo — the minority response to the Nunes memo that was penned by staffers of the committee’s Republican majority — by slamming Chairman Devin Nunes’s unconscionable “risk of public exposure of sensitive sources and methods for no legitimate purpose.” The Schiff memo, which has been delayed for weeks because the FBI objected to its gratuitous effort to publicize highly classified intelligence, including methods and sources, then proceeds to tell its tale through what appear to be scores of blacked-out redactions of information Schiff pushed to expose.

Heavy Reliance on Steele Dossier Confirmed
The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This passage puts the lie to two of the main Democratic talking points:

1) This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump–Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.

It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

Moreover, because Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his “clandestine” activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

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Deadly Threat from Iran Former IRGC commander threatens to nuke Israel – and why he’s for real. Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

Maj. General Mohsen Rezai founded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the early days of the revolution, upon the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.

While he relinquished control of the IRGC in 1997, he remains one of the regime’s most influential leaders. A “principalist,” who is considered a revolutionary purist, Rezai has occasionally shown a more pragmatic bent.

He regularly boasts of the Iranian regime’s military power, and issues threats to all who would challenge the regime that seem to get dismissed in the Western media.

Last week, when he vowed to “level Tel Aviv to the ground,” was no exception.

He was speaking in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned at the Munich Security Conference last week that Israel would “act against Iran itself” if Iran continued to invade Israeli air space, as they did when they sent a drone into Israel from an air base in Syria.

And yet, outside of the Israeli media, only the Daily Mail paid much attention to Rezai’s threats.

But make no mistake about it: General Rezai understands the cold calculus of nuclear deterrence, and he was not making an idle threat.

His message was crystal clear: Iran considers itself to be a nuclear weapons-capable state. And he speaks from direct, personal knowledge since he was himself in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade.

I know this because his son defected to the United States at the age of 23 in 1999, and wound up staying with me for several months, learning English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies. Many of the stories he told me about his father I related in a 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Here is just one of them, which explains why I am confident that General Rezai was not making an idle threat to Israel last week. It involves a January 1993 trip Rezai made to China and North Korea with a 50-man military delegation, as well as his then teenage son.

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How Identity Politics Is Made to Destroy Us By David Horowitz

Posted By on February 26th, 2018

In January, when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers.

“Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.” This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the illegal aliens who had benefited from President Obama’s constitutionally suspect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all of whom are nonwhite, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly nonwhite.

Trump’s general immigration plan seeks to move to a merit-based system, which would give priority to immigrants who can contribute needed skills to the country and would have a reasonable chance of success once they arrived. Giving priority to English speakers would enhance the ability of new arrivals to assimilate and succeed. To oppose such a plan on the grounds Pelosi does, one would have to believe that nonwhite immigrants don’t have skills or don’t speak English. Anti-Trump reporter Jim Acosta made the latter insinuation on CNN. He said Trump wanted only immigrants from majority-white countries like “England and Australia.” In fact, English is the official language in more than 57 countries, including such nonwhite countries as Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Botswana, as well as Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Guyana.

Pelosi’s malicious accusation was even more disconnected from reality, since Trump has never proposed excluding or expelling populations based on race, which would be the only way to “make America white again” (whatever that might mean). Yet this denial of obvious facts in order to gin up a racial indictment of what otherwise would be seen as patriotic policies has become the ever-present theme of the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s presidency. These attacks began with his first statement on immigration during the opening presidential primary debate. At that time, speaking specifically of people crossing the border illegally, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”