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A Brief History of ‘Fake News’ By Paul Davis

Posted By on June 26th, 2017

The original concept of fake news was called “disinformation,” an invention of Joseph Stalin, who coined the term. Some writings from the time indicated that the Soviets in many cases considered disinformation to be a higher intelligence priority then actual intelligence collection. This appears to be a continuing philosophy, with intelligence collection left to independent hackers and the thrust of state sponsored intelligence going to disinformation (dezinformatsiya).

Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive and cause chaos. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc explained in his[i] book Disinformation that the ultimate measure of success for disinformation was when the major organs of the media coud be tricked into unknowingly propagating deliberate falsehoods.

But the Russians are far from the only ones practicing disinformation designed against political systems. The current investigations of alleged “Russian collusion” on Capitol Hill are the result of a disinformation campaign that was begun by the Democratic Party and continued when the mainstream media were fooled into publicizing the accusations as fact.

This is not to say the Russians weren’t involved. There was much made of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s “Trump Dossier.” The dossier contained a lot of unverified allegations against Trump that would lead the reader to assume the Russians were either in contact and helping him or that they had enough information to blackmail him once he was in office. What is less well publicized is that Steele paid for the information, that he paid what turned out to be Russian operatives, and that he was never able to verify the information he received. There have been attempts to breathe life into the dossier by pointing out that parts seemingly have been verified by recent independent revelations. This is, however, part and parcel of a disinformation campaign, finding ways to shore up the reports you have already pushed out.

Of course, this type of reasoning can drive you crazy. If any lie can be proved true, then what is true? Actually, it’s not that difficult. You need multiple sources to confirm a story and they must be vetted to be trusted. This is where the disinformation campaign falls apart. The deeper you dig, the less the “facts” hold up.

This process appears to be happening now with the investigations into the Trump campaign and the Russians. The so-called multiple contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives were a bunch of disconnected and unrelated data points. So-and-so met with this person that has a connection to the Russian government. Look deep and there is a good and legitimate reason. President Trumps’ son-in-law attempted to set up a back channel to Russia. This is standard stuff and we only knew about some of it by intercepting the Russian ambassador’s communications with Moscow, that he knew were being intercepted and read. So, there was a meeting between Jared Kushner and the Russian Ambassador. This we know is true, but the exact contents may or may not have been revealed. If they were, it is still nothing, as back channels are a normal part of statecraft. We also know, or at least most believe, the DNC was hacked and e-mails released. This, however, is not a disinformation campaign since what was in the e-mails is true. This is a crime, as hacking is a crime, but it is not disinformation.

What was begun as a political talking point to explain the unexplainable, that Clinton lost to Trump, morphed into disinformation and is being carried so far that now the Russians have latched onto it to continue a campaign of disruption of the American government and political system.

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WHO KILLED NABRA HASSANEN A MOSLEM TEEN?

Posted By on June 26th, 2017

Leftist Illegalophilia, Not Islamophobia, Killed a Muslim TeenThe Left has only itself to blame for Nabra Hassanen’s murder. Daniel Greenfield

When Nabra Hassanen was killed by Darwin Martinez Torres, the media rushed to blame Islamophobia and Trump. The truth was simpler. It was the left’s own Illegalophilia that killed the Muslim teenager.

Torres, an illegal alien from El Salvador, had no interest in Hassanen’s religion. He got into an altercation with her friends. Hassanen happened to be the one he caught when her friends left her behind.

The murder happened in Fairfax County.

Earlier this year, Fairfax County Chief of Police Ed Roessler had assured illegal aliens that they had nothing to worry about. The police were not going to do anything about them until they killed someone.

“We’re not targeting someone on the street that we may or may not know is here unlawfully,” Deputy County Executive David Rohrer soothed.

Cecilia Wang, the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, demanded “accountability” for Hassanen’s death. That’s easy enough. The Virginia ACLU had pressured Fairfax County to go further in not cooperating with immigration authorities. Wang can demand “accountability” from the ACLU for Hassanen’s death.

Fairfax County’s refusal to investigate illegal aliens made it a magnet for a rising illegal alien population. Its jails have nearly 2,000 illegal aliens and the area has become a magnet for the El Salvadoran MS-13 gang. It’s unknown whether Torres was an MS-13 member, but his behavior matches the extreme brutality and fearless savagery that the group, which has been lethally active in Fairfax, is known for.

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Europe Is Still Ailing A glimpse into the dark malaise behind the EU project. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on June 26th, 2017

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

Recent elections in France, the Netherlands, and Austria, in which Eurosceptic populist and patriotic parties did poorly in national elections, suggest to some that the EU is still strong despite Britain’s vote to leave the union. Yet the problems bedeviling the EU ever since its beginnings in 1992 have not been solved. Nor are they likely to be with just some institutional tweaks and adjustments. “More Europe,” that is, greater centralization of power in Brussels at the expense of the national sovereignty of member states, is not the answer. The flaws in the whole EU project flow from its questionable foundational assumptions.

Those problems have been identified and analyzed for decades. EU economic growth and per capita GDP consistently lag behind those of the U.S., in part because of over-regulated dirigiste economies, over-generous social welfare transfers, expensive retirement benefits, restrictive employment laws, and higher taxes. Some countries have addressed these problems, most importantly Germany. But Germany’s economic success has exacerbated the stark contrast with the poorer performing Mediterranean countries. They are still struggling with debt and deficits, and suffering double-digit unemployment rates, particularly among the young, which range from 15 to 25 percent. Germany’s current dominance makes the EU look less like a union of sovereign states and more like a German economic empire.

Particularly ominous is the case of France, the second largest economy in the EU. France is facing cumulative national debt––government, household, and business––that totals 250 percent of its GDP, up 66 percent since 2007. This total does not include unfunded pension and health-care obligations. New president Emmanuel Macron has pledged neoliberal reforms to begin correcting this unsustainable drag on growth, yet previous attempts at even minor changes by French presidents have been met with street demonstrations comprising millions of protestors. It remains questionable whether there is the will among the citizens and their political leaders to face the harsh cuts and painful adjustments necessary to right France’s fiscal ship. Given the size of France’s economy, a fiscal crisis similar to that still troubling Greece will severely stress and further fracture the EU.

Europe’s economic woes are entwined with a serious socio-cultural problem: Europeans are not having children. Birth rates are at 1.58 child per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Since human minds and entrepreneurial creativity are modern capitalism’s most valuable resource, a shrinking and aging population––by 2030, one in four Europeans will be 65 years or older––bodes ill for future economic growth, leading to fewer and fewer workers paying taxes to support more and more of the aged drawing benefits. Pragmatic considerations aside, the failure to have children is also a failure to invest in the future or even concern oneself with the fate of one’s country beyond this life. Such attitudes promote an Après nous, le déluge mentality, and turns la dolce vita into the highest good.

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Trump, Mueller and Arthur Andersen Did the president act ‘corruptly’? Not from what we know—but then neither did the accounting firm. By Michael B. Mukasey

Posted By on June 26th, 2017

What exactly is Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating? The basis in law—regulation, actually—for Mr. Mueller’s appointment is a finding by the deputy attorney general that “criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted.”

According to some reports, the possible crime is obstruction of justice. The relevant criminal statute provides that “whoever corruptly . . . influences, obstructs or impedes or endeavors [to do so], the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had,” is guilty of a crime. The key word is “corruptly.”

President Trump’s critics describe two of his actions as constituting possible obstruction. One is an alleged request to then-FBI Director James Comey that he go easy on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was under investigation for his dealings with Russia and possible false statements to investigators about them. According to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” because “he is a good guy.”

An obstruction charge based on that act would face two hurdles. One is that the decision whether to charge Mr. Flynn was not Mr. Comey’s. As FBI director, his job was to supervise the investigation. It is up to prosecutors to decide whether charges were justified. The president’s confusion over the limits of Mr. Comey’s authority may be understandable. Mr. Comey’s overstepping of his authority last year, when he announced that no charges were warranted against Hillary Clinton, might have misled Mr. Trump about the actual scope of Mr. Comey’s authority. Nonetheless, the president’s confusion could not have conferred authority on Mr. Comey.

The other is the statutory requirement that a president have acted “corruptly.” In Arthur Andersen LLP v. U.S. (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the following definition: that the act be done “knowingly and dishonestly, with the specific intent to subvert or undermine the integrity” of a proceeding. Taking a prospective defendant’s character into account when deciding whether to charge him—as Mr. Comey says Mr. Trump asked him to do—is a routine exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It is hard to imagine that a properly instructed jury could decide that a single such request constituted acting “corruptly”—particularly when, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump also told him to pursue evidence of criminality against any of the president’s “ ‘satellite’ associates.”

The second act said to carry the seed of obstruction is the firing of Mr. Comey as FBI director. The president certainly had the authority; it is his motive that his critics question. A memorandum to the president, from the deputy attorney general and endorsed by the attorney general, presented sufficient grounds for the firing: Mr. Comey’s usurpation of the prosecutor’s role in the Clinton matter and his improper public disclosure of information unfavorable to Mrs. Clinton. But the president’s detractors have raised questions about the timing—about 3½ months into the president’s term. They have also cited the president’s statement to Russian diplomats days afterward that the firing had eased the pressure on him.

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The Missile Defense Imperative As nuclear threats grow, the U.S. needs more advanced protection.

Posted By on June 26th, 2017

Liberal opposition to missile defense has persisted since the 1980s, but the politics may be changing with technological progress and the rising threat from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons. Congress has an opportunity this summer to notch a rare bipartisan deal that enhances U.S. security.

Kim has already overseen more nuclear and missile tests than his father and grandfather combined, and the Defense Intelligence Agency warns that “if left on its current trajectory” Pyongyang will develop a capacity to hit Japan, Alaska, Hawaii or even the U.S. West Coast. The Trump Administration is pleading with China to stop the North, but Chinese leaders never seem to act and they’re even trying to block regional missile defenses in South Korea.

Meanwhile, the U.S. last month successfully tracked and shot down a mock intercontinental ballistic missile, akin to a bullet hitting a bullet. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD)—first fielded in 2004 but untested since 2014—has a success rate of nine in 17 intercept trials. But even the failures show the GMD is increasingly effective.

Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan wants to build on this progress with an amendment that would fund a more integrated system, add new interceptors and sensors and increase research. The legislation has united conservatives such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and liberal Democrats such as Gary Peters and Brian Schatz, no small feat in the Trump era.

Systems like the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense at sea and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) on the ground can shoot down regional threats within earth’s atmosphere. Only the GMD can hit long-range threats targeting all 50 states, bringing the missiles down in space. All of these systems have separate radars, which have to be coordinated to get a complete picture of a target. The bill aims to create a better integrated system that provides what Mr. Sullivan calls “an unblinking eye.”

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What Sharia Prescribes: Same as the Ten Commandments? by Nonie Darwish

Posted By on June 25th, 2017

Islam was created 600 years after Christianity not to affirm the Bible, but to discredit it; not to co-exist with “the people of the book” — Jews and Christians — but to replace them.

It is hard to read Islamic law books without concluding that Islamic values are essentially “a rebellion against the Ten Commandments”.

Islam violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” when Allah commanded Muslims to kill Allah’s enemies, and in the process, kill and be killed in jihad if they are to be guaranteed heaven.

Accepting a parallel legal system would effectively nullify actual freedom for many of the people possibly forced to use it, and the ability to receive equal justice under law. Sharia is the reason there is a death warrant out on this author, on Salman Rushdie and others, for apostasy.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, of the “Ground Zero mosque”, once again wrote a deeply inaccurate article reprimanding Americans for their supposedly “right-wing caricature” of Islamic law, sharia, which he insists is not a threat to American law. In his recent article “The silly American fear of sharia law”, he denied that sharia is incompatible with US laws and the constitution. Oh, really?

Imam Rauf tries to blame sharia’s amputation and stoning on Biblical Law:

“Sharia is not about amputations and stoning. These extreme punishments carry over from earlier, biblical law” and “Within the history of Islam, they have rarely occurred. What Islamic law does prescribe are the same do’s [sic] and don’ts of the Ten Commandments.”

Imam Rauf’s article is, to say the least, misleading — especially regarding the Ten Commandments. Sharia is not only incompatible with Western legal system but is the direct opposite of Western values; it has violated all ten of the Ten Commandments.

Islam was created 600 years after Christianity not to affirm the Bible, but to discredit it; not to co-exist with “the people of the book” — Jews and Christians — but to replace them. It is hard to read Islamic law books without concluding that Islamic values are essentially “a rebellion against the Ten Commandments.”

Islam has little respect for human life — of either Muslims or non-Muslims. To begin with, Islam violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Sharia punishes sins against Allah, such as blasphemy and apostasy, with execution. This is while it prohibits prosecuting Muslims who kill apostates, and also parents and grandparents who kill their offspring. Allah commands Muslims to kill Allah’s enemies, and in the process, kill and be killed in jihad if they are to be guaranteed heaven.

“Surely Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their belongings and in return has promised that they shall have Paradise.106 They fight in the Way of Allah, and slay and are slain. Such is the promise He has made incumbent upon Himself in the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Qur’an.107 Who is more faithful to his promise than Allah? Rejoice, then, in the bargain you have made with Him. That indeed is the mighty triumph.” (9:111)

The concept of adultery and loyalty in marriage is totally different. Loyalty is expected from the woman under penalty of death, but men have a lot of room in that regard, the result of the rights of polygamy and temporary marriage for Muslim men. Thus, in Islam, the concept of marriage as a covenant of loyalty between one man and one woman does not exist.

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Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain After protests shut down events hosting conservative speakers, schools reassess approach to free speech By Douglas Belkin

Posted By on June 25th, 2017

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it.

Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”

The University of California, Berkeley, where protesters halted speeches by conservatives Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, is debating bringing in conservative faculty to broaden the spectrum of political discourse on campus.

About a dozen schools have signed on to a new doctrine from the University of Chicago that puts free speech above concerns about political correctness.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment on campuses, so some kind of statement from the top might have good-sounding words but actions speak louder than words,” said Jack Citrin, a professor of political science at Berkeley. “I’d like to see what happens the next time [conservative intellectuals] Charles Murray or Ayaan Hirsi Ali try to speak on a campus.”

Dr. Citrin is a member of the Heterodox Academy, a consortium of about 900 academics that aims to broaden the diversity of opinions on campus. This week the group released its second university rankings, which aim to measure just how well the most elite schools in the nation are faring in that regard.

The organization says its members come from across the political spectrum. The largest group (25%) consider themselves moderates, according to an internal poll of their members posted on their website.

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking.

Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015. The aim of the place mat was to help students prepare “for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones.”

Striking the balance between protecting both students and the First Amendment isn’t easy, said Ari Cohn, a director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He called it “advanced citizenship.”

But he also condemned university leaders for “wanting to have their cake and eat it too.” He pointed to the commencement address delivered by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in May.

“If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words?” she said.

A week later, Mr. Cohn said, the answer became clear: Harvard would decide. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Did Votes By Noncitizens Cost Trump The 2016 Popular Vote? Sure Looks That Way

Posted By on June 25th, 2017

Election 2016: Late in 2016, we created a stir by suggesting that Donald Trump was likely right when he claimed that millions of noncitizens had illegally voted in the U.S. election. Now, a study by a New Jersey think tank provides new evidence that that’s what happened.

Last November, just weeks after his Electoral College win that gave him the presidency, then President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The reaction was angry and swift, with the left accusing him of being an “internet troll” and of hatching a “Twitter-born conspiracy theory.”

At the time, we noted that a group called True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud website, had claimed that illegals had cast three million votes last year. The media and left-wing groups immediately portrayed True The Vote as a fringe group with little credibility.

The only problem is, a study in 2014 in the online Electoral Studies Journal made a quite similar claim: In the 2008 and 2010 elections, they said, as many as 2.8 million illegal noncitizen votes were cast, “enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes and congressional elections,” said the study, authored by Jesse T. Richman and Gushan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

The bombshell was this: “Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”

It got little coverage in the mainstream media, and what coverage it did get was almost entirely dismissive.

Now comes a new study by Just Facts, a libertarian/conservative think tank, that used data from a large Harvard/You.Gov study that every two years samples tens of thousands of voters, including some who admit they are noncitizens and thus can’t vote legally.

The findings are eye-opening. In 2008, as many as 5.7 million noncitizens voted in the election. In 2012, as many as 3.6 million voted, the study said.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were 21.0 million adult noncitizens in the U.S., up from 19.4 million in 2008. It is therefore highly likely that millions of noncitizens cast votes in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Antithesis of Obstruction Trump did not obstruct a valid FBI investigation; he demanded the exposure of a false one. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 25th, 2017

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

The Left loves narrative. The ever-expanding story manipulates time, space, and detail to fit a thematic framework. Political narrative has some surface appeal, but it is deeply flawed. It obscures plain and simple truth.

So let’s stick with the plain and simple: The essence of obstruction is to frustrate the search for truth. Its antithesis is to demand the exposure of fraud.

Donald Trump’s political enemies are trying to build an obstruction case on the antithesis of obstruction: the president’s insistence that the collusion fraud be exposed.

Over a period of weeks, Trump came to understand what was being done to him. His exasperation was evident in his every bull-in-a-china-shop turn. An ardently pro-law-enforcement candidate, he came to office believing the FBI was in the fraud-exposure business. He thus could not comprehend why then–FBI director James Comey would not assure the public of what Comey was privately assuring both the president and the public’s representatives in Congress, namely: The notion that the president was a suspect was false. Implicitly, the narrative that Trump had colluded with Putin to steal the election was false.

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

The president justifiably believed this cloud of suspicion was grievously harming his fledgling administration. Despite both the dearth of collusion evidence and Comey’s acknowledgment — in non-public Capitol Hill briefings — that Trump was not a suspect, congressional Democrats continued to peddle the collusion narrative. The narrative became the rationale for “The Resistance.”

After the flame-out of the “Electoral College has destroyed democracy” storyline, the Left moved on to “collusion” as the Original Sin that rendered Trump illegitimate. Thus, Democrats rationalized, it was imperative to deny cooperation with Trump on any matter of governance — the approval of executive officials needed to run the government, the confirmation of judges, the Obamacare collapse, tax reform, Syria, debt ceiling, Afghanistan, jihadist attacks in the U.S. and Europe. Anything. The point of the collusion narrative was to delegitimize Trump in the public mind; cooperating with him, treating him as the legitimate president of the United States, was out of the question.

From Trump’s perspective, it was inconceivable that someone as sophisticated as Jim Comey could not see what was happening, how the cloud of suspicion enveloping Trump was damaging his administration. Over time, Comey’s explanations for why he needed to remain silent publicly made less and less sense to the president.

The rationale that it would ultimately serve Trump well if the FBI went about its business and cleared him in the normal course was a presumptuous elevation of the bureau’s work over the rest of the government’s. What, after all, is the normal course? The FBI had been investigating for months and months. Not only had it found no collusion; it had signed on (with the CIA and NSA) to an Obama-engineered report that not-so-subtly suggested a cui bono theory of Trump collusion in Putin’s machinations.

It wasn’t just the failure to dispel suspicions about Trump; the bureau appeared to be fueling them.

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ROGER KIMBALL: POTEMKIN PROGRESSIVISM

Posted By on June 25th, 2017

It often has been observed that philosophy really got going when people started thinking seriously about the distinction between appearance, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Plato is full of meditations on this theme, from the stick that appears bent when half submerged in a bowl of water to the texture and real significance of our experience of the everyday world.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/22/potemkin-progressivism/

The moral is: things are not always as they seem.

Alas, it is one thing to enunciate that moral in the abstract, quite another to take account of its operation on the ground.

Grigory Potemkin famously exploited our habit of innocence about appearances when he deployed a series of fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River. His aim was to soothe his erstwhile lover Catherine the Great with the illusion of general prosperity as she floated past the smart-looking façades. After she passed, the ensemble would be hastily disassembled, moved down river, and reassembled to greet the Empress anew.

There is a lot of Potemkin in the current ululations of the Left. Thousands upon thousands of unhappy females congregate on the Washington Mall to prance around in their vagina costumes and pussy hats while whining about Donald Trump.

Is the behavior of today’s Left just a façade, or is could it be indicative of something more substantive and troubling behind the door?

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) jumps up and down on the floor of the House warning about Trump’s possible “collusion” with the Russians. The siege machines of the mainstream media wheel themselves into place to repeat, elaborate, fantasize about what Schiff and his anti-Trump colleagues dream about, hurling little spit balls of accusation and innuendo over the walls of the public’s incredulity.

Hollywood, the academy, the “arts community” join hands to chant their anti-Trump mantras, hoping for deliverance from the awful truth of the election of 2016. Their aim? A sartori, a nirvana in which no one had ever heard of Donald Trump but only the pants-suited deliverer of their dreams.

Everywhere there is talk of “resistance,” disruption, unrest, even impeachment. This, even though the thing being resisted is the result of a free, open democratic election and the call for impeachment is not in response to any evidence of a crime, much less a “high crime or misdemeanor” to propel such a proceeding.

And now we have Robert Mueller, bosom buddy of James Comey, as special counsel. Like Santa Claus, he is making his list and checking it twice, filling his sleigh with Obama and Clinton attack dogs, and preparing to make his round-the-town journey to distribute presents to every deserving boy and girl Democrat. He has his verdict. All he needs now is a tort, and that’s what those salivating Obama-and-Clinton terriers are for: digging, digging, digging. There has to be something, somewhere that they can pin on Trump!

Looked from the outside, you might think that the “progressive” Left were on the march, that they were a rising force, voice of the people, popular-sentiment-against-entrench-interests,” etc., etc.

That may be the appearance. The reality is that Republicans control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, 67 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, and 33 Governorships, their largest number since 1922.

Just the other day, we were treated to the most expensive House race in the nation’s history as money from Hollywood, Manhattan, and Martha’s Vineyard poured in to back Jon Ossoff, the great white hope to shatter the juggernaut of Republican victories. The Dems picked the one really soft-spot in Georgia (Trump had taken it by only 1 percent in 2016) and spent at least $23.6 million to defeat Karen Handel, a weakish candidate but a Republican and therefore a possible scalp. It was supposed to be a “referendum on Trump.” And maybe it was. But the referendum did not go the way the Democrats hoped it would and Handel offed Ossoff 52 percent to 48 percent. By my count, that makes the special election score since November 9: Republicans 5, Democrats 0.

So there are grounds for thinking that the hysteria on the Left is just so much infantile caterwauling: they did not get the all-day sucker they were promised so they are going to sit down in the middle of the floor and wail and wail and wail. Litigate, too, no doubt, but even that will be conducted in tantrum tones.

I think that conclusion is mostly right. And I believe that Trump would be well advised to leave the Democrats in their bawl room, their boudoir (French for “room for pouting in”) while he gets on with the business of running, and improving, the country, which, by the way, he is doing very well.