Errant Nonsense

Ever since the G7 summit, president Trump has criticized European leaders harshly. Trump is no Metternich, Disraeli or Kissinger; he is blunt and his comments indecorous. But the pointed criticisms he has made to the Europeans, especial Germany’s Angela Merkel, are not only well deserved, they are long overdue.

Since the beginning of the Cold War a rapacious Soviet foreign policy was kept in check by United States troops stationed primarily in Germany. These troops were often characterized as a “trip wire”, that if engaged by the Russians, would lead to inevitable armed hostilities. The peace was kept due to the deterrent effect of the American strategic nuclear umbrella.

The unconditional and unwavering military commitments made by the United States for the defense of Europe during the Cold War as well as the Marshall Plan, were primarily responsible for Europe’s ability to rebuild their post-war economies. During this period of recovery, Europe ran up trade surpluses with the United States that continued up until the recent G7 meeting.

Trump indelicately informed the spoiled and haughty Europeans that this grotesque imbalance was going to be redressed.

Trump merely asked the Europeans to pay their fair share of military expenditures as members of NATO. Indeed, under the treaty the Europeans were required to pledge a specified amount of their GNP for defensive capabilities; most of them balked, and with the exception of Great Britain, have contributed a pittance. Germany, the economic power house of Europe, was only paying a laughable 1% and simultaneously running trade surpluses with America, while the U.S. taxpayer subsidized its defense capabilities.

This was obscene and Trump indelicately informed the stunned and militarily dependent Europeans that their days of post-war freeloading were over.

Relieved of the mettlesome cost of providing for their own defense, the European, especially Germany, spent enormous sums on lavish social welfare programs that in the end, were indirectly subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.

Despite the collapse of the former Soviet Union, did any previous American president ever ask why U.S. troops are still stationed in Germany long after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Europe has been drifting away from the United States culturally and economically. Political elites favor consolidation of decision making with European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Many of the old European countries have willingly ceded their sovereignty for the idea of a common or unified Europe. Merkel has opened her borders to migrants from the Middle East and they have flooded in, unwilling to adopt or assimilate to the cultural and national mores of their host country.

Replacement birth rates in Europe are dangerously low. In short, Europe is dying a slow death; a fate suffered by its own hands.

There is very little substance or commonality left within the Transatlantic alliance. Trump understands this reality and has acted accordingly, reversing decades of counterproductive and unenlightened U.S. foreign policy that had never adopted to the changing geopolitical realities.

Trump has thrown down the Pochahantos gauntlet on Senator Elizabeth Warren to prove she has a Cherokee heritage.

Last Thursday In his typical trademark bombastic style, presidnet Trump challenged Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to take a blood test in exchange for $1 million that would definitively prove whether or not she has Cherokee blood.

Trump spoke as if he were debating Warren in a presidential election contest, Trump said his team would purchase a DNA blood test kit and during the debate,

“And we will say, ‘I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to

your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian,”

Trump said. “And we’ll see what she does. I have a feeling she will say no

but we will hold it for the debates.”

Warren naturally changed the subject when she responded,

“Hey, @realDonaldTrump: While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order. Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you’re destroying.”

Through this challenge, Trump did more in one day to halt the pernicious influence of identiy politics that has coursed through the political veins of the country than the entire Republican establishment has done since the Reagan presidency.

In fairness to the anti-Trump wing of the party, when you contrast something against nothing, Trump will always prevail.

Trump is going to prove to be one of the most brilliant politicians of our lifetime for the simple reason that he came to Wasahington with a wrecking ball and he hasn’t stopped swinging it. Trump has no political experinece and that is just what the times call for to shake up the corrupt swamp in Washington. Those in flyover country who are not enthralled with the political elites who have overseen the nations decline are cheering raucously at Trump’s takedown of the the patent fraud, Elizabeth Warren.

Trump’s audacious and unorthodox stunt was another adroit political move unappreciated by the brain-dead establishment and anti-Trump wing of the party. Trump accomplished three things with the good natured contest. First, he insures that the entire identiy politics scam for which Warren is an exemplar is exposed for what it is: an exercise in monuental silliness that lays bare progressives obsession with race as the determinative factor in politics.

Second, Trump can resurrect the phoniness of Warren at will. He refused to be bound by the strictures and rules that were established by the mainstream media to circumscribe Republican president’s choices in the political arena. Since starting in office, Trump has gone over the heads of the media and communicated directly wiht the American people. This insures that the Pocahontas story will not be buried or ingnored completely by the mainstream media.

Third, by publicly shaming Warren, Trump is going to put the nail in the coffin of a pernicious political idelogy that provides succor for the hard left and now for the entire Democratic Party.

Trump is not going to let Warren off the hook. Rest assured, we have not heard the last about Warren’s shameful saga.

It is gong to be great fun watching Warren squirm as she steadfastly refuses to take the simple blood test that would exonerate her claims of Cherokee ancestry and end the mystery once and for all.

And that is precisely the reason Trump is going to keep pressing the issue.

Warren’s refusal to take the test will have the same effect as a criminal defendant taking the Fifth.

On multiple occasions, Warren had an opportunity to rescind her silly claims and end the matter definitively. She chose to cotinue to stick her foot in her party’s sacrosanct identity politics muck and she will never be able to extract herself from the morass.

The Republican attack ads will practically write themselves.

Michael Goodwin has an article in the New York Post this morning in which he argues that based on recent email communications from her various super PAC’s to various activist groups in the party, she is contemplating another run at the presidency.

Clinton has reminded many rank and file Democrats that her groups have stood in the bulwark in fighting the policies of the Trump Administration, particularly, given the recent migrant child crisis on the border, his immigration policies. She noted that her group, Onward Together, has raised $1 million to various groups including the ACLU to change border policy.

She also introduced another one of her groups called Demand Justice, shortly after Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, to vigorously contest any of Trump’s nominees. The Director of Demand Justice is Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign press secretary.

In support of his argument that Hillary is contemplating another run, Goodwin argues that,

“With the Democratic Party locked in a battle between its far left wing and its far, far left wing, no single leader has emerged to unite it. Clinton is trying to play that role by being a mother hen to the fledgling activists drawn to politics by their hatred of Trump.

If they were active in 2016, most probably supported Bernie Sanders in his primary challenge to Clinton. But by helping to fund them now, she is putting them in her debt for later.

Ah, but will she need their support later? Is she really going to make a third run for the White House?”

However intriguing the idea of another Clinton campaign may be, there are a host of factors that insure that the idea will never gain traction, save among die-hard Hillary devotees.

There is the not insignificant problem of Bill Clinton’s unpredictable and potentially damaging behavior. He has a habit of straying from the campaign script and sticking his foot in his mouth. Any one of his intemperate and impolitic comments could cause irreparable damage to any third campaign. Furthermore, Bill Clinton’s unrepentant posture during his book tour will not play well during the primaries among the #MeToo crowd.

Those who spoke out against his White House depravity in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein disclosures, would be forced to deal with the indelicate question of why the party would want to reward and take the risk of sending Bill Clinton back to the White House again. The Democratic Party cannot possibly be that stupid. Although, they could always chose, yet again, to commit Hari Kari by tying themselves to the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics.

Goodwin claims that Hillary would easily beat presidential contender Kamala Harris in her home state of California. I think Goodwin here is way off the mark. Many in the Democratic Party view Harris as a female Obama. Given the party’s undying devotion to identity politics, Harris would defeat Clinton handily in any California primary.

Finally, it is highly unlikely there are any high-level strategists in the Democratic Party that would view favorably a third try for Clinton. If they decide to support another of Clinton’s bids for the presidency, they will have taken leave of their senses, given the party’s disastrous decision to hand her the keys to the kingdom in 2015, despite having notice of her email chicanery and the brewing troubles with the Clinton Foundation.

The Republican Party can only hope and pray that the Democrats nominate a has-been as their candidate.

One would naturally be inclined to ask: Has the Democratic Party a death wish?

Eugene Robinson’s Tuesday article in The Washington Post is entitled: GOP Trying to Make Democrats Self-Implode. The brief answer to Robinson is that the Democratic Party is doing a fine job of imploding all on its own. The GOP has nothing to do with the civil war raging between its left wing and old line establishment of the Democratic Party; Republicans are merely gleeful bystanders witnessing Democrats acts of self-immolation.

Let’s start with the lunatic Congresswoman from California, Maxine Waters. After the incident at the border, she called on a mob to harass Trump Administration officials and then in the same breath had the gall to tell a cheering crowd that “God is on our side.” In Waters, the Democratic Party has found its Robespierre and will henceforth operate under the watchful eye of cooky fringe liberals like Waters who they have delegated as head of the Committee on Public Safety.

As historian Crane Briton, chronicled in his notable work, The Anatomy of a Revolution, most insurrectionists or left wing radicals who seek to upset or destroy the existing political order, wind up eating their own. During the final stages of the convulsions released during the French Revolution, it was Robespierre himself, in the end, who was forced to walk up the wooden stairs to the guillotine, where he had sent so many before him.

The party elders dare not rebuke Waters because she truly represents the radical wing of the party and that is where the energy lies in today’s Democratic Party. Democratic Party officials have encouraged the Bernie Sanders wing them to declare war against the Administration, in the hopes that stoking the rage will help them in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia called the Red Hen by its owner. Because of her standing in the Trump Administration the owner felt it was her moral duty to refuse to server Sanders. After all, Trump’s odious policy of child separation at the border — an occurrence that happened during the Obama Administration — was indicative [click to continue…]

The latest indication that the Democratic Party harbors extreme views about immigration, more particularly, immigration enforcement, comes from Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for Attorney General of New York and a law professor at Fordham.

In an incoherent article entitled, ICE is a tool of illegality. It must be abolished, Teachout, (remember, he is a professor of law), writes that,

“the United States is in a legal and moral emergency, and lawyers have a special responsibility to speak up. Lawyers, as the protectors of the rule of law, must demand the end of indefinite family detention centers, must insist that all children get guaranteed legal representation, and should join the growing movement to abolish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).”

Here is a question for our distinguished law professor, isn’t crossing the border illegally a crime? Or, does Teachout, like a growing number of liberals, believe, without any foundation in American jurisprudence, that migrants have a universal right to emigrate to the U.S.? Teachout, like so many other left-wing critics of Trump never address the question.

Teachout further inveighs against Trump, for enforcing the law through ICE, by calling such action, “a tool of unconstitutional illegal behavior.”

Did Teachout get the memo, that the U.S. Supreme Court just upheld Trump’s travel ban as constitutional.?

Teachout is an example of the madness of the left on immigration and how out of the mainstream their views are on illegal immigration with the rest of the country.

As Rich Lowry writes in the New York Post,

“the one thing the American people know about Donald Trump is that he believes we have a border and it should be enforced. About his opponents, they know no such thing — and how could they?”

Teachout perfectly illustrates the real position of liberals on illegal immigration: they don’t believe anyone who crosses the border without permission is committing a crime. For Democrats, migrants are entitled to remain in the U.S. and the country is obligated to pay for their care and well-being.

As Lowry further notes,

“At a time when Democrats should be cognizant of their vulnerabilities on immigration, many of them consider US immigration authorities the interlopers rather than illegal aliens.”

Do Democrats like Teachout, believe the American people share their open borders views? They are going down in flames next November if they let people like Teachout be their spokesman on illegal immigration.

Maxine Waters, Congresswoman from California, continued her reckless and dangerous rhetoric yesterday exhorting people to harass individual members of the Trump Administration. Waters noted to the crowd that God was on their side.

One of the first questions that comes to mind in the face of such outrageous demagoguery, is where have membes of the Bush family been? Why won’t Larua Bush speak out against the moral turpitude of the Democratic Party expressed in Waters inflamatory comments? The Bush Clan has always been ready to excoriate a Republican president in the harshest terms imaginable, yet they are incapable of criticizing a Democrat’s reprehensible conduct well outside the bounds of civil discourse and political norms?

Their silence speaks volumes. Apparently, their outrage is reserved only for Donald Trump.

As a cogresswoman, Waters conduct is beyond the pale. Paul Ryan should insitute proceedings immediately for the House to issue a censure.

In the meantime, where have you been Mitt Romney? John McCain? Two other anti-Trumpers, who found the language used by Trump rendered him unfit to serve as president. Is the language Waters used not similarly contemptuous?

The silence of establishment Repbulicans, who railed against Trump for his indecency and casting aside, what they considered the norms of political conduct and common decency, are now mute when a Democratic congresswoman calls for a mob to march on the homes of officials of the Trump Administration. The posture of the Republican establishment and most notably, the anti-Trump Republicans is why rank and file voters in the party banished the Bush family and their followers to the hinterland.

Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader offered a non-apology apology today by telling Waters to “back off,” yet in the same breath blamed Trump for the climate of incivility.The fact that no other prominent Democrat has yet to publicly and unequivocally rebuke Waters for her despicable rhetoric tells us how morally bankrupt their party is.

Fervent Anti-Trumper, George Will continues to make a fool of himself with his latest bombastic inculcation to members of the Republican Party. Will believes the only way to save our constitutional republic is for voters of the Republican Party to vote for the Democrats this fall.

At one time, Will was worth reading as he ably articulated the original principles of conservatism, even if he had no appreciation of the political tactics necessary to implement some of the conservative agenda. Will continues to demonstrate a willful ignorance of how ill suited Bush Republicanism was for dealing with the modern day Democratic Party.

As such, Will no longer has any utility for furthering any agenda that is right of center or moderate compared to the rabid left-wing extremism embraced by the Democrats. Will could be characterized as a “Bow-tie conservative”, one who is comfortable debating the finer and more arcane principles of the constitutional separation of powers, but who becomes aghast at getting his hands dirty in terms of what practical political steps are warranted and necessary for purposes of implementing any part of a conservative agenda.

During the early stages of the presidential campaign, Will’s embraced the Democratic Party theology of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Namely, that Republicans were doomed, because of the dwindling of the white population.

How foolish he looked on Election Day.

After rank and file Republicans rejected the establishments’s candidate of choice, Jeb Bush and started giving Trump victory after victory in the Republic party primaries, Will announced sanctimoniously, to great huffing and puffing, that he was leaving the Republican Party. No one cared.

Perhaps that his why he has issued his latest loony pronouncement in the hope that someone will actually listen.

Will’s embodies the worst of Bush Republicans, who have allowed they personal dislike of Trump’s mannerisms and vulgarity to dilate the most idiotic political choices. Jenna Bush claiming she can’t vote for Trump, but then pulling the lever for a woman whose husband defiled the Oval Office. Will engages in similar moral posturing.

There is no sane member of the Republican Party who seriously accepts Will’s idea that Trump is such a mortal threat to the country, that helping the Democrats enact their hard-left identity politics agenda, would somehow ameliorate the damage that Trump has allegedly afflicted on the Republican brand.

As Hot Air’s Allahpundit noted,

“I understand his disgust at the disgusting thing the GOP has become and his impulse to fire off the loudest rhetorical airhorn he can find and right in its ear to try to wake it. But voting for the party of open borders and anytime abortion? Of national handgun bans?”

The reason Trump is president is because Republican Party voters with their heads screwed on straight realized that the Republican “brand” was tarnished long ago, prior to Trump’s arrival on the political scene.

Will and his band of anti-Trump fellow travelers continue to exhibit the most bizarre behavior stemming from the shock of their wholesale rejection and abandonment by voters.

Trump has actually enacted more “conservative” policy goals in his short period in office than either of the two Bush presidencies. But Will opposes him because he thinks the Story Daniels affair tarnishes the presidency.

Does George Will, now a regular on MSNBC, think anyone will ever take him seriously again?

Some may think that the recent executive order Trump signed yesterday allowing migrant children to remain with their parents ends the crisis at the border. Not satisfied after shouting from the rooftops about how Trump’s hard line separation policy was akin to Nazism, the Democrats through presidential hopeful and open borders advocate, Kamala Harris, now have adopted the view that detaining families that stay together is also unacceptable.

If there were any question that the Democratic Party was using this crisis for PR purposes and at heart, believes there should be no southern border at all, this Tweet from Harris will dispel any doubts:

This Executive Order doesn’t fix the crisis. Indefinitely detaining children with their families in camps is inhumane and will not make us safe.

Until recently, the media has completely avoided and/or deliberately omitted the fact that during the Obama Administration, children were housed in cages and other deplorable temporary holding cells. There were pictures circulated on Twitter recently by liberals hoping to paint Trump in the worst light possible. The entire attempt at slander backfired, when it was discovered that the photographs were actually taken during the Obama Administration.

There is also an AP story that was circulated initially by liberals aiming to achieve what the earlier Twitter photographs could not. This second attempt has backfired as well when upon scouting the dates were not favorable for a another Trump is a monster story. The story concerns physical abuse at a Virginia juvenile detention center that occurred when Obama was president.

Reports are finally trickling out about Obama carrying out the same policies that liberals find so repugnant. As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air reminds those Democrats who have been calling Trump evil incarnate, the practice acually started under president Obama:

By this time, most readers here already know that the practice actually began well before Trump won his election, and in some cases before he even officially began his run for the presidency.

Morrissey then refers to a McClatchy report:

President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border.

Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities. …

Obama took several actions that led to an outcry of fear and distrust, though his actions failed to get the attention the Trump administration has.

The only acknowledgement from the media that conditions in some places under the Obama regime were as allegedly deplorable as the current conditions of housing under Trump, comes from of all places, via CNN.

Watching a Democratic Senator try to respond to host Tammy Baldwin’s question as to why she didn’t complain when Obama kept unaccompanied illegal kids in cages is cringe-worthy, but must-see TV.

As John Hinderacker of PowerLine tellingly notes,

Liberals have been playing a cynical game, misrepresenting the facts and relying on emotion to whip up hatred of the administration. The last thing they care about is illegal alien children. (Or, as many have pointed out, the much larger number of American children who are separated from parents because the parents commit crimes and go to prison, just as the illegal alien parent has committed the crime of illegal entry.

Hurray! and Good Riddance.

The question one must ask about Schmidt’s departure is in what sense could he be considered a Republican during and after the election? He left the party a long time ago, or more accurately , the party changed and banished members of the consultant class who are nothing but pariahs. Steve Schmidt was the most virulent of the consultant’s to attack the conservative members of the party. He characterized members the rank and file as “crazy’s.”

For years, he was part of the tag team as a go-to guest on Chris Mathews MSNBC talk show wherein he would vilify voters of the party who defied the establishment, of which he is an exemplar, and voted for Trump.

Here is how I described the ineffectual, but highly compensated members of the corrupt consultant class in my book Election 2016.

Some of the most prominent members of the Old Guard are the consultant class, who for the past several election cycles maintained an incestuous and profitable relationship with the RNC. Win or lose, the same names would usually crop up: Mike Murphy; Steve Schmidt; Stuart Stevens; John Weaver and Rick Wilson. These political strategists all fed off the parasitic relationship with the party establishment. They repeatedly bilked the RNC and its donors —both large and small. They all sang the same old song. They could all be seen on the cable TV and Sunday morning talk show circuit, their appearances ostensibly booked due to their expertise, which was comical, given their dismal track record.

The track record of the consultant class pariahs was dreadful, yet the party continued to hire them. It was a unique and enviable employment relationship where the worse you performed the greater your job security and the more you were paid.

Schmidt is a despicable Quisling who no longer has a place in the party, however it evolves during the Trump Administration and thereafter.

Matthew Sheffield of Praxis exposed the dreadful record of Steve Schmidt,

Though he’s often portrayed as some sort of expert on television, Steve Schmidt isn’t exactly someone who’s gone from success to success. In 1998, he was the communications director for a botched campaign against California senator Barbara Boxer. One year later, he held the same position for the dull and uninspiring presidential campaign of Lamar Alexander. He managed to help Arnold Schwarzenegger win re-election as governor of California but then returned to his losing ways in 2008 as he helmed the daily operations for the failed John McCain presidential campaign where he recommended Sarah Palin as the vice presidential candidate and thereby removed the strongest reason to vote against Barack Obama, who was at the time a junior senator from Illinois who had been in office for only two years.

Yet, instead of working to overcome his mistake, Schmidt launched an unprofessional private smear campaign against Palin which harmed McCain even more by undercutting his judgment in the press. Schmidt’s catastrophic mismanagement of the McCain campaign seems not to have harmed his ability to continue getting work, something that surprised New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney who couldn’t help but note that he “stands as evidence that there may be little cost to being associated with a losing campaign and a disastrous political misjudgment.

No one in the party will miss Steve Schmidt. The Democratic Party will welcome him with open arms and while he continues to excoriate Trump and those who voted for him, he will be revered by party elites.