French Conservaties Chat About Donald Trump's New America

Évelyne Joslain, the author of Trump: For Better or Worse, chatted with Radio Courtoisie's Henry de Lesquen about President Donald Trump's New America and the Reasons for His Success.

Libre Journal d'Henry de Lesquen du 19 décembre 2016 : “La nouvelle Amérique du président Donald Trump ; Chronique du grand-large : « Les raisons du succès de Donald Trump » ; Apologie de la peine de mort”

Par Henry de Lesquen | 19 décembre 2016 | Libre Journal d’Henry de Lesquen | Mots clés : Amérique . Charles-Henri d'Elloy . Donald Trump . États-Unis . Evelyne Joslain . Nicolas Stoquer . Patrick Simon . peine de mort

Henry de Lesquen, assisté de Joëlle, recevait Evelyne Joslain, politologue, essayiste, spécialiste du monde anglo-saxon, Nicolas Stoquer, diplômé de l'IEP, fondateur du Rassemblement Pour la France, défenseur du patrimoine ; Patrick Simon, avocat, président de l'ALEPS ; Charles-Henri d'Elloy, écrivain. Thèmes : “La nouvelle Amérique du président Donald Trump ; Chronique du grand-large : « Les raisons du succès de Donald Trump » ; Apologie de la peine de mort ; Chronique du courrier des auditeurs”.

Première partie

Seconde partie

Référence bibliographique

Trump, pour le meilleur et pour le pire (Évelyne Joslain), Éd. Presses de la Délivrance (juin 2016)

Henry de Lesquen

Familier depuis 1988 des émissions de Radio Courtoisie, où il était fréquemment invité en tant que président du Carrefour de l'Horloge, Henry de Lesquen y a créé le libre journal des idées politiques en 2003. Après la mort du fondateur de Radio Courtoisie, Jean Ferré, en 2006, et selon les vœux de celui-ci, il lui a succédé, d'une part comme patron de la radio, d'autre part comme patron du libre journal du lundi soir. Membre du conseil d'administration de l'association depuis 2005, il en est le président depuis 2007. Né en 1949, marié, père de cinq enfants, Henry de Lesquen est haut fonctionnaire. Il habite avec son épouse à Versailles, où il est conseiller municipal depuis 2001 sous l'étiquette "divers droite". Il préside en outre le Club de l'Horloge et a participé dans le cadre de ce cercle de pensée politique indépendant des partis à la rédaction d'une vingtaine de livres, dont La Politique du vivant et Penser l'antiracisme. Il préside également l'association Voix des Français : www.vdfr95.com. Twitter : @hlesquen.

Chicago's Hate Crime as Presented in France: Only One Mention of the Perpetrator's and Victim's Races, and That as an Aside

Coverage of the hate crime in Chicago is no better in the French press than in the whitewashing press in the United States, as evidenced by this 20 Minutes and AFP report.

The title, first:

The Aggression of a Mentally Handicapped Young Man Broadcast on Facebook

Then, the opening paragraph:

Traumatized, the victim is having a hard time communicating. Four persons have been caught and arrested, announced the Chicago police, after the broadcast of a video where they are seen mistreating a young man while shouting racist insults.

Still nothing unusual about race, with the "shouting racist insults" part giving the idea that, if anything, it seems to be whites hectoring an African-American.

When the races of the perpetrators and victims are finally presented, it is almost as an aside, in a pair of secondary adjective clauses, and only once, in a single sentence:

The suspects, who are black, and the victim, who is white, are all young adults.

For some reason, you see, what matters is that all the "actors" are young.

If the races of perpetrators and victim were reversed, don't you think that sentence would be written quite differently? (The suspects and the victim, all of whom are young adults, are respectively white and black.)

Of course. And, indeed, race would be featured — prominently — in the headline as well as in the opening paragraph and, in fact, throughout the entire article.

From that point on, race disappears from the rest of the article, although one sentence does admittedly hint at the subject, since it contains the shouts « Fuck Donald Trump ! Fuck white people ! »

VIDEO. Etats-Unis : L’agression d’un jeune handicapé mental diffusée en direct sur Facebook

Traumatisée, la victime peine à communiquer. Quatre personnes ont été appréhendées et placées en garde à vue après la diffusion d’une vidéo où on les voit maltraiter un jeune homme en criant des insultes racistes, a annoncé ce jeudi la police de Chicago, dans le nord-est des Etats-Unis.

Les suspects, qui sont noirs, et la victime, qui est blanche, sont tous de jeunes adultes.

To no one's surprise, Newsbusters' Curtis Houck is on the story—the story of the non-story: ABC, NBC Skip White Chicago Man Being Tortured Live on Facebook by Four African-Americans, while shouting “fuck Trump” and “fuck white people.” (Equally unexpectedly, CBS’s coverage left out those last two details.) Leading Ed Driscoll to remind us that

CBS’s blackout on the details of this story, and their competitors’ embargo of the story itself, dovetails perfectly with Iowahawk’s observation that “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving,” and Jim Treacher’s line that in the 21st century, the profession “is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

Related: “The Left’s insane hatred of Donald Trump has spun out of control, and there have been far too many instances of this sort of depraved violence,” John Hinderaker writes at Power Line. “I don’t want to hear another damn word about ‘hate crimes’ against minorities supposedly inspired by Donald Trump’s campaign or election, not unless they equal this level of depravity.”

The Boston Herald's Howie Carr (thanks to Instapundit):

Why can’t the alt-left call a hate crime a hate crime?

Is it because some hate crimes are more hateful than others? Or less?

Finally, yesterday, the Chicago police charged the four aspiring rappers with a hate crime for allegedly beating, torturing and kidnapping a white mentally disabled kid from the suburbs.

They were screaming “Bleep white people!” and “Bleep Trump!” but none of the PC posse wanted to … uh, jump to any conclusions.

Take Obama — please. His flack Josh Earnest was asked if this was a hate crime.
“I think it’s too early to tell.”

No call from Obama for a “national conversation” about hate crimes. He didn’t even call it “workplace violence.”

Then there was Don Lemon, last seen drunk on New Year’s Eve on CNN. Apparently, he’s still on his bender, because this is what he said:

“I don’t think it’s evil. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training.”

Bad home training. Hey, I’ll bet these at-risk youths were turning their lives around too. That’s why one of Lemon’s guests, one Symone Sanders, said that we shouldn’t be “callously classifying” a kidnapping accompanied by a few chants of “Bleep white people!” as a hate crime.

Yeah, they’re lovely people — Tanashia and Brittany Covington, Tesfaye Cooper and Jordan Hall. Tanashia is 24 and the others are 18. Which, according to Chicago PD Commander Kevin Duffin, makes them “kids.”

“Kids make stupid decisions … That will certainly be part of whether or not we determine this is a hate crime or whether or not this is stupid ranting and raving.”

Here was the Boston Globe headline on the hate crime: “4 questioned after video of apparent racial attack in Chicago.”

Apparent. On MSNBC it was called an “apparent beating.” Apparently, whoever wrote these headlines didn’t see the video.

Various local newscasts said the thugs had “detained” the white kid, who was “picked on” and/or “bullied.”

What if this had happened to some Muslim terrorist at Gitmo? The same pajama boys now averting their eyes from the truth would be hollering for war crimes trials.

This wasn’t the first post-election black-on-white hate crime on the West Side. In November, a 50-year-old white man was dragged from his car by four people screaming obscenities about Trump. That hate crime was likewise recorded on videotape.

Police arrested Rajune Lewis, Dejuan Collins, Julian Christian and a juvenile and … do you remember seeing anything about this on the network newscasts? Me neither.

Compare this kid-glove treatment for all these thugs to what happened to the two Babson College students who drove over to Wellesley College after the election. Let’s let Babson President (and former Lt. Gov.) Muffy Healey describe how her students “engaged in behavior that was, at a minimum, insensitive, unacceptable and contrary to our core values.”

Their crime? They were yelling “Trump 2016!” and “Make America Great Again.”

Muffy banned them from campus and they were kicked out of their frat. They had to hire lawyers to fight Muffy’s fake news.

If it wasn’t for double standards, the alt-left wouldn’t have any standards at all.

In contrast, tweets Anthony Bialy, “Those who believed ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ right away are unsure if the Chicago assault was a hate crime.”

Plus: Remembering (not) the horrific Christian-Newsom murders — Glenn Reynolds:

There was no White House commentary, and no mass marches or riots. And not all that much press attention. Because these horrors did not Advance The Narrative.

“Parachute politics” is systemic in the Democrat party, the party whose members never take “no” for an answer

Representative Maxine Waters of California has a curious explanation for why Democrats were so thoroughly humiliated in 2016 

writes Benny Huang (in disbelief)

—they were just too nice. “That has been a problem in my party, that when we’re in power we’re nice,” said Waters. “We bend over backwards to work with people.”

Any hope that the Democrats would conduct a serious post-mortem was dispelled with these remarks. The Democrats lost this year and they’ve been losing with some degree of consistency since Barack Obama swept to power in 2008 but they’re still avoiding introspection. As usual, they’re finding ways to flatter themselves in defeat, convinced that it was their own virtue that did them in—plus Russia, racists, and fake news, of course.

The real explanation for why Democrats lost and have continued to lose is rather complicated but the nitty-gritty is this: Trump’s positions on certain issues helped win over several rust belt states that everyone had hitherto considered safely blue while holding onto the traditionally red ones. This happened despite substantial voter fraud in at least one of those rust belt states—Michigan. Was it the Democrats’ nicety that lost these states? Oh, I doubt it. I think it had something to do with their war on coal and on in industry in general. Barack Obama spoke openly of bankrupting coal-fired power plants and Hillary Clinton, his would-be successor, bragged that she would “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Killing people’s jobs is not very nice.

Compromise is something the modern Democrat party just does not do. They’re quite skilled at all sorts of subterfuge intended to look like compromise but the real thing eludes them. In some rare instances, when the votes simply aren’t there for their pet projects, they may be forced to give a little ground. But it wounds them deeply. They quickly turn to the judiciary or to Daddy Obama to achieve what they can’t achieve through the legislature. By hook or by crook, they get what they want.

What ails the jackass party is what I call “parachute politics,” named in honor of Maxine Waters’ fellow California Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. During the 2010 Obamacare debate Pelosi displayed an arrogance that I found shocking. “We’ll go through the gate,” said Pelosi at a press conference. “If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the America people.”

Does that sound like someone who’s bending over backwards to work with others? Or does that sound like a fanatic, someone so sure of the righteousness of her cause that nothing—certainly not the will of the people—could have dissuaded her from her path? Pelosi spoke these words just days after Scott Brown pulled off an upset victory in a Massachusetts special election by promising to be the forty-first vote against Obamacare. Yes, running against the “Affordable Care Act” (snort!) was a winning proposition even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts. People didn’t want the crap sandwich Pelosi was trying to force feed them and they want it even less today.
 
Sure, Americans generally agree that they want some kind of health care reform but they mean something that will make health care more affordable both at the point of sale and in the final analysis. Obamacare has only made it more expensive. Back in 2010 there were at least a few gullible Americans who believed all of Obama’s lies about keeping their current plans and saving the average family of four some $2500 per year. If there are still people who believe these falsehoods they must be delusional.

“Parachute politics” is systemic in the Democrat party. Whether the issue is killing the unborn, stopping voter ID, redefining marriage, or any number of other issues, they absolutely do not take “no” for answer.

Voting rights for felons is a good example. This year, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia took the bold step of restoring voting rights to all felons in his state who had completed their sentences. He did not attempt to amend Virginia’s constitution. He did not work with legislators to build consensus. He simply decreed it.

 … McAuliffe was undeterred. If the Virginia Supreme Court told him that he could not restore voting rights en masse he would do it on a superficially “individual” basis. He got to work “signing” stacks of clemency documents using an autopen to replicate his signature. Governor McAuliffe’s unilateral and constitutionally dubious scheme was a gift to his dear friend Hillary Clinton, to himself, and to his party—the “nice” party that Maxine Water says “bends over backwards to work with people.”

Not that I doubt Maxine Waters’ sincerity when she says this. Her problem isn’t that she doesn’t mean what she says, her problem is that she considers every concession made by her party, no matter how small and no matter how begrudgingly extracted, to be an enormous sacrifice. If the “arc of history” bends toward her own demented definition of justice why should she ever give an inch to the evil forces of reaction? In her mind she and her friends should get 100% of what they want 100% of the time because they are self-evidently right. It’s this attitude that makes compromise nearly impossible.

 … When asked if she would accept a hypothetical invitation from Trump to meet and find common ground, Waters replied unequivocally that she would not.\

She’s not alone. Congressman Keith Ellison, who is a strong contender to replace Donna Brazile as the next chairman of the DNC, said that “All there is to do is vote ‘no’” to whatever Trump and the Republicans propose. Now there’s some of that famous bipartisanship! I hope the Republican leadership heard Ellison and realizes that he and much of his party cannot be won over. They can be opposed and hopefully defeated but they can’t be swayed from their reflexive opposition. Please don’t try.

I can recall a time not long ago when Ellison’s and Waters’ defiant attitude would have been called “obstructionism.” Of course that was when some Republicans weren’t kowtowing to President Obama. (Others were kowtowing their asses off, by the way.) Things are different now. I also recall that “obstructionism” was not just unseemly but racist to boot. Not anymore. Now that I think about it, there was also a time in the recent past when Republicans’ “obstructionism” justified presidential end-runs around Congress. Is that still fair play or did that change too?

But don’t let Maxine Waters fool you. She may try to pretend that extraordinary circumstances have driven her to adopt a never-before-seen attitude of resistance but that just isn’t true. She was a partisan warrior before November 8th just as she’s a partisan warrior now. She was not “nice” when the Democrats ran the show and neither was the rest of her party. Their 2006 and 2008 victories convinced them that the country had gone left for good. What was the sense in reaching across the aisle to the moribund minority?

Liberals are rewriting history before our very eyes, inventing some mythical time when the Democratic majority extended a hand of mercy to those evil Republicans only to have it slapped away. Those of us with memories longer than a goldfish’s know better.

Trump Book Author Evelyne Joslain Discusses the Republicans' Election Victory with GOP Guests

The Republican onslaught during America's presidential elections were the subject of Radio Courtoisie's Libre Journal du nouveau monde segment as Évelyne Joslain (the author of Trump: For Better or Worse) chatted with Paul Reen, a leader of Republicans Overseas, and blogger/journalist/author Erik Svane.

Libre Journal du nouveau monde du 23 novembre 2016 : “Les succès électoraux des Républicains”

Par Évelyne Joslain | 23 novembre 2016 | Libre Journal du nouveau monde | Mots clés : Donald Trump . élections . Erik Svane . États-Unis . Les Républicains . Paul Reen . primaires

Evelyne Joslain, assisté de Nathalie, recevait Erik Svane, journaliste, écrivain et Paul Reen, vice-président des Républicains Outre-mer, sur le thème : « Les succès électoraux des Républicains ».

Welcome to 2017: A Handful of Non-Negative Donald Trump Books on the French Market

Among the rare non-negative books about Donald Trump that appeared on the French market in 2016 were Evelyne Joslain's Trump : Pour le meilleur et pour le pire (Trump, For Better and Worse), Guy Millière's Après Obama, Trump ?, André Bercoff's Donald Trump. Les raisons de la colère (Donald Trump: The Reasons for the Anger), and Laure Mandeville's Qui est vraiment Donald Trump ? (Who Is Donald Trump Really?).

TrumpLand and Clinton Archipelago

Vivid Maps has created a pair of revelatory maps

using IDW (Inverse distance weighted) technique in ArcGIS.

(See also their post on the 2016 U.S. presidential election results in three maps…)

Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression

We can thank Jill Stein and her hopeless recount effort for bringing about at least some positive change in our election system

writes Benny Huang.

In the face of incontrovertible evidence of voter fraud in Michigan’s most populous county, the Michigan House passed a much needed voter ID bill. Unfortunately, the Michigan Senate will probably not vote on the bill this session. Pray that they get to it in the New Year.

The bill is long overdue though it won’t fix the particular problem discovered during the Michigan recount. Here’s what happened: when state officials reviewed the Michigan vote tally they began to notice an odd trend at polling places found mostly in Wayne County, the heavily Democratic area where Detroit is located. At some polling places more ballots were cast than names checked off the voter rolls.  The problem was particularly pronounced in Detroit where 247 of the city’s 662 voting precincts counted more ballots than voters. The city was rife with broken seals on ballot boxes, a strong indicator that ballots were either added, removed, or swapped out. According to a spokesman for Michigan’s Secretary of State, election staff attributed irregularities at polling places in Detroit to human error. Apparently there’s a lot more “human error” in big corrupt cities than in other places.

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. I’d venture to say that she’s likely wrong on that point. This degree of suspicious irregularity is probably very normal—for Detroit.

The excess ballots should be considered the absolute minimum level of cheating. There may have been other forms of chicanery layered on top of that—voter impersonation, for example, or non-citizens voting. Those types of voter fraud are more difficult to detect especially when people in power have a vested interest in turning a blind eye. Liberals will deny that any such thing took place but of course they’re also denying the blatant ballot-stuffing, sheepishly explaining it as “human error.” The lesson to be learned here is that Democrats always deny and minimize voter fraud when they’re the ones behind it—which happens to be most of the time. Their denials are nothing but meaningless noise.

What then can voter ID law do to clean up this mess? Not much. Voter ID is intended to stop voters from misrepresenting themselves not crooked poll workers from fiddling with the ballots after they’ve been cast. Voter ID is not enough. The real solution to the problem of voter fraud is to break the backs of the corrupt urban Democratic machines that run most of our big cities.

That won’t be easy of course, and it will be downright impossible as long as Loretta Lynch and her Department of “Just-Us” is around to protect them. The current administration views any effort to restore integrity to our chaotic elections as a furtive attempt at disenfranchising minority voters. Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression.

 … Just don’t expect the corrupt Democratic machines to go softly into the night. They will sue, they will protest, and they will slander good people with spurious accusations of racism. They will make those of us who care about electoral integrity wonder if it’s really worth the fight. I assure you, it is.

We don’t have much time. There are midterm elections in two years and another presidential election two years after that. If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough. Next time they’ll really cheat their asses off—worse than Bill Belichick, I mean.

Cheating is a long-standing tradition within the Democratic Party dating back to New York’s Tammany Hall. Some of their world-class cheaters have included Lyndon Johnson in Texas, Richard Daley in Chicago, and Honey Fitz in Boston. They’ve elevated cheating to an art form.

In 1965 we passed the Voting Rights Act which enabled federal officials to crack down on corrupt Democrats in the rural South who engaged in voter intimidation while conveniently doing nothing about corrupt Democrats in the urban North who engaged in voter fraud—and sometimes voter intimidation as well. Though the law wreaked of northern hegemony, it was sold to the naïve public as a sincere effort to keep election officials honest.

It was the age old story of our nation—we northerners using the federal government as the means and racism as the pretext to force our will upon southerners. Sure, there was a problem in the South; but there was a similar problem in the North and the federal government didn’t post outsiders at our polling places to babysit us. We northerners were permitted to run our own elections which were then, just as they are now, hopelessly tainted with corruption. Southerners, on the other hand, were placed under some adult supervision—by which I mean Yankee supervision.

Voter fraud is very real. Anyone who tells you otherwise either benefits from it or is simply foolish. I’ve noticed that a curious kind of circular logic surrounds the crime of voter fraud that doesn’t apply to other kinds of crime. The fraud deniers refuse to consider any incidents of voter fraud because no one has proven to their satisfaction that it ever happens more than a few times per election cycle in disparate locations. Mere “anecdotes,” they say. They then cite a lack of convictions for voter fraud as proof that it never happens. I wonder if it ever occurs to them that there aren’t many convictions because no one is on the lookout for it and anyone who tries to stop it is smeared as a racist?

 …  Examples of voter fraud abound. In Indiana, the state police are investigating the Indiana Voter Registration Project for running what appears to be a massive absentee ballot scam in 56 counties. Stay tuned for some final resolution on that one. A CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 deceased Californians who had apparently voted from beyond the grave. In Virginia, the Public Interest Legal Foundation discovered 1,046 non-citizens on the voter rolls in just the eight counties that responded to their request. In Wisconsin, A Hillary Clinton surrogate bragged on camera about busing voters around to vote at multiple polling places.

Who raped and trafficked teenage girls in Coventry? Evil "men," we are told

Why is it that I do not feel like I am wrong, or unfair, or racist, or guilt-ridden when (I guess that must be what I am doing) I racially profile the Five men [who] have been convicted of sexually abusing and trafficking six teenage girls in Coventry?

The "sex gang" of "evil" men treated victims "like pieces of meat," we are told by the BBC.

Waqaar Khan, Kadeem Bourne, Kenan Kelly, Marcus Woolcock and Zahid Chaudhary were accused of almost 40 offences, Warwick Crown Court heard.

Ringleader Khan befriended the girls, aged 15 to 17, on social media before picking them up and forcing them to have sex, sometimes filming it.

West Midlands Police described them as "brazen, calculating and evil".

The court heard the men took the girls, some of whom were in care, to secluded areas of the city and sometimes gave them alcohol or drugs before abusing and trafficking them for sex.

One girl, aged 17, said she was knocked out by one of the men and came round to see them watching a video of herself being raped while she was unconscious.

[Detective Chief Inspector] Ian Green said Khan came to the attention of police in March when he was a mutual "friend" on the accounts of several vulnerable young girls in the city.

When police subsequently examined his phone, officers found thousands of text messages containing "sexualised conversations and several videos of graphic sexual abuse".

The girls identified the other men and a "comprehensive investigation" was started.

"It was the brazen nature of their offending that they actually thought they were untouchable and these girls wouldn't report it through fear," Mr Green said.

I wonder why on Earth these men might have thought they were untouchable?!

Economic Dependency and Feelings of Victimhood: What Exactly Is the Precise Subtext of Hope 'n' Change ?

Perhaps the best quote about Michelle Obama's hopelessness comes from Ann Althouse (thanks to Glenn Reynolds).

“Michelle Obama seems to confuse the past and the future in a strange way that relates to a criticism of Democrats one often hears: Their political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.”

Yes, He Can: Yes, Obama Could Have Won a Third Term; But Not for the Reason He Thinks

Actually, it is entirely possible that Barack Obama may be right when, as Fox News reports, he says that, had he been able to run, he could have won a third term in the White House.

Describing his confidence in an America that is “tolerant” and “full of energy,” Obama said: “I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that … if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”

However, he would not, might not, have won again because of who he is, or because of what he stands for, or because of what his programs contain.

The victory would be because of decades of efforts by "neutral" and "independent" "journalists" (aka Democrats with bylines) in the mainstream media to whitewash (sic?) the Apologizer-in-Chief and members of the Democrat Party as well as the policies they stand for.

“I know that in conversations that I've had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one,” Obama told Axelrod, defending his assertion.

The truth is, that if reporters were generally fair and neutral and balanced, you would be hard-pressed to wonder if a member of the Democrat Party could ever win an election again.

Let's get down to basics:

What do the Democrats stand for?

Helping the victims of society while bashing and berating the members of society who don't want to help same, punishing the latter in all sorts of ways, not least by increasing their taxes.

In other words, they think of everyone as children: innocent tykes who must be protected, along with spoiled, ill-behaved brats who must be given dressing-downs and be punished by having (parts of) their allowances removed.

What do the Republicans stand for?

The Republicans don't want to help blacks, they do not want to help women, they do not want to help Latinos and immigrants, and they do not want to help gays and transgenders.

Just as the Republicans do not want to help… (wait for it)… whites and males and straights!

Why?

Because they think — they know — that the average man, woman, person, is a grown-up, an adult who can be expected to manage his or her life without dramatics and intervention by hordes of professional politicians and armies of career bureaucrats, or too much thereof.

Isn't this what the revolution of 1776 was all about?

Isn't this what the constitution of 1787 is all about?

We Americans are grown-ups!

And we expect to be treated as such.

Related: Another thing the mainstream media might have
found out about Obama's past had he been a Republican

Michelle Obama's Response Is Far Worse
Than Saying Life Under Trump Is Without Hope:
She Considers that Americans Are Kids
in Need of a Father Figure for President

"The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel" wrote Thomas Sowell, in… 2011 (!), "is that there are people who are surprised"

The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel is that there are people who are surprised

wrote Thomas Sowell back in… June… 2011 (Obama's general approach to foreign policy — selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries)!

Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots.

 … Israel is one of the Haves. Its neighbors remain among the Have Nots, despite their oil. No wonder that Barack Obama has bent over backward, in addition to bowing low forward, to support the side that his ideology favors.

Israel is not simply to have its interests sacrificed and its security undermined. It is to be brought down a peg and-- to the extent politically possible-- insulted. Obama has already done all these things. His latest pronouncement is just more of the same.

Whether at home or abroad, Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback.

 … All of this is consistent with Obama's general approach to foreign policy-- selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries.

My four favorite memes among those chosen by Powerline's Steven Hayward to illustrate Thomas Sowell's thoughts (thanks to Ed Driscoll) are reproduced in this post.

Which brings up a question:

Wouldn't it be great if somebody in the Trump administration would nominate Thomas Sowell to become 2017's choice for the Nobel Prize in Economics?
Related: • "The poor" are the human shields behind whom advocates of ever bigger spending for ever bigger government advance toward their goal

• "If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer"

Let's end this post with a Thomas Sowell quote from November 2008:

[Barack Obama has] accomplished nothing other than to advance his career through rhetoric

says Thomas Sowell (thanks to Frank) as he speaks with Peter Robinson (6:00),

and it reminds me of a sophomore in college who thinks he can change the world because he's never had to run anything.

Good-Bye, Princess: Carrie Fisher Is Dead at 60

Incredible: at only 60, the Star Wars movies' Princess Leia is gone…

Now, some of us are feeling really old!

WARNING: SPOILER BELOW

Carrie Fisher had just come out with a new part-time autobiography, The Princess Diarist, besides appearing in a surprise cameo, with one brief line or two, as her younger self in the final scenes of Rogue One… (Thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed Driscoll)

(Somewhat) Related: What was the one single biggest plot hole in The Force Awakens?

Update: 14 Other Movies Featuring Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher

Oppression Olympics: AIn't it a nice change to see the victimhood pathology eating away at the grand coalition of the oppressed rather than at our nation as a whole?

The University of California’s “Students of Color Conference” ended in disarray earlier this month

notes Benny Huang,

with various racial, ethnic, and religious groups vying for the “Biggest Victim” prize. Though it was intended to foster thoughtful discussion about issues that affect minorities, the conference devolved into a “safe space gone wrong” according to The Daily Bruin’s Jacqueline Alvarez.

Rather than hating white people, the various groups turned on each other. “[T]he conference eventually turned into a kind of ‘oppression Olympics,’ where students argued over which minority group was oppressed the most rather than finding solidarity and understanding amongst each other,” wrote Alvarez. One point of contention was the conference’s theme: “Fighting anti-Blackness.” The whole conference was geared toward America’s premiere victim group, blacks, which displeased some members of other groups. When one student asked why other groups’ issues weren’t being discussed a black student replied that blacks were the most oppressed which elicited a negative response from a Muslim student who said that her people were being bombed in the Middle East.

I don’t know about you but I find this whole story very entertaining. It’s a nice change to see the victimhood pathology eating away at the grand coalition of the oppressed rather than at our nation as a whole.

Modern progressivism is an identity politics stew consisting of divergent groups that don’t always agree. What binds them together is a visceral hatred of Western civilization which they associate with white people, Christianity, capitalism, individual rights, and “the patriarchy” (men). They’ve shown great progress in vanquishing all of these things.

The Left has an obsession with tearing down the status quo, a task it has been engaged in for more than two hundred years. Armed with rhetorical sledge hammers they go about smashing everything they see. Smash monogamy! Smash the patriarchy! Smash capitalism! Smash this! Smash that! Smashing is what they do best and for that the Left deserves to be called a demolition crew.

Leftists won’t admit this of course. In their own minds they are building a better, more egalitarian future. But in order to usher in that future they must first demolish Western civilization and sweep away the wretched rubble. This task has become their fixation. So focused are they on undermining the current order that they’ve almost lost sight of their supposed long term goal of building an earthly paradise in its place.

In all likelihood, they never will get around to the construction phase of their strategy because the demolition phase will never be complete. Consider for a moment their obsession with racism. Leftists perceive it everywhere and concoct phony examples of it where it doesn’t exist. Here’s a good example: Just before the election, a black church in Mississippi was torched and spray-painted with the words “Vote Trump.” Police have since arrested a man named Andrew McClinton for the heinous act. Who is this scoundrel? A klansman, perhaps? Nope. McClinton is a black member of the church. This man actually burnt down his own spiritual home just to make a point about the imaginary racists who live in his head.

In order to sustain our hysteria about racism the Left needs to provide teachable moments from time to time. The Mississippi church burning was one such moment. The lessons they wanted us to learn from it were that white supremacism still reigns supreme and that we must continue smashing it with all due ferocity. Therefore, demolition is still called for—and always will be. There’s never a good time to declare victory in the war on racism.

Unfortunately for them, a movement so tightly bound up with destruction runs the risk of devouring itself from within.

… We conservatives should take every opportunity to point out that the Left’s many strange bedfellows don’t have much in common. Sometimes we do illuminate the absurdity of a movement that counts both Muslims and homosexuals as members. Don’t “gays” know that most Muslims hate them? Many don’t. But we haven’t done a good enough job explaining to Muslims that homosexuals hate them too. We might want to mention that after the social justice warriors complete their incremental criminalization of Christianity they’ll have all the right precedents in place to do the same to Islam.

“No fair!” shout the Leftists. “That’s the politics of divisiveness!” Yes, I suppose it is. But they started it.

 Conservatives want people in this country to unite behind a common national identity—as Americans—whereas  liberals want to split the population into many different groups based on sex, sexuality, class, race, and religion before bundling the majority of those splinter groups into a coalition that will act as a battering ram against the dreaded System. They really don’t like it when we try to dilute the glue that binds their various constituency groups together.

 …/… I do believe that Trump was trying to split the Obama coalition but that’s okay because it richly deserves to be split. Black people’s interests are not the same as Hispanics’ interests and on the issue of illegal immigration blacks’ interests are in fact diametrically opposed to what Hispanic advocacy groups demand. Our unsecured borders have worked out great for dishonest employers but not for blacks who have found themselves competing for entry-level jobs with people who will work for less.

Trump was not, however, trying to drive a wedge between blacks and Latinos but rather between blacks and illegal aliens. There’s a difference. Perhaps it’s time for blacks to ask themselves where their true interests lie. What exactly do they gain from illegal immigration? Nothing, as far as I can see.

There are other reason why blacks should not rejoice in the booming Hispanic population, many of whom came here illegally.

 … Van Jones doesn’t like people messing with the “Obama coalition” because his goal is to unite black and brown against white. Am I guilty of wanting black and white to unite to against brown? No. I want Americans of all colors to come together against illegal alien invaders—not all of whom are Hispanic. This is our country. It belongs to a multiracial group of people called Americans and we decide who may enter our house.

The coalition of the oppressed is in fact very fragile. Don’t hesitate to do everything in your power to aggravate its inherent schisms. Their goal is to destroy Western civilization so don’t feel bad about wanting to destroy their contrived sense of solidarity.

When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable “you can’t impose your morality on other people”; but social critics are quick to (mis)quote the Bible when they can make it seem to support their quirky political views

Twitchy's Brett T deadpans that ABC News political analyst [is] shocked that Christians didn’t treasure his gift of politicizing the holiday (thanks to Ed Driscoll).

Why would Christians be uncivil to ABC News’ chief political analyst on Christmas Eve, of all days? It’s impossible to know for sure, but his contribution to the holiday might have something to do with it.

Here you go people. A nativity scene without any Jews, Arabs, Africans, refugees, poor people pic.twitter.com/1eoxIIAxu5

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) December 24, 2016

Ah, the gift of politicization that absolutely no one asked for! Just chuck that over in the pile with the “Joseph and Mary were homeless” lectures from Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and Jesse Jackson and …

Every Christmas, liberals who despise the Bible and the message of the Bible try to find something from the Bible in an attempt to advance some liberal cause based on the Bible

writes Gary DeMar (while ignoring

the Bible when it addresses same-sex sexuality/marriage and killing of unborn children).

As usual, they get it wrong, similar to the way they get the Bible’s “my brother’s keeper” message wrong.

At first, the Christmas story became a political message about homelessness. Then liberals claimed that when Mary and Joseph could not find a room in Bethlehem – you guessed it – it’s just like today’s refugee problem. Never let a contrived Bible story go to waste.

The problem with the refugee analogy is that Joseph was not a foreigner seeking refuge from his homeland since he was from Bethlehem, the place of his birth. He was a citizen of Israel. As we’ll see, the existing government was oppressing people. In this case, through taxes.

The latest claim has been made by ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd who tweeted the following:

“Let us remember today 2 immigrants, a man and his very pregnant wife, sought shelter & were turned away by many. She gave birth in a manger.”

  … You can’t be an immigrant in your own country.

Jesse Jackson was the first liberal to turn Christmas into a political propaganda piece. It was in the December 26, 1988, issue if Jet Magazine. The title of the article was “Jesse Jackson Tells the Real Meaning of Christmas.”

He made the same claim in 1991 when George H. W. Bush was president. He repeated his “homeless couple” theme at the 1992 Democratic National Convention

 … 

Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, scolded the “Christian Right” for opposing government welfare programs by appealing to the birth narrative of the Bible: “They should recall,” she writes, “that Jesus Christ was born homeless to a teen who was pregnant before she was married.”

Hillary Clinton, in comments critical of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s homeless policies, sought to remind the easily manipulated and ill-informed that “Christmas celebrates ‘the birth of a homeless child.’”

Rev. William Sterrett told The Providence (RI) Journal that the true Christmas story is about the poor and needy. “We have a very clear picture about the whole thing,” Sterrett said. “But the truth is Mary and Joseph were homeless. She gave birth to Jesus in a barn. This image captures the essence of a Christmas story because you cannot get any poorer than that.” There’s no evidence that Jesus was born in a barn.

Pat Nichols, writing for The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), concludes, “At the core, the story of Christmas is about a homeless couple about to have a baby. It is a story about poverty that most of us never experience, people with little more than they carry on their backs and a donkey to provide transportation.”⁵

Have these people ever read the Bible? The Christmas story is set during a time of government control, high taxation, and political oppression (what we would be getting more of if Hillary had been elected in 2016).

 … Politicians and social critics are quick to quote and misquote the Bible when they can twist its message to support their quirky and dangerous political views.

When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable “separation of church and state,” “you can’t impose your morality on other people,” “religion and politics don’t mix.” But they are quick to impose their distorted view of biblical morality on the rest of us through the power of civil government.

The Advent story, in addition to being a demonstration of God’s love toward sinners, is also about how taxes hurt the poor and government decrees can turn productive families into the disenfranchised by enacting and enforcing counterproductive laws.

Kitten in the Breadbasket

My parents' 3-month-old cat
joins us for Christmas dinner…

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Why do American politicians on the right always make strange noises?

Why do American politicians on the right always make strange noises?

asks Dick Rich to The Economist, regarding then propensity of mainstream media types to lean left, by using weasel verbs and words for their adversaries (Charles Krauthammer "fulminating", Donald Trump launching a "ferocious" and "blistering attack"…).

Newt Gingrich “bellows”; Mitch Daniels “huffs”. Please suggest other speech patterns that those on the right should use. Or at least attribute “whines” to the words of Harry Reid, “oozes” to those of Nancy Pelosi, and “pontificates” to those of Barack Obama.

Related: Typical MSM Headline?
"Clinton wants to move past email
scandal, but voters can't seem to"

The First and Last "Group Therapy Session for the Easily Offended"

Non Sequitur by Wiley

Michelle Obama's Response Is Far Worse Than Saying Life Under Trump Is Without Hope: She Considers that Americans Are Kids in Need of a Father Figure for President

Charlie Spiering has watched Michelle Obama on the Oprah Winfrey Network and the Breitbart columnist does not seem to be much impressed:

Michelle Obama … she thinks her husband had been a calming voice for the country, comparing him to a parent calming a child that had bumped his head.

“I feel like Barack has been that for the nation, in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grownup in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, ‘Hey it’s going to be OK,’” she said.

The general response has usually been disbelief or mirth and merriment that the Apologizer-in-Chief's wife considers life under Donald Trump life without hope.

But what the former Michelle Robinson said is far worse—here are her actual words:

What do we give your kids if you can't give them hope? Y'know, our children respond to crises the way they see us respond. You know, it's like [a child] that bumps his head on the table, and they look up at you to figure out whether it hurts. And if you're, like, "oh my God, they're cryin'!", but if you're like "you know what, babe, it's okay, it's okay…"

And I feel that way about the nation, I feel that Barack has been that for the nation — in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grown-up in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, "Hey, it's going to be okay. Let's remember the good things that we have, let's look at the future, let's look at all the things that we are building." All of this is important for our kids to stay focused, and to feel like their work isn't in vain, that their lives aren't in vain… 

So the American public is not only "kids" but "our kids"; who need a father figure in the White House to stay focused and who need his benevolent intervention to prove that their work, and that their lives, are not in vain. Needless to say, this echoes her husband's contention that young Americans are "kids" until at least 26 (the age at which the "kids" can stay under their parents' health care) and quite possibly until far longer.

In fact, the wife has just said, effectively, that all citizens are children throughout their entire lives. Meaning only one thing: that, for their own good, Americans need 1) higher taxes and 2) more interventionist politicians to ride, like knights in shining armor and on white steeds, to their rescue, along with 3) more beneficent bureaucrats to intervene in their lives.

Note to both Obamas: No U.S. president is a father (or the mother) of the nation. Americans are not "kids" and Americans are not crybabies in need of a Che Guevara-like father figure to blow their noses. Americans live in a republic, founded 240 years ago by men who agreed with the Judeo-Christian assumption that all men are equal and all men are in fact grown-up adults, who, offhand, can be trusted to take care of their own lives and the vast majority of problems therein.

This is reflected in the Declaration of Independence (a message to the "you-didn't-build-that" — and won't be able to do so without our help — élites of George III), and, indeed, in every single line of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Update:

The Democrats' “political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.”

Not Much Concern Among Democrats in 2008 Over Foreign Interference in Presidential Elections, When Foreign Contributions Helped Obama Amass a War Chest Twice the Size of His Opponent

Funny.

I don't remind much of a concern among Democrats in 2008 over foreign interference in a presidential election, when the donkey party removed certain safety checks to donations, and it was alleged that foreign (i.e., illegal) contributions helped propel Barack Obama's war chest to the highest in history, indeed, the double of what his opponent (John McCain) had to spend…

Then, again, the same people who had cried bloody murder in 2004 when George W Bush had 10% more to spend than his opponent (John Kerry) — "See?! That proves it!! That America is not a democracy!!" — went mum four years later when the future apologizer-in-chief, as mentioned, had 50% more to spend than his opponent.

Funny, indeed…

Leftists fail to mention that what little illegal aliens do pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser says that her city can no longer continue to support out-of-towners at the city’s homeless shelters 

writes Benny Huang at Constitution.com.

“We have an obligation to serve our residents,” said the mayor. “But we cannot serve the entire region … We’re serving everybody else’s residents. We can’t serve our own. Our own residents are standing at the back of the line.” Last month she proposed a new policy that would require homeless people to prove their residency before being admitted to homeless shelters.

Proving residency can be quite tricky when a person does not have, um, a residence. Mayor Bowser demonstrated the absurdity of her proposal when she asked, “Do they have utilities? Do they have a lease? Do they have any way to demonstrate that they live here?” No, doofus. People who live under highway overpasses do not usually have leases or utility bills.

Bowser compounded the stupidity of her comments when she categorically refused to exclude illegal aliens. “Anybody, regardless of their immigration status, would have to demonstrate that they are a DC resident,” she said. So the city will gladly take in the poor from other countries, even those who are in the country illegally, just not people from outside the District. Yeah, that makes sense.
 
Despite the insanity of Mayor Bowser’s proposal, I can understand the bind she’s in. Budgets are, by definition, the apportionment of finite resources. She’s determined that the social services budget is overburdened and that she has to do something about it. She doesn’t want to slam the door in anyone’s face but unfortunately she must or there will be no social services for anyone.

Naturally, she isn’t willing to take the issue head on, pretending as she does that DC’s strained budget has nothing to do with the illegal aliens who have invaded the city. She’ll blame Virginians and Marylanders because they don’t have a grievance lobby to agitate on their behalf but she’ll never blame non-Americans. It doesn’t occur to her, I suppose, that people from other countries are also from out of town—really out of town.

To hear the Left tell it, the flood of immigration from the third world is a boon to the American economy. They don’t like to distinguish between the illegal and legal varieties of course, and they became incensed whenever anyone else does. Immigrants, they say, contribute to the economy and even pay taxes. They fail to mention however, that what little illegal aliens pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly.

Despite the fact that it’s illegal for them to collect welfare benefits, they do it nonetheless. They send their children to our public schools—some of whom are also illegal aliens and some of whom are anchor baby citizens. (Yes, I said anchor baby. Get over it.) They demand ESL programs. They displace other workers who then turn to public assistance for their daily bread. They commit all sorts of crime then make use of court-appointed interpreters and public defenders. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that enforcement is just too expensive. We’ve tried non-enforcement and it’s costing us out the butt.

My initial reaction toward Washington’s budgetary crisis is schadenfreude. Serves them right. Washington is a boastful “sanctuary city” located within a country that is for all practical purposes a sanctuary nation. Immigration enforcement is a joke and has been for quite a long time. If some big city Democrat mayor can’t make ends meet because of stupid policies that she supports then too bad for her. But of course it won’t be Muriel Bowser who suffers the most when there isn’t enough money to keep the homeless shelters open, it will be homeless Washingtonians.

I often wonder if the burdening of our social services by illegal aliens is in fact an intentional effort—a “conspiracy,” if you will—to bring the whole system down. Recall the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, first articulated in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine. Drs. Cloward and Piven were a married couple, both professors and sociologists, who argued that there just weren’t enough people on the welfare rolls and that those who were on the welfare rolls were only accessing a fraction of the benefits they were qualified for. They advocated a mass movement to enroll more people for the purpose of collapsing the system.

Why would they want to do that? I’ll let them tell you:

“A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.” 

The basic idea was to federalize all anti-poverty policy, to redistribute wealth, and to institute a minimum guaranteed income. It was a socialist’s dream.

From this 1966 article was born the so-called welfare rights movement. Activists combed the slums in search of people who weren’t receiving all of their benefits or any benefits at all. Welfare recipients marched for more handouts. A lot of time and energy that would have been better utilized looking for jobs was instead spent on organizing and making demands.

But the Cloward-Piven strategy showed a surprising lack of ambition. They were “thinking small,” confining their movement to poor Americans when in fact there was a bottomless well of impoverished people in our backyard. I’m speaking of Latin America, of course. Fifty years after the article was published it appears that the Left has overcome its provincialism. These days they’re trying to get Latin Americans here by the boatload and to care for their every need. And why stop there? There are plenty of poor people in exotic places like Somalia and Syria. Just keep importing more and more of the third world’s most desperate people until the system heaves and gives way under the strain. Then replace it with something a little more Venezuelan.

Is this the 21^st Century version of the Cloward-Piven strategy? In recent years I’ve asked myself that question with increasing frequency. Illegal immigration has swelled, states have granted drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to people who shouldn’t even be here in the first place, and “sanctuary cities” (lawless zones) are now commonplace. The center cannot hold—and that may be the point.

It’s schemes like this that remind me of just how dumb it is for anyone to vote Democrat, even poor people. Especially poor people. I’m sure this will be a tough sell but I believe that it serves the best interests of America’s poor to show the jackass party to the door. Why? Because the welfare system as we know is it unsustainable, burdened a little more everyday with illegal aliens, the children of illegal aliens, and people who are just trying to get over on the system. For people who really need those services the prospect of collapse ought to be frightening. They should be telling their elected officials to stop importing wards of the state but they never do. Perhaps they believe, as many poor people do, that there’s some rich guy out there who can and should be squeezed a little harder. But there isn’t a rich guy in the whole world who could keep our social services afloat in the long run even if the government seized every penny he owns. The answer isn’t more taxes it’s less spending.

But don’t Republicans want to slash social services? Not really. For as long as I’ve been observing politics, Republicans have generally favored the status quo, opposing Democrats’ attempt to expand social services while doing little or nothing to undo what’s already been done. … 

For people who really need those benefits it makes no sense to continue to vote for a party, the Democrats, that is wittingly or unwittingly crashing the system. The first victims of the coming implosion are those Americans who actually need the benefits that government will no longer be able to provide.