Are conservatives free to fight back when vicious charges are leveled at them designed to instill fear and chill dissent?

The Left has learned nothing from the election of Donald J. Trump. The hysteria of the progressive crybullies, infected with a vicious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, grows unabated. The smearing of anyone who disagrees with “racist,” “sexist,” and “bigot,” has depreciated the meaning of the words, lessening their sting. The constant usage of such labels has exposed the Left as being filled with hacks.

The Democrats are the “There You Go Again” Party in everything but name.

But that is not the main message that Benjamin Weingarten offers in his Conservative Review piece.

While the Left has failed to learn any lessons, those on the Right must seize on the lessons of the 2016 election.

We ought to take a page from the playbook of Trump, who has almost singularly provided us with a golden opportunity to redefine the terms of battle, no longer fighting on leftist ground. For Republicans and conservatives has been liberated from the PC thought police. We are free to fight back when vicious charges are leveled at us designed to instill fear and chill dissent.

As former speaker Newt Gingrich has perceptively noted, Trump has been a masterful media manipulator, getting media members to chase so-called “shiny objects” — “Can you believe Trump said X!?” ad nauseam.

Mr. Trump’s version of stray voltage has a number of effects beyond just causing chaos and distracting his opponents. When everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage. And when everything is an outrage, you expose yourself as a purely partisan actor, turning off large swaths of the American public.

Trump’s lack of fear of touching politically incorrect third rails that millions of Americans felt, but which had not been articulated so bluntly by a national politician, served him well. Incidentally, it also allowed him to shift the Overton Window on critical issues like immigration and Islamic supremacism.

When attacked for taking these positions, unlike those to come before him, Trump did not avoid the fray. Rather, he jumped into it, counterpunching.

Lulled into a false sense of security by Republicans who fought with their hands tied behind their backs, constrained by suicidal rules of political engagement for decades, the Left did not know how to react when hit.

Leftists could not believe that a political opponent had the gall to actually fight tooth and nail.\

Trump does not give an inch to his critics, and neither should any other Republican. He defines the rules of engagement, and so should all on the Right.

Watching the confirmation hearings to date, we see many on the Left jabbing as if we are in a pre-Trump world. Their questions all hew to the same old narrative that if you are not a racist, sexist, or bigot, then you are an out-of-touch plutocrat or a shill for some special interest or other.

Like Trump, Republicans should challenge these charges head on. They should take issue with the Left’s premises from the start, showing that it is the Left who is projecting when it tries to discredit those who believe in capitalism, the power of the individual, and the sanctity of the individual’s rights, the rule of law, national sovereignty, federalism, and the Judeo-Christian morality on which the country is based.

When leftists attack an attorney general designate because he is a white male from the South, they should be attacked for judging based on color of skin (rather than content of character) and for trying to bruise an appointee who will not stand for open borders, selective law enforcement, and politicized justice.

When leftists attack a secretary of education designate because her family is wealthy, they should be attacked for their anti-capitalism and hypocrisy, and their real desire to bloody an appointee because she believes that the Left’s own constituents — and indeed all Americans — should have the opportunity to send their kids to superior schools, rather than being doomed to a subpar education because it mollifies a teachers union.

These attacks are designed to put not only the appointees, but also all right-thinking people on the defensive — to fear reflexively a false premise because those premises have prevailed among the progressives who dominated media, academia, and government for decades.

We should no longer live in fear — for the Left thrives when we self-censor and accept its baseless premises.

Trump did not, and he won the highest office in the land.

Yes, the Left will continue to claim scalps. People will be fired for contributing to one cause or another or committing a thought crime in the eyes of progressivism. But the more we resist, thwart, and turn the Left’s fire back around on itself, the more the Left will be outraged, marginalized, and alienated from sensible Americans.

In the Civil War Between Right and Left, Only the Latter Fights Ferociously

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth

writes Dennis Prager in Townhall:

America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America’s Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech “hate speech.” To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot.

There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left. Using the First Civil War analogy, American unity was achieved only after the South was vanquished and slavery was abolished.

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism — there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt — supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

The third significant difference between the First and Second Civil Wars is that in the Second Civil war, one side has been doing nearly all the fighting. That is how it has been able to take over schools — from elementary schools, to high schools, to universities — and indoctrinate America’s young people; how it has taken over nearly all the news media; and how it has taken over entertainment media.
 
The conservative side has lost on every one of these fronts because it has rarely fought back with anything near the ferocity with which the left fights. Name a Republican politician who has run against the left as opposed to running solely against his or her Democratic opponent. And nearly all American conservatives, people who are proud of America and affirm its basic tenets, readily send their children to schools that indoctrinate their children against everything the parents hold precious. A mere handful protest when their child’s teacher ceases calling their son a boy or their daughter a girl, or makes “slave owner” the defining characteristic of the Founding Fathers.

With the defeat of the left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and the defeat of the left in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives and the right have to defeat the American left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.

Update: The Prager article was mentioned by Newt Gingrich in a TV interview

"We Couldn't Believe Our Ears" Say Shocked MSM Reporters: Conservative Writer Thrown Off French TV for Opining Obama Might Be Muslim

A pro-Republican author in France was expelled from a television show during the Donald Trump inauguration after "shock" at her "rather hallucinatory rant."

L’intervention hallu d’Évelyne Joslain sur @BFMTV: “Obama déteste l’Amérique. Je pense qu’il était plus musulman dans son cœur que chrétien” pic.twitter.com/0aLwSaLtMj

— Jérémie Maire (@jeremiemaire) January 20, 2017

Mind you, Evelyne Joslain did not say on BFMTV that Barack Obama was a Muslim, but that he might be Muslim, in his heart, specifically, that "I believe Obama is more Muslim in his heart than Christian." This led to shock throughout the French media, with Marianne calling it "surreal" and Télérama declaring that "we couldn't believe our ears." Indeed, the (very) few people who leaped to her defense were said, all of them, to belong to… (wait for it) le Fascosphère.

The questions (regarding Evelyne Joslain's alleged "misplaced words") that the members of the mainstream media (uncharitably called by some, "presstitutes") of any country, including America itself, never ask and never answer, is the following: what is wrong with being Muslim anyway — given that we are constantly reminded how wonderful, or at least how normal, the religion of peace is and its adherents are — while how insulting is it not to think that the leader of a Western nation is Christian — given the fact that we are constantly reminded how obtuse, how retrograde, how racist, and how superstitious those oafish believers are.

And why shouldn't a person be allowed to believe that a certain leader, or a certain type of a country's population, is hateful towards the country (or towards the majority of the population thereof) that he leads or that they live in? We hear about hate and hate thought and hate crimes all the time, don't we? Are only members of the right supposed to belong to such a group? Well… that's exactly the point… ain't it?

L’intervention hallu d’Évelyne Joslain sur @BFMTV: “Obama déteste l’Amérique. Je pense qu’il était plus musulman dans son cœur que chrétien” pic.twitter.com/0aLwSaLtMj

— Jérémie Maire (@jeremiemaire) January 20, 2017

The same outrage came up in America itself as the presidential campaign was slowly getting underway when Donald Trump, asked if Obama is a Muslim, "did nothing at the time to disabuse the man of this notion and the candidate has since taken considerable heat for his nonresponse from just about every quarter, including that paragon of justice and honesty Hillary Clinton" (Roger Simon).

Time to head over to PJ Media's Instapundit where Glenn Reynolds and Ed Driscoll have some choice comments, while Jim Treacher, Andrew Klavan, and Brian Gates take the media's double standards a step further in the obligatory snarky section.

There's nothing wrong with being a Muslim. That's why it's considered such a terrible insult. https://t.co/kjqmeMbXgY

— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) September 18, 2015

Leftists: "How dare Republicans suggest Obama is a Muslim!"
Next breath: "Republicans are so Islamophobic!"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

— Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) September 18, 2015

@jtLOL @instapundit likewise, Christians are the most backward, misogynist, racist ppl in America, and how dare you suggest Obama isn't one.

— Brian Gates (@knownasbgates) September 18, 2015

Roger Simon went on to point out the following:

Is Obama a Muslim?  The answer is no.  But what is he then?  Is Obama a Christian, as Jeb Bush asserted in an attempt to make Trump look bad after Thursday's dustup? Not a chance.  Obama is about as pure a post-modern agnostic as you can find.  He's about as Christian as your average gender studies professor at Swarthmore. Religion is for the [44th] president a convenience, an instrument of power.

What Evelyne Joslain didn't, and doesn't, understand is that nobody, but nobody, is allowed to criticize Barack Obama, or even put his words into doubt, since he is not a professional politician (or at least not a professional politician in the traditional sense) but something closer to a sainted figure, a light worker, a near-messiah, who is trying to transform the nightmarish hellhole that is America into a European paradise, a place where Americans will finally be so lucky to have as high taxes as Europeans do, as much red tape as Europeans enjoy, and as many bureaucrats as Europeans have.

Indeed, the taboo on saying anything negative about Obama seems coupled with the right, indeed almost the duty, to say nothing positive about people like a George Bush, a Sarah Palin, and — last but definitely not least — a Donald Trump…

That's the real story: nobody is allowed to question the immortal pronouncements of the left's paragon of virtue (whether concerning his private life or public policy), and nobody, more generally, is allowed to question any part of the left's PC narrative.

Related: • Are conservatives free to fight back when vicious charges are leveled at them designed to instill fear and chill dissent?

• ‘Isolated incident’? Violent episodes from the Left are beginning to feel like Groundhog Day; As long as the Left remains self-righteous, it will continue to terrorize the rest of us

• In the Civil War Between Right and Left, Only the Latter Fights Ferociously

• Sur les chaînes françaises, on préfère les crétins qui ne connaissent des Etats-Unis que les lieux où les gauchistes se réunissent pour trépigner en vase clos

The 2016 Vote and the Electoral College System Explained — With Help from the European Union

To better understand the 2016 election results in the United States,
it is perhaps helpful to make a comparison that brings in 
the European Union.

Below are 5 points regarding the importance (or lack thereof) 
of Hillary Clinton's victory in the popular vote,
and to what extent it is correct to portray 
her election loss as a scandal.

(The following is meant to be a neutral description of the 2016 election 
as well as of the reasons and concepts explaining America's electoral college, 
since, as I never cease to say, no one was more appalled in March 2016 
than I when Donald Trump emerged as the GOP's candidate…)

Let us start by quoting Mark Twain, 
who, if you remember, said that
there are three kinds of lies — 
lies, damned lies, and statistics.

FIRST of all 
— and what I am going to say will sound
like withering criticism of America, but it is in fact
nothing if not an entirely neutral and dispassionate
observation —
the United States is (get ready for it) 
NOT — repeat NOT — A DEMOCRACY. 

Sounds like a shrieking Trotskyite protester 

from the 1970s, right? (Or from any other era,
not least the present.)
Still, it is true.
The U.S. is not a democracy
(just like France is not a democracy).
It is a republic.

(C'est la RF, la Répubique Française,
pas la DF, pas la Démocratie Française…)

What is the difference?
A Democracy is a government of men,
it is rule by the majority (which sounds
pretty good, until the majority becomes a mob);
A Republic is a government of laws,
it is a rule by the majority,
coupled with protection for the minority
(for the political minority).

SECOND, 
the United States of America is not a country, not in

the same sense as Denmark or France or Columbia is;
it is a federation, a union (50 states), somewhat like
the European Union (28 nations), but in the final count 
somewhere in-between a country and the EU. 
(The same applies to places like Brazil and Mexico
— 26 states in the República Federativa do Brasil,
31 states in the Estados Unidos Mexicanos.)

THIRD: 
Both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party 
campaigned according to the system in place, not the system 
not in place. Neither was going for the popular majority,
they were going for the victory in the number of states, 
i.e., for victory in  electoral votes.

They knew the goal, that is how they campaigned, and, 

no, there were no unpleasant (or, rather, no unfair) surprises.

You might as well protest that you have calculated that
a hypothetical loser in a specific country's one-man/one-vote 
system would have emerged the victor had that country 
adopted an America-style electoral college system.
(Yeah, very interesting, but… so what?)
But the "Democratic" system is undoubtedly better,
you counter? Not sure — read on:

FOURTH: 
Because the citizens of one state feel pretty

knowledgeable about how their state will their turn out

(when they don't, and the state is "up for grabs",
that's when it's referred to as a swing state),

many of them will not bother to vote — just as neither party's

candidate will bother to spend much (or any) campaign time
there — knowing the effort is unlikely to change anything. 

Thus, for instance, neither Hillary nor Trump 
made many campaign stops in California. Meanwhile,
conservatives in the Golden State will not bother to 
leave their homes to vote (knowing it is futile), 
which they certainly would do, if the rule-book allowed  
for a one-vote system (thus changing the popular votes 
back, perhaps decisively, perhaps not, towards the right).

This brings us to the fifth and final point:

FIFTH:

Whatever you think about Hillary and/or Trump

— and I have said time and again how horrified

I was when The Donald won the GOP nomination —

the fact remains, whether you like it or not, that

the Republican candidate won the popular vote

in state after state, from East to West and from

North to South, over and over and over again,

in 30 states (i.e., 30/50).

But because California is (by far) the most populous state,

its winning majority turned the simple state majority into

also the national majority.

If you discount California, the victor of the remainder of
the nation's popular vote (the popular vote in the remaining
49 states combined) happens to be… the Republican.

Whomever you favor in this contest, shouldn't the fact 

that one candidate won the national vote by nearly 

3 million votes be (at least slightly) tempered by the fact 

that 4 (!) million votes of that candidate's 65 to 66 million 

result came from 1 state out of 50 (California)?

Shouldn't the fact that the winning candidate lost the popular vote

in 30 states out of 50 — as well as in the remaining 49 combined —
cause you to pause? (Indeed, imagine 

if it were the other way around, and a winning Republican had won

the popular vote, but also only because of one single state

(Texas?) out of 50.)

Possibly you will recover and say, "Erik, all that is very nice, 
but in the end, it's immaterial, isn't it?" and possibly you will
continue insisting, "So what?! The total amount of votes
is still more fair! Hillary still wins!"

Well, as it turns out, this is precisely not fair, not at all; 
indeed, it is precisely the kind of local unfairness that the 
"Founding Fathers" sought to prevent when they invented 
the electoral college for their republic (not for their democracy)

— to prevent one single state, or, more accurately, one section 
of the country (or of the Union), from dominating all the others.

Try to imagine this on a European level.

Imagine that in a more unified European Union,

a continental vote has one of two EU candidates win

the popular vote in, say, 20 nations out of 28,

from Denmark and France to Estonia and Greece.

But because the 28th nation is the most populous, the candidate

who wins in Germany wins the whole game, meaning the

seven nations "allied" with it (so to speak) beat out

the 20 lesser-populated countries' choice.

How many times would there be elections,
how long would the EU endure, before all other nations
woke up to the fact that their votes didn't matter, that Germany
(like California in the U.S.) was the dominant member, and indeed,
that they started growling about getting ready to follow the UK in its Brexit vote?!

No. The above scenario shows why, if 
the EU did want to go ahead with "a more closer union",
countries like Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal would
refuse a system based on the one-man-one-vote, because
they would become totally subjugated by the more populous 

countries — and who could blame them for that?

Countries like France, Germany, and Italy, on the other hand, 
would counter that a system in which each country has the 
same amount of votes is ridiculous and unfair, amounting to 
the loss of rights for tens of millions of people when their 
nations have five to 10 times the populations of their smaller 
neighbors — and who could blame them for that?

This is precisely the debate that occurred

between the 13 former colonies, the small

states (Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina…)

and the large states (Pennsylvania, Virginia,

Massachusetts…), in the 1780s.

Indeed, let us leave the Old Continent

and head back across the Atlantic:

The result of the debates in the summer

of 1787 is the United States Constitution:

• In America, the compromise between small states and large states
on the legislative level led to the two-chamber legislature,
the Senate and the House of Representatives.

• On the executive level, the compromise is a 
combination of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
It is called … the electoral college.

Europe 1: The Aggressive Tone in Donald Trump's Inauguration Speech Was Directed at Washington and the Establishment

A member of Republicans Overseas responds to the questions of Europe 1's Wendy Bouchard.

Soutien de Donald Trump, Erik Svane, membre de Republicans Overseas, a décrypté le discours d'investiture du nouveau président des Etats-Unis.

Invité(s) : Erik Svane, membre de Republicans Overseas

Par Wendy BOUCHARD

RTL Debate: Is Donald Trump a Danger for France?

Trump est-il un danger pour la France ? Le débat @ErikSvane / @durpaire dans #RTLMatin à 8h25 > https://t.co/r32D2MQBdR pic.twitter.com/PekfzUge7F

— RTL France (@RTLFrance) January 19, 2017

On RTL's 6 Minutes Pour Trancher, with Yves Calvi, François Durpaire and a member of Republicans Overseas debate on the question over whether Donald Trump is a danger for France: Donald Trump est-il un danger pour la France ?

Prescient (Not)? Schadenfreude Celebration about Donald Trump Distress in a Wiley Cartoon from 2007

Non Sequitur: A Wiley Miller cartoon from before the Barack Obama era, Christmas 2007 to be exact, proves to be strangely prescient (not), almost as much as the much-vaunted video compilation of VIPs saying over and over, and that among gales of laughter, that Donald Trump will never be president.

As We Predicted in 2008, Accusations of American Racism Would, and Will, Never Cease

As we predicted weeks before the 2008 vote, the (then-hypothetical) election of Barack Obama would in no way bring an end, not to American racism, but to accusations of American racism.

In its issue immediately prior to the 2016 elections, Charlie Hebdo was back to its tired old prejudices and its tired old tricks, saying Obama [Would] Again Be a [U.S.] Citizen Like All the Others, while the poor black man (victim) is forced to flee under a hail of bullets fired by white police officers. In the meantime, Jean-Yves Camus reports on the alt-right (Ku Klux Klan Without the Hoods) while a "Jacob Hamburger" compares The Donald to (sigh) a cowboy and a gangster.

A couple of weeks prior to the 2008 election, I wrote a post asking a series of questions…

(By how many percentage points must Barack Obama win for "America" to "prove" (to itself as well as to others) that it is no longer racist? … What if the Illinois senator wins by, say, 60%? That's a pretty impressive victory by any standard. But does that mean that the other 40% must necessarily be racists? Must race be the only, or the main, reason for their voting against Obama? … And how about the future? Given that one in seven Americans is black (it's actually about 12.85% or closer to one in eight, but since we are talking about presidential terms, seven is an easier figure to handle), must Americans from now on elect an African-American every seven election cycles to prove they aren't racist? … Or must Americans make up for the 220 years without an African-American at the helm, meaning that the next six presidents (the total number of white males in the White House, 43, divided by 7) must be black.)

Here was/is the point of the questions

What is the point about these questions? The point is as follows: Make no mistake about it. Should Obama win the election, the hand-wringing and wild charges about American racism — both at home and abroad — will at best cease temporarily. Any opposition to President Obama's policies will be construed as racism "rearing its ugly head" again.

And at best (at best, according to the — non-thinking — bean-counters, that is), in the faraway future, we will be told by the snickerers and the snorters: "Well yeah, a black American was elected in 2008 (even reelected in 2012), but that was a one-time travesty!"

Or they will say that oh, sure there is an African-Americans (there are African-Americans) whom Americans have elected president, but… his (but their) skin color wasn't dark enough. "Would they ever" — insert knowing ironic smile here — "elect a really dark Negro?"

 … Why does this come up? Because Americans — or certainly, conservative Americans from small town America — must be accused of something sinister.  If it isn't racism, it's fascism. If it isn't fascism, it's something else. Americans must be treacherous, they must be greedy, they must be warmongers, they must be reactionary, they must be clueless. And… they must be racist.

 … the basic truth about racism is as follows: racism is far less an accurate description of an attitude prevalent in a given society, in a given individual, than it is a weapon that is wielded to demonize one's opponents while making oneself appear heroic by parroting (and by doing nothing else than parroting) politically correct platitudes. More often than not, in other words, the fight against alleged pockets of racism is nothing more noble than a self-serving act of self-praise.

Watch the video, Erik Explains Racism in the 2008 Election to His Cat

See No Pasarán's previous coverage of Charlie Hebdo (which
features an explanatory cartoon on the magazine's English page)…

Related — Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism
That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party

• Dennis Prager: Foreigners of every race know that
the U.S. is the least racist country in the world but most black
Americans and the entire left deny it (the entire left, foreign as
well as American)

• A week or two before the 2008 election, Michael
Ramirez drew a cartoon called Who Are We to Judge?

2008 Flashback—What You Never Read About in the MSM: Obama Mockingly Imitates a Handicapped Man

A look back: Back during the 2008 campaign, one of the two contestants was not taken to account by the media for imitating, for mocking, a handicapped man — indeed, the wounded war veteran who proved to be his opponent.

From a September 2008 post:

It's one thing (one which is bad enough), as Jonah Goldberg points out, that Barack Obama and his campaign staff do not realize that

One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious.

(Jonah Goldberg goes on to ask: "what does it say about his supposedly 'cybersavvy' staffers that they don't know how to conduct a five-minute Google search?", adding that "by this logic [incidentally], Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.")

It's another thing, as Christopher Cook points out, that Barack Obama seems to intentionally mock McCain's war wounds (at 12:20 in the video).

At a moment when describing a McCain ad, Obama adds a somatic gesture to create an image of John McCain. That gesture involves changing his stance and arm position to imitate the way McCain stands—a stance the Senator developed as a result of the injuries he suffered while he was a "guest" at the Hanoi Hilton.

…The gesture was clearly an imitation of McCain—the context makes that plain. Obama makes no other such bodily gestures EXCEPT when he's creating a picture of McCain in the windmill commercial.

Obama may not have been directly saying "ha, ha, you got your arms broken and a bayonet plunged into your groin and I didn't." It doesn't matter. His way of imitating John McCain is by imitating the man's physical stance.

Barack Obama is a puerile, emotionally under-developed little man. It's appalling to think that he could be this close to the presidency.

And by the way… Let's not even go into the subject about what this says about the left's alleged undying respect for servicemen and veterans…

Oh, and by the way: while we're wallowing in the past and the good ol' times, do you remember this one?

You have heard about the Republican candidate's stooping to negative ads and hateful campaigns, haven't you? Disgusting, scandalous, going down into the gutter, etc… Well, it so turns out that the McCain campaign was doing little more than using Obama's own comparison to Paris Hilton! And that, from a Washingon Post article of three and a half years ago (merci à Arnaud) [from February… 2005!]…

"Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame," [quipped Barack Obama in February 2005]. "I've already had an hour and a half. I mean, I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse."

Obama dismisses those who disagree with him like a professor forced to deal with simple-minded, wayward students

  … after two terms of the Obama presidency, the Democratic Party is weaker than it has been since the 1920s

writes Peter Wehner in the New York Times.

IT wasn’t supposed to end this way for Democrats.

Eight years ago, Barack Obama won the presidency promising to transform America. A supremely self-confident politician, Mr. Obama was the object of extravagant hopes that he nurtured and encouraged.

 … The man who seemed to hold such promise for his party ended up taking a scythe to it.

What happened?

For some of the president’s admirers, the answer is that America has become benighted and bigoted. For others, the culprit is the Republican Party, which obstructed Mr. Obama at every turn. And for still others, like Mr. Obama, the problem is that his administration didn’t do enough to advertise its greatness.

Even if you believe there are elements of truth in these explanations, they still amount to excuses. The same country that twice elected Mr. Obama did not suddenly become a nation of deplorables. In his first two years, with Democrats firmly in control of the House and Senate, Mr. Obama won the passage of his sweeping legislative agenda, including the Affordable Care Act, the stimulus package, financial regulations, the extension of jobless benefits and more. As for selling his policies, President Obama was constantly making his case.

The decimation of the Democratic Party came because Mr. Obama turned out to be great at poetry and bad at prose.

Start with the economy. … the Obama presidency has been characterized by injurious incompetence, in particular with regard to his signature achievement, Obamacare.

 … Overseas, the Obama years have been defined by spreading disorder and chaos, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with nations collapsing and borders dissolving. More terrorist safe havens have been established than ever before. Russia and China have become more aggressive and significantly increased their geopolitical influence. America is now held in brazen contempt by our enemies and mistrusted by many of our allies.

Yet in some respects the greatest failure of the Obama years is in the area where many people thought he would excel. Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his 2008 campaign a promise to end a politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” In February of that year, I praised him for “a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment.” Yet he leaves office with America more conflicted and cynical than when he took office. More than 70 percent of Americans say the country is either more divided or no more united than it was in 2009. Race relations are the worst in decades, and our nation is as polarized as it has been in the modern era.

It would be silly to lay all the blame for this at the feet of Mr. Obama. Republicans have been rhetorically reckless at times, and President-elect Donald Trump has coarsened public discourse and set Americans against one another in ways that were once unimaginable. But Mr. Obama came first, and he played a role in where we are.

In his farewell address last week, President Obama said that for the sake of our democracy we need to heed the advice of the fictional character Atticus Finch, who said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Yet Mr. Obama never seemed to consider things from a different point of view from his own. He has shown withering disdain for his opponents, constantly impugning their motives even as he testified to the purity of his own. It was his arrogance that proved to be Mr. Obama’s undoing. (Even leaders of his own party felt Mr. Obama’s derision, as if dealing with them was somehow beneath him.) Mr. Obama dismissed those who disagreed with him like a professor forced to deal with simple-minded, wayward students. He warned us against retreating into our bubbles, but he was never able to escape his own.

During the Obama presidency, many people felt unheard and alienated. They are the kind of Americans Mr. Obama had in mind in 2008 when he talked about “bitter” people clinging to their “guns or religion.”

Barack Obama is among the most talented campaigners we have ever seen. But as president, he failed in a manner and on a scale that damaged his party, undermined faith in the institutions of government and left the nation more riven than he found it. For most Americans, the economy has been listless. All this helped create the conditions that allowed a cynical demagogue to rise up and succeed him, one who will undo the achievements he most prizes.

In many ways Barack Obama and Donald Trump could not be more different. Mr. Obama is equable and graceful; Mr. Trump is erratic and graceless. Yet one cannot make sense of the incoming presidency without understanding the failures of the outgoing one.

America's founding fathers wanted elections to have consequences, but they also created a system that requires factions to work together

President Obama started with an outstretched hand,

remembers Eric Cantor in the New York Times, 

but pulled it back with a policy lurch leftward to a place we could not go

 … News outlets, along with the Democrats, labeled us the “Party of No.” But that didn’t reflect the reality. Our goal was to offer a viable alternative to every major piece of legislation the Democratic majority put forward. We wondered if the president would embrace our efforts to bridge the policy divide, and if he did, what that might mean for Republicans in Washington.

A few weeks later, John and I, along with the other congressional leaders, met with President Obama at the White House to discuss our plan as well as his proposed stimulus bill. Bringing along a one-page outline of our working group’s recommendations, I rather brazenly asked the president if I could hand it out at the meeting. The president agreed, and after glancing at it, he said to me, “Eric, I don’t see anything crazy in here.”

I was hopeful. But later in the meeting, when I mentioned that a stimulus package built around government spending would be too much like “old Washington,” the president’s tone changed. He said:

“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won. So I think on that one I trump you.”

It wasn’t long afterward that we learned that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, were well on their way to having a final stimulus package drafted, and they weren’t really interested in any of our ideas.

 … As Americans witness the swearing in of a new president this week, it’s another reminder that our founding fathers wanted elections to have consequences, but they also created a system that requires factions to work together even after a decisive election. It is my hope that the new president and leaders in Congress live up to our founders’ expectations.

Benny Huang gets misty-eyed recalling all the cherished memories from eight years in the Obama White House

When Barack Obama became our president eight years ago

remembers a wistful and dewy-eyed Benny Huang,

the entertainment community welcomed his ascendancy with a video in which they pledged “to be a servant to our president.”

It was one of those creepy montages in which a diverse group of famous people repeat the same thing over and over again. You know the ones I’m talking about. In this case they kept saying “I pledge” to do this or that good deed, but mostly just to be good Obama-bots. I think it was intended to be inspirational, which it was in its own warped way. It inspired me to puke a little in the back of my mouth.

Two terms later and the jet set is back with an administration-produced video in which they recount their favorite moments from the Obama years. This time it didn’t just feature stars and starlets but also a diverse group of regular folks as well.

Their favorite moments were predictable. Leonardo DiCaprio said that his favorite moment was when President Obama declared at the UN that climate change is the most important issue facing this generation and all generations to come. DiCaprio is really, really concerned about “climate change” (which I think used to be called global warming), though not concerned enough to change his hypocritical lifestyle. John Legend claimed that “I never cried before from an election result.” Yeah, lots of us have shed tears in the Obama years though not necessarily from joy. One guy, who I think is a regular Joe, said that his favorite moment was when Barack Obama finally showed his support for same-sex marriage. Yes, we were all relieved when Obama decided to stop lying about that. It was getting really awkward hearing him try to explain his deep Christian faith.

These people are truly, deeply demented.

But I have good news for the celebrities and non-celebrities who appeared in those agitprop films—the best is yet to come! Yes, Barack Obama’s finest moment will occur about noontime on the 20^th of January, 2017, when he gets his sorry butt out of the White House. It can’t come fast enough.

I too have my “favorite” moments. And by “favorite” I mean those moments that are seared into my mind for their hypocrisy, incompetence, narcissism, racism, criminality, and/or idiocy. I’m sure my readers have theirs as well and so I invite them to leave those cherished memories in the comments section.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane together.

Remember that time that Obama appointed all of those tax cheats to important positions in his administration? Yeah, me too! Liberals like taxes because they don’t pay them. One of those tax cheats, Tim Geithner, was even appointed Secretary of the Treasury. You know, the guy who oversees the IRS?

And who could forget the time someone put a Chairman Mao ornament on the White House Christmas tree? (Oops, I mean the “holiday tree.”) Seriously, were they sold out of Pol Pot ornaments? Mao Zedong is literally the greatest murderer in world history. Not to be outdone, White House communications director Anita Dunn praised the bloodthirsty tyrant as one “of [her] favorite philosophers”—alongside Mother Teresa!
 
Then there was that time that Barack won the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than being a real cool cat. At the time the award was announced he’d been in office for just twelve days. That was before he took his fleet of drones on a killing spree and before he flooded North Africa with guns that were impossible to account for the moment they were distributed. Apparently, the Nobel panel had some misgivings later in the Obama years that perhaps they had given the prize to an unworthy recipient. Ya think? I wonder what their first clue was? Could it have been the Libyan teenagers in Toyota pickup trucks driving around shooting people with American-furnished weapons? Or was it when those weapons seeped into neighboring Mali and helped al-Qaeda-linked Islamists foment a rebellion?

There are so many good gun-related memories from the Obama years. Operation Fast & Furious (F&F) was when Eric Holder’s Department of Justice purposely allowed weapons to “walk” from Arizona gun stores across the border to the Mexican underworld, allegedly so that they could be tracked by their serial numbers. The whole operation spun out of control and the DOJ lost track of the guns. One of those guns was used to kill Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol agent and Marine Corps veteran. An F&F .50 caliber rifle was found at the criminal hideout of notorious narco-gangster El Chapo when he was arrested last year. A third F&F gun was found in the possession of an Islamic terrorist bent on shooting up the “Draw Mohammad” contest in Garland, Texas, and a possible fourth was used in the November 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris.

Another classic Obama moment was when he released five top Taliban commanders, which he did not have the legal authority to do, in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who was supposedly being held captive in Afghanistan. Except he kind of wasn’t. Bergdahl deserted his post and went straight to the Taliban. Subsequent attempts to locate and rescue him got good soldiers killed or wounded. National Security Advisor Susan Rice claimed that Sergeant Dirtbag “served with honor and distinction.” She later clarified that she meant only that his original decision to enlist was honorable if not the circumstances of his, um, “capture.” But in any case, “serving” is what soldiers do every day in the military, while enlisting is what they do on their first day. By her definition of the word there’s never been a soldier who didn’t serve with honor and distinction because they all enlisted at some point. Rice’s original comment was not misunderstood, it was a lie.

And let’s not forget all the great work Obama has done on the behalf of convicted felons.

In 2015, President Obama decreed that federal agencies would be prohibited from asking prospective employees if they had ever been convicted of a felony because not hiring felons is raaaaacist! Gee, I wonder if a person could get a job at the White House with a criminal record? But at very least this action was within the president’s legitimate authority. Then the Administration warned landlords that asking a prospective tenant about his criminal background is also illegal. This move was dressed up as a new but wholly legitimate interpretation of the already existing Fair Housing Act. In reality, it was a complete re-write of the law that bans discrimination based on race, not criminal history. So now you have to rent a room in your home to someone who might be a murderer or a rapist. You’ll never know because you can’t ask.

I’m getting a little misty-eyed recalling all of these great times we’ve shared together. There was that time—who could forget it?—when the full force of the federal government was brought to bear on the Little Sisters of the Poor in order to force them to provide birth control to their employees. Then there was that other time that Obama’s Secretary of the Navy named a ship after the pedophile Harvey Milk, as well as the time that the DOJ dismissed all charges against the New Black Panthers after they stood outside of a polling place in Philadelphia threatening voters with a billy club and saying that they were about to “be ruled by the black man, cracker!”

But I’ve saved my absolute favorite Obama memory for last. My favorite moment, bar none, was when Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documents related to the Fast & Furious debacle and the US Attorney refused to prosecute! That’s right, the department which Holder headed excused its boss. Poor Eric Holder, that innocent lamb, the one who dealt death to Mexicans (and some Americans, Frenchmen, etc), then lied about it, then blew off subpoenas, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist. That, ladies and gentleman, was the quintessential moment of the Obama Administration. It was all there, all on display—the arrogance, the deceit, the reckless disregard for people and processes.

So what are your favorite memories? Do tell. Some day we might need to remind ourselves of why we can never allow a Marxist ideologue in the Oval Office ever again.

You are invited to leave those cherished memories of yours in the blog's comments section.

Related: Sure Thing—Let's All Go Ahead and Swoon at Barack's Love for Michelle;
Only, What Does That Have to Do with Obama's Beliefs and His Performance?

Sure Thing—Let's All Go Ahead and Swoon at Barack's Love for Michelle; Only, What Does That Have to Do with Obama's Beliefs and His Performance?

So who was the best family man?

Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?

Where was there better marital harmony?

In the family of Cromwell or in the family of (either) King Charles?

Where is there better marital harmony?

In the family of Barack Obama or in the family of (either) George Bush?

Are you having your fill reading about Barack Obama and how he has led a scandal-free administration besides also the impressiveness of his showing his undying love for the former Michelle LaVaughn Robinson? (See his tears?!)

Hollywood even made a (worshipful, natch) movie about the couple.

Besides the fact that we don't, offhand, know to what extent the external family values of anybody (the Obamas, the Bushes, the Lincolns, the Davises, the Cromwells, the Stuarts, certainly no one currently alive) is real — rather than window dressing, i.e., more or less carefully thought out propaganda, especially when it concerns a politician (!) — isn't there a reason to question the fact that this makes the person better at managing his country, or, for that matter, better at any job at all?

I don't remember many instances from leftists at how impressed we were supposed to be at the "crazy cowboy" aka the "liar" and the "buffoon" for his love for Laura or that of his father for Barbara and how the latter — immediately — turned away a woman visitor who had had the audacity of flirting with him.

Indeed, I remember the same levels of enthusiasm for Bill Clinton, whose marital harmony, I think it would not be hard to argue, was lower than either of his two successors (the latest successor, I am not so sure) or his two predecessors in the White House. And… how about John F Kennedy?

That's it: Barack Obama is the impersonation of coolness, Bill Clinton was/is the impersonation of coolness, JFK was the impersonation of coolness. All of 'em young. All of 'em sexy. That's it, really, ain't it?

Barack Obama, who dances and sings and raps on television. Bill Clinton, who plays the saxophone on stage. JFK, who, who… who just stands around, looking incredibly sexy.

Are we allowed to wonder to what extent being cool and being young (or young-looking) and being sexy and playing a musical instrument (or one's vocal chords) plus being funny on a TV show (see also Michelle Obama being the coolest FLOTUS ever or the FLOTUS of Our Dreams) — and even have a deep, manly voice — is supposed to be a requirement for being a good leader of a country?

Are we to be allowed to wonder to what extent Barack's love (sure — why not accept it as true?) for the woman of his life has anything to do with his beliefs and with his performance in office?

Related: • Obama had Scandals Aplenty — The media just pretended they didn't exist

It's liberating to know that you can tell whatever lies are politically useful without consequence. The Obama administration could almost always count on the media to back it, regardless of the contortions necessary.

• Obama's 'Scandal-Free' Administration Was Actually Riddled with Scandals

During the Obama administration, all these Democrats were silent

AGREED: "it’s worth a full-on embed" writes Glenn Reynolds
— of Ted Cruz's pointing out the double standards of
Congressional Democrats’ newfound concern for the rule of law