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Saturday, October 21, 2017

Which Way Is The Tide Moving?

I happened upon MSNBC for just a moment last night, only to hear someone (I didn't even determine who) say the President Trump is moving towards his "inevitable impeachment" following the report by the special prosecutor of his findings.  That's why the President (according to this speaker) is behaving "so erratically". 

It struck me as strange that this is still the storyline on MSNBC.  I mean, I don't know what Muller's report will say or when it will come, although my best guess is that it will be next October for maximum impact on the 2018 election (but, of course, it's totally non-political).  The reality, however, is that MSNBC doesn't know that either.  That network is just reporting their own liberal fantasies as news.  The actual news of the last few weeks, however, has been much different in trajectory.  Consider just a few things:

1.  The biggest power base outside the government for the Democrats has been Hollywood.  There are more supporters in the university community, but the cash generated from Hollywood liberals and their notoriety keeps Hollywood in first place.  Hollywood, however, took an enormous hit with the Harvey Weinstein mess and the obvious complicity of a great many people in it.  Liberal icons like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were dragged through the mud -- or more precisely they were shown to inhabit the mud.  None of this will stop celebrities from pushing for the Democrats, but it will reduce the impact of their voices.  It's not just that their halos are crooked; their gone!

2.  The discussion of immigration is now in a position that forces the Democrats to negotiate if they want to keep DACA.  Some of their base want the Dems to fight everything, but the end result of that will be the deportation of people now under DACA.  Many more Americans will be unsympathetic if the Dems fight some rather popular proposals in order to fight the President on everything.  The Dems have no good answer to why they would refuse to negotiate a deal when the result of that refusal is the deportation of DACA people.

3.  The tax reform package is gaining momentum.  The budget passed, and that is the first step.  We are moving towards the completion and unveiling of the full proposal.  The Democrats are complaining about how the plan is just tax cuts for the rich at the expense of everyone else.  That's looking silly since the final terms of the plan have not be released and the parts available thus far don't fit that description.

4.  The Democrats are stuck with people like congresswoman Frederica Wilson as the face of the party.  In the rush to criticize everything Trump, Wilson decided that when general Kelly called her an "empty barrel" it was a racial slur.  Kelly said nothing about race, and anyone who heard him understands that.  Even Wilson said that she had never heard "empty barrel" before and looked up what it meant.  There's no definition that makes it a racial slur; Wilson knows that but threw out the charge anyway.  She was looking so bad that people on MSNBC rushed to point out that general Kelly grew up in an Irish neighborhood in Boston so he surely is a racist.  That took the claim from a dishonest start (made by Wilson) to a defense of charges of racism by denouncing all Irish Catholics from Boston in the 1950s and 1960s as racists.  One does wonder what John F. Kennedy would make of that charge.  So the Dems went from moronic to being racist themselves.

5.  While we're talking race, the Democrat candidate for the most important election this year (governor of Virginia) made some racist moves of his own a few days ago.  Candidate Northam airbrushed his black running mate off of flyers being distributed in northern parts of the state because, he says, some of the people distributing the flyers didn't want to give out materials with the black candidate for lieutenant governor on them.  So who is more racist?  Is it the Democrat campaign workers who didn't want to give out materials showing a black candidate or the Democrat running for governor who both saw nothing wrong with the request to remove the black man from the flyer and then actually had that done? 

6.  The Democrats are looking foolish by trying to make the attack on American special forces in Niger into the equivalent of the terror attack in Benghazi.  I've listened to babblers like senator Blumenthal talk about coverups and undisclosed missions while pointing fingers at president Trump on this matter.  The truth, however, is that we know why there are marines in Niger:  president Obama ordered them there in 2013 to help train local forces fight Boko Haram and other terror groups seeking to move into the impoverished nation.  The soldiers were attacked by terrorists as they traveled back from a meeting with village elders in a remote region.  Unlike Benghazi, the president did not try to pass this off as a response to a video; it has been properly described all along.  Unlike Benghazi, help was given immediately to the men under attack.  There were planes overhead as the fighting continued and the terrorists fled once the first plane opened fire on them.  In other words, Niger was nothing like Benghazi where the people under attack were left on their own for more than thirteen hours despite help being just three hours away.

7.  And let's not forget that Raqqa, the erstwhile capital of ISIS, has been liberated.  Of all the blows to ISIS inflicted by the USA and its allies, this is the biggest.  In the context of the Democrats, though, their main point about this victory is that Trump gets no credit for it.  I love the smell of sour grapes in the morning.

The reality is that it has been a rather good few weeks for President Trump and a rather bad few weeks for the Democrats.  Maybe that's why they are back on Russia and Muller.  But remember this:  there really is a Russia scandal with real evidence of wrongdoing now.  It has nothing to do with Trump or his campaign, though.  It is the scandal of the massive payoff by the Russians to the Clintons and other Obama officials in order to get approval for the Uranium One transaction.  We now know that the FBI had investigated that matter before the deal was approved, but Eric Holder and perhaps Obama himself kept the details of that investigation secret.  They didn't tell Congress.  They didn't tell the public.  And, most important of all, they didn't tell the people making the decision on the deal.

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