Destroying America’s History One Icon at a Time

Columbus Day brought a refreshing reminder that leftists are effectively erasing America’s heritage as an important step in transforming America into a socialist state. 

As I look, “Happy Indigenous Peoples” day is approaching 100K tweets, which is simply advancing the narrative that was already set in motion by leftists across America. 

A teacher posted some of the proud pictures from her propagandized little ones with sayings like “Christopher Columbus didn’t find America,” and “Christopher Columbus is a really mean man.”  How charming. 

A Christopher Columbus statue was torn down in Los Angeles in 2018 and several others were vandalized this year. 

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.  The prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time ran clearly against toppling statues.  Don’t these third-world barbarians know that they are destroying world culture?  It helped elevate the Taliban’s evil in the eyes of the world. 

Murderous Islamist thugs harboring terrorists?  That’s pretty bad.  Destroyers of world culture?  Call in the Marines!  Even the liberal American media were outraged.

Less than twenty years later, destroying monuments is becoming a national sport in America with little outcry and support from the media.  Leftists have become the Taliban, which is no surprise since the goals are similar.  When attempting to force a twisted worldview on society, overthrowing perceived enemies and any connection to a different past is essential.  

When a 200-year old monument of Christopher Columbus was smashed in Baltimore a couple years back, a sign was hung on it that read, “The future is racial and economic justice.”  In case anyone thought this was just America’s youth acting out as opposed to Marxist-inspired destruction, the act was narrated on YouTube and referenced “capitalist exploitation of labor.” 

The leftists started with Confederate monuments, which made a good test to see what kind of resistance they would face.  It was a crafty and evil first play.  The statue destroyers weren’t terribly discriminating. Monuments to peace and to those who opposed slavery were torn down next to the others.

Kicking a toppled Confederate monument in Durham, NC (Twitter video screen grab)

Few Americans roused themselves to resist, especially after media lies and manipulation around Charlottesville. 

The Left’s effort was never about destroying America’s legacy of slavery.  Democrats have been on the side of slavery and then racism at every turn in America’s history.  They were simply starting with the easiest target to normalize their far more insidious goal, which was overthrowing America’s attachment to its history and the ideals this represented.

The shock effect is long gone.  Tearing down a statue in America is now treated as little more than background noise.  This attack on American history will not end until every monument that can’t be co-opted for the leftist agenda is overthrown.

Of course, it starts before the toppling of the statues.  While on the official tour for George Washington’s Mount Vernon homestead, it was hard not to notice that more time was spent talking about Washington the slave owner than Washington the great general or founding father. 

The momentum to overthrow a national icon starts subtly, but it builds once the ground is set.  Tear down Columbus and then start mentioning Washington’s history fighting American Indians.  He becomes just another offender of a mythical “Indigenous People’s Day.” This couples nicely with the already rampant attacks on him as a slave owner.  It was seen as good news when a San Francisco school chose only to cover a George Washington mural instead of destroying it.     

My daughter recently told me that she was writing an essay on Thomas Jefferson in her high school class.  The topic?  Jefferson’s problematic history with slavery.  That Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence and one of history’s greatest thinkers is irrelevant in the leftist mind.    

Icons are flawed men and women of their time.  But, they are icons because they did something great and meaningful for America.  We study George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of the incredible contributions these great men made to freedom, liberty, and self-governance.  The Left uses them as an opportunity to destroy America. 

It’s not just monuments on the menu of destruction.  Kate Smith is a woman who was once awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for her patriotism and powerful renditions of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”  Her statues are now being torn down even as teams like the Yankees and Flyers refuse to play a song that was once representative of America itself. 

A colleague told me that he considers Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to be a racist anthem because it is sung by people he considers racists.  If such a thing existed, I’m sure he would gladly tear down a Greenwood statue.  But, that’s not necessary.  There is already cultural pressure to avoid playing Greenwood’s powerful patriotic anthem in any place that is not a distinctly conservative setting.  The very idea of being patriotic and proud of America is under attack.     

All of this is an attempt to erase America’s history and it should be opposed fiercely.   It is part of the overall effort to undermine America’s values and freedom and is par for the course on the socialist menu.  It is also the toxic offspring of political correctness and racial tribalism.  It all serves the same purpose, which is the fundamental transformation of America into a Marxist state.

If you can damage Thomas Jefferson enough, then the Declaration of Independence must be compromised by extension.  I was mildly surprised when touring the University of Virginia recently that our tour guide spoke so positively about Thomas Jefferson and what he meant to the school.  That won’t last.  In a few years, that beloved statue will be either covered or vandalized, which will serve as a depressing bookend in the same town where American statue destruction exploded into the national consciousness.      

If you can do enough damage to the founding fathers, then it is far easier to overthrow the Constitution, or just ignore it.   

I was at Hillsdale College for their 175th Anniversary a couple weeks back.  While there, I walked past all the statues on campus; statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and a “Last Full Measure of Devotion” statue dedicated to the many students who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.  There are also two statues of non-Americans who advanced the ideals of liberty; Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.  The students study the great words of all of these patriots who contributed so much to America and freedom.

It was a stark reminder of what is being lost in this country.  The school looks to its past and the unchanging values that have sustained America since its founding.  It is inspiring to see.  But, it is also a sad reminder that it is now an anomaly.  In today’s America, a student would learn more about America’s history and government by watching a couple hours of School House Rock videos than what they will get in twelve years of school.     

Americans need to recognize these attacks on America’s history for their intended purpose.  A made-up Indigenous People’s Day is not intended to honor American Indians.  It is just one more front in the war to destroy America.   

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on twitter @fletchdaniels.              

Columbus Day brought a refreshing reminder that leftists are effectively erasing America’s heritage as an important step in transforming America into a socialist state. 

As I look, “Happy Indigenous Peoples” day is approaching 100K tweets, which is simply advancing the narrative that was already set in motion by leftists across America. 

A teacher posted some of the proud pictures from her propagandized little ones with sayings like “Christopher Columbus didn’t find America,” and “Christopher Columbus is a really mean man.”  How charming. 

A Christopher Columbus statue was torn down in Los Angeles in 2018 and several others were vandalized this year. 

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.  The prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time ran clearly against toppling statues.  Don’t these third-world barbarians know that they are destroying world culture?  It helped elevate the Taliban’s evil in the eyes of the world. 

Murderous Islamist thugs harboring terrorists?  That’s pretty bad.  Destroyers of world culture?  Call in the Marines!  Even the liberal American media were outraged.

Less than twenty years later, destroying monuments is becoming a national sport in America with little outcry and support from the media.  Leftists have become the Taliban, which is no surprise since the goals are similar.  When attempting to force a twisted worldview on society, overthrowing perceived enemies and any connection to a different past is essential.  

When a 200-year old monument of Christopher Columbus was smashed in Baltimore a couple years back, a sign was hung on it that read, “The future is racial and economic justice.”  In case anyone thought this was just America’s youth acting out as opposed to Marxist-inspired destruction, the act was narrated on YouTube and referenced “capitalist exploitation of labor.” 

The leftists started with Confederate monuments, which made a good test to see what kind of resistance they would face.  It was a crafty and evil first play.  The statue destroyers weren’t terribly discriminating. Monuments to peace and to those who opposed slavery were torn down next to the others.

Kicking a toppled Confederate monument in Durham, NC (Twitter video screen grab)

Few Americans roused themselves to resist, especially after media lies and manipulation around Charlottesville. 

The Left’s effort was never about destroying America’s legacy of slavery.  Democrats have been on the side of slavery and then racism at every turn in America’s history.  They were simply starting with the easiest target to normalize their far more insidious goal, which was overthrowing America’s attachment to its history and the ideals this represented.

The shock effect is long gone.  Tearing down a statue in America is now treated as little more than background noise.  This attack on American history will not end until every monument that can’t be co-opted for the leftist agenda is overthrown.

Of course, it starts before the toppling of the statues.  While on the official tour for George Washington’s Mount Vernon homestead, it was hard not to notice that more time was spent talking about Washington the slave owner than Washington the great general or founding father. 

The momentum to overthrow a national icon starts subtly, but it builds once the ground is set.  Tear down Columbus and then start mentioning Washington’s history fighting American Indians.  He becomes just another offender of a mythical “Indigenous People’s Day.” This couples nicely with the already rampant attacks on him as a slave owner.  It was seen as good news when a San Francisco school chose only to cover a George Washington mural instead of destroying it.     

My daughter recently told me that she was writing an essay on Thomas Jefferson in her high school class.  The topic?  Jefferson’s problematic history with slavery.  That Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence and one of history’s greatest thinkers is irrelevant in the leftist mind.    

Icons are flawed men and women of their time.  But, they are icons because they did something great and meaningful for America.  We study George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of the incredible contributions these great men made to freedom, liberty, and self-governance.  The Left uses them as an opportunity to destroy America. 

It’s not just monuments on the menu of destruction.  Kate Smith is a woman who was once awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for her patriotism and powerful renditions of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”  Her statues are now being torn down even as teams like the Yankees and Flyers refuse to play a song that was once representative of America itself. 

A colleague told me that he considers Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to be a racist anthem because it is sung by people he considers racists.  If such a thing existed, I’m sure he would gladly tear down a Greenwood statue.  But, that’s not necessary.  There is already cultural pressure to avoid playing Greenwood’s powerful patriotic anthem in any place that is not a distinctly conservative setting.  The very idea of being patriotic and proud of America is under attack.     

All of this is an attempt to erase America’s history and it should be opposed fiercely.   It is part of the overall effort to undermine America’s values and freedom and is par for the course on the socialist menu.  It is also the toxic offspring of political correctness and racial tribalism.  It all serves the same purpose, which is the fundamental transformation of America into a Marxist state.

If you can damage Thomas Jefferson enough, then the Declaration of Independence must be compromised by extension.  I was mildly surprised when touring the University of Virginia recently that our tour guide spoke so positively about Thomas Jefferson and what he meant to the school.  That won’t last.  In a few years, that beloved statue will be either covered or vandalized, which will serve as a depressing bookend in the same town where American statue destruction exploded into the national consciousness.      

If you can do enough damage to the founding fathers, then it is far easier to overthrow the Constitution, or just ignore it.   

I was at Hillsdale College for their 175th Anniversary a couple weeks back.  While there, I walked past all the statues on campus; statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and a “Last Full Measure of Devotion” statue dedicated to the many students who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.  There are also two statues of non-Americans who advanced the ideals of liberty; Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.  The students study the great words of all of these patriots who contributed so much to America and freedom.

It was a stark reminder of what is being lost in this country.  The school looks to its past and the unchanging values that have sustained America since its founding.  It is inspiring to see.  But, it is also a sad reminder that it is now an anomaly.  In today’s America, a student would learn more about America’s history and government by watching a couple hours of School House Rock videos than what they will get in twelve years of school.     

Americans need to recognize these attacks on America’s history for their intended purpose.  A made-up Indigenous People’s Day is not intended to honor American Indians.  It is just one more front in the war to destroy America.   

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on twitter @fletchdaniels.              

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

ABC busted for outrageous fake video intended to make Trump responsible for fake atrocities against Kurds

Fake news comes in a variety of forms, but some of the deepest impact comes from vivid images intended to elicit powerful emotions of blame against the target. ABC News, part of the media now in full propaganda mode intended to destroy President Trump, has just been caught in a terrible lie, worthy of Goebbels.

ABC used dramatic video images purportedly of a savage Turkish attack on Kurds, who, ABC would have us believe, are now suffering the worst consequences. of war because of President Trump’s troop redeployment in Syria. ABC “News” used the footage on its Sunday “World News Tonight” and Monday “Good Morning America” high profile showcases for its reporting. The narrative supplied clearly blames Trump for what looks like an appalling slaughter:

YouTube screen grab

“This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad,” senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell, who is in Syria, said Monday on Good Morning America.

As he spoke, ABC aired footage showing undisclosed gunmen firing tracer bullets at undisclosed targets, causing massive, fiery explosions. Furious stuff indeed.

Earlier, on Sunday, ABC News anchor Tom Llamas also aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians.

“The situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria. One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State],” he said.

Llamas then described the video as it aired on-screen.

“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies,” he added.

Viewers of the segment embedded below would believe that President Trump bears personal responsibility for Kurds being subjected to savage artillery bombardment. He is almost a war criminal – if you believe the footage is real:

I am certain that nobody at ABC News ever expected that anyone would identify the true source of the video, a test conducted at a Kentucky gun range. It took a blogger, Wojciech Pawelczyk, aka Polish Patriot TM, to expose their deceit:

Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner called up ABC News to ask about the fake news:

After seeing a comment from Twitter user Wojciech Pawelczyk, I began making some calls. As of this writing, it appears ABC indeed aired footage recorded in the Bluegrass State and claimed it was from Syria. The network has since pulled the video.

“We’ve taken down video that aired on World News Tonight Sunday and Good Morning America this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy,” a network representative told the Washington Examiner. ”ABC News regrets the error.”

A representative for the Knob Creek Gun Range also told the Washington Examiner that they are still investigating ABC’s reporting, adding further that the images aired by the network “look to be” from their Kentucky property. (snip)

The footage, which appears to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for an American audience. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which includes the very popular night shoot, is a biannual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they often record it and post video of it to social media.

I don’t think that we can believe any mainstream media reporting on the situation in Syria regarding the Kurds now. The geopolitics are hellishly complex to begin with, and there are no good options. But with a media establishment willing to lie this profoundly, there can be credibility at all given to their work.

Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse reminds us that the liars at ABC “News” have another propaganda production ready for airing:

ABC getting caught manufacturing Fake News should be an additional concern because ABC news is also promoting this:

“Hunter Biden sits down for an exclusive interview with ABC News”:

 

President Trump tweeted about the scandal last night:

 

If ABC “News” had any integrity, it would hire an outside law firm politically aligned with President Trump and have it conduct a thorough investigation of how this footage was obtained and aired, naming the names of everyone who had a hand in the decision. But I am not holding my breath.

Fake news comes in a variety of forms, but some of the deepest impact comes from vivid images intended to elicit powerful emotions of blame against the target. ABC News, part of the media now in full propaganda mode intended to destroy President Trump, has just been caught in a terrible lie, worthy of Goebbels.

ABC used dramatic video images purportedly of a savage Turkish attack on Kurds, who, ABC would have us believe, are now suffering the worst consequences. of war because of President Trump’s troop redeployment in Syria. ABC “News” used the footage on its Sunday “World News Tonight” and Monday “Good Morning America” high profile showcases for its reporting. The narrative supplied clearly blames Trump for what looks like an appalling slaughter:

YouTube screen grab

“This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad,” senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell, who is in Syria, said Monday on Good Morning America.

As he spoke, ABC aired footage showing undisclosed gunmen firing tracer bullets at undisclosed targets, causing massive, fiery explosions. Furious stuff indeed.

Earlier, on Sunday, ABC News anchor Tom Llamas also aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians.

“The situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria. One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State],” he said.

Llamas then described the video as it aired on-screen.

“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies,” he added.

Viewers of the segment embedded below would believe that President Trump bears personal responsibility for Kurds being subjected to savage artillery bombardment. He is almost a war criminal – if you believe the footage is real:

I am certain that nobody at ABC News ever expected that anyone would identify the true source of the video, a test conducted at a Kentucky gun range. It took a blogger, Wojciech Pawelczyk, aka Polish Patriot TM, to expose their deceit:

Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner called up ABC News to ask about the fake news:

After seeing a comment from Twitter user Wojciech Pawelczyk, I began making some calls. As of this writing, it appears ABC indeed aired footage recorded in the Bluegrass State and claimed it was from Syria. The network has since pulled the video.

“We’ve taken down video that aired on World News Tonight Sunday and Good Morning America this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy,” a network representative told the Washington Examiner. ”ABC News regrets the error.”

A representative for the Knob Creek Gun Range also told the Washington Examiner that they are still investigating ABC’s reporting, adding further that the images aired by the network “look to be” from their Kentucky property. (snip)

The footage, which appears to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for an American audience. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which includes the very popular night shoot, is a biannual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they often record it and post video of it to social media.

I don’t think that we can believe any mainstream media reporting on the situation in Syria regarding the Kurds now. The geopolitics are hellishly complex to begin with, and there are no good options. But with a media establishment willing to lie this profoundly, there can be credibility at all given to their work.

Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse reminds us that the liars at ABC “News” have another propaganda production ready for airing:

ABC getting caught manufacturing Fake News should be an additional concern because ABC news is also promoting this:

“Hunter Biden sits down for an exclusive interview with ABC News”:

 

President Trump tweeted about the scandal last night:

 

If ABC “News” had any integrity, it would hire an outside law firm politically aligned with President Trump and have it conduct a thorough investigation of how this footage was obtained and aired, naming the names of everyone who had a hand in the decision. But I am not holding my breath.

via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

Corrupt Senators Took Ukraine Cash

While Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, two groups of Democratic senators have been colluding with Ukrainian interests to advance their own agenda and political careers.

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” – a group of Democratic senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same time the Democrats are pushing the Trump-Ukraine yarn. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff.

That’s handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine’s energy sector, directly in line with Burisma’s interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, “We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets.”

This was at a time when Democrats were waging a war on fossil fuels, opposing fracking, and trying to shut down U.S. energy production. American natural gas was bad for the environment, but Ukrainian natural gas was good for the campaign coffers when it involves Hunter Biden’s business interests and John Kerry’s former chief of staff. As Hilton points out, Sen. Markey’s hypocrisy runs particularly deep:

Sen. Ed Markey was the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal! He wants to shut down gas production in America. Yet he personally intervened with the Obama administration to send your tax dollars to boost Ukraine’s gas production. And not just once.

Not only did he write that letter to Obama, but he sponsored multiple pieces of legislation that called for more U.S. assistance and aid specifically to help Ukraine’s natural gas sector, including one that “directs the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to prioritize support for investments to increase energy efficiency, developed domestic oil and natural gas reserves and develop renewable energy sources in Ukraine.”

Interestingly, as Democrats falsely accuse President Trump of bribing the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on a political opponent, namely Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, another group of Democratic senators actually asked the Ukrainian government to help the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to dig up dirt on Donald J. Trump. As the Marc Thiessen noted in his recent column in the Washington Post:

It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

This is corruption and hypocrisy raised to a new level. President Trump, as the transcript of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky showed, pressured no one to dig up dirt on a political opponent. There was no quid pro quo, only a request that the Ukrainians look into the real crime Joe Biden confessed it — leveraging U.S. financial support to get a prosecutor investing his son’s company, Burisma, fired.

And if you want real collusion with a real trail of evidence of people trying to do real things interfering with the 2016 campaign, try Hillary Clinton’s collusion with the Ukraine to derail and besmirch Team Trump. As Politico reported in a story that went nowhere at the time:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Here you have a real meeting between a DNC operative in a foreign embassy receiving materials used to defame and derail the Trump campaign. This meeting had real consequences. No fabricated versions of phone calls here.

Democratic senators took campaign cash from Ukrainian interests while begging Ukraine for help in removing a duly elected President from office. And these are the people who would participate in a Senate impeachment trial. The inmates are indeed running the asylum.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

While Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, two groups of Democratic senators have been colluding with Ukrainian interests to advance their own agenda and political careers.

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” – a group of Democratic senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same time the Democrats are pushing the Trump-Ukraine yarn. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff.

That’s handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine’s energy sector, directly in line with Burisma’s interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, “We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets.”

This was at a time when Democrats were waging a war on fossil fuels, opposing fracking, and trying to shut down U.S. energy production. American natural gas was bad for the environment, but Ukrainian natural gas was good for the campaign coffers when it involves Hunter Biden’s business interests and John Kerry’s former chief of staff. As Hilton points out, Sen. Markey’s hypocrisy runs particularly deep:

Sen. Ed Markey was the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal! He wants to shut down gas production in America. Yet he personally intervened with the Obama administration to send your tax dollars to boost Ukraine’s gas production. And not just once.

Not only did he write that letter to Obama, but he sponsored multiple pieces of legislation that called for more U.S. assistance and aid specifically to help Ukraine’s natural gas sector, including one that “directs the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to prioritize support for investments to increase energy efficiency, developed domestic oil and natural gas reserves and develop renewable energy sources in Ukraine.”

Interestingly, as Democrats falsely accuse President Trump of bribing the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on a political opponent, namely Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, another group of Democratic senators actually asked the Ukrainian government to help the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to dig up dirt on Donald J. Trump. As the Marc Thiessen noted in his recent column in the Washington Post:

It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

This is corruption and hypocrisy raised to a new level. President Trump, as the transcript of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky showed, pressured no one to dig up dirt on a political opponent. There was no quid pro quo, only a request that the Ukrainians look into the real crime Joe Biden confessed it — leveraging U.S. financial support to get a prosecutor investing his son’s company, Burisma, fired.

And if you want real collusion with a real trail of evidence of people trying to do real things interfering with the 2016 campaign, try Hillary Clinton’s collusion with the Ukraine to derail and besmirch Team Trump. As Politico reported in a story that went nowhere at the time:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Here you have a real meeting between a DNC operative in a foreign embassy receiving materials used to defame and derail the Trump campaign. This meeting had real consequences. No fabricated versions of phone calls here.

Democratic senators took campaign cash from Ukrainian interests while begging Ukraine for help in removing a duly elected President from office. And these are the people who would participate in a Senate impeachment trial. The inmates are indeed running the asylum.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

via American Thinker

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Brutal wipeout for Democrats in Louisiana, and the press trying to keep it quiet

The last of the Louisiana state election numbers are in and it’s not pretty for the Democrats.

Not only does its moderate Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, face a runoff as noted here, the state Senate has taken a supermajority. And a whole bunch of key state offices went squarely to Republicans. Funny how the press isn’t covering this much.

But Guy Benson at Townhall is, and he found a Democratic Party “decimated“:

Among statewide office-holders, the incumbent GOP Lieutenant Governor (68 percent), Attorney General (66 percent), Treasurer (60 percent, and Agricultural Commissioner (58 percent) were all re-elected without the need for a run-off, under the state’s ‘jungle primary’-style system.  It also appears that the solid Republican majorities in both state legislative chambers will remain intact – with the GOP expanding its Senate advantage into super-majority territory by picking up a pair of Democratic seats:

The Hill, which also had a look, but ran an anodyne headline that didn’t match the content of its three-alarm fire for Democrats, noted that this Democrat loss came in a special election, and those normally don’t draw large numbers of voters, but this one did.

And not only did the Republicans take a Senate supermajority, they almost snapped away the state House, too:

Amid record turnout for what is usually a sleepy off-year, irregular election, Louisiana Republicans locked up enough seats in the state Senate to amount to a super majority. The party came within seven seats of winning a super majority in the state House, too, with eight runoff elections to come in November.

What’s more, the outlook continues to get strong for the GOP in Louisiana because the Republicans have consolidated: The GOP gubernatorial candidate third-place finisher, Ralph Abraham, endorsed the second place finisher Eddie Rispone. 

Which makes the whole thing sound like a wave election, with a big warning to the left for 2020.

And that ought to be big news, a warning to the impeachment-obsessed Beltway Democrats that the voters aren’t buying into their repeated stunts to unseat President Trump.

The lack of press coverage of what ought to be a front page story almost seems delusionaql 

Trump has noticed that one:

 

 

We all recall the kind of coverage Alabama’s Senate special election got when Democrat Doug Jones won in that nearby state against a flawed GOP candidate. The press couldn’t stop shouting about it. (One wonders what Jones is thinking about as he watches this Louisiana race results right now).

And it comes on top of an uncomfortable pattern of Republicans winning special elections – recall how Republicans won in the recent one in North Carolina, and there have been others, too.

Scarier still for Democrats, the GOP is getting these votes from people who normally vote Democrat:

John Couvillon, a Louisiana-based pollster who surveyed the field extensively, said Republican gains came in districts that had long voted for Democratic legislators, even as they became more culturally conservative — so-called ancestrally Democratic regions in rural areas north and west of Lafayette.

 

“These parishes had never before given Republicans legislative candidates serious consideration,” Couvillon wrote, even though President Trump won all three with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2016.

 

Obviously, the GOP is energized and it’s translating to not just money raised and large crowds at rallies, both of which have been dismissed as unimportant by political analysts, but now actual votes. President Trump has helped significantly, holding a big popular rally in the state which may have either been his riding a wave or else turning things pivotally. Trump enthusiasm has got to be behind much of this and Trump isn’t stupid.

Democrats are being wiped out both by their impeachment obsesssion as well as by their way-out-of-the-mainstream leftwinger, and it’s being done by the people themselves sneaking up on them. As of now, they’re all deluding themselves that nothing is happening. 

Image credit: Twitter screen shot

The last of the Louisiana state election numbers are in and it’s not pretty for the Democrats.

Not only does its moderate Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, face a runoff as noted here, the state Senate has taken a supermajority. And a whole bunch of key state offices went squarely to Republicans. Funny how the press isn’t covering this much.

But Guy Benson at Townhall is, and he found a Democratic Party “decimated“:

Among statewide office-holders, the incumbent GOP Lieutenant Governor (68 percent), Attorney General (66 percent), Treasurer (60 percent, and Agricultural Commissioner (58 percent) were all re-elected without the need for a run-off, under the state’s ‘jungle primary’-style system.  It also appears that the solid Republican majorities in both state legislative chambers will remain intact – with the GOP expanding its Senate advantage into super-majority territory by picking up a pair of Democratic seats:

The Hill, which also had a look, but ran an anodyne headline that didn’t match the content of its three-alarm fire for Democrats, noted that this Democrat loss came in a special election, and those normally don’t draw large numbers of voters, but this one did.

And not only did the Republicans take a Senate supermajority, they almost snapped away the state House, too:

Amid record turnout for what is usually a sleepy off-year, irregular election, Louisiana Republicans locked up enough seats in the state Senate to amount to a super majority. The party came within seven seats of winning a super majority in the state House, too, with eight runoff elections to come in November.

What’s more, the outlook continues to get strong for the GOP in Louisiana because the Republicans have consolidated: The GOP gubernatorial candidate third-place finisher, Ralph Abraham, endorsed the second place finisher Eddie Rispone. 

Which makes the whole thing sound like a wave election, with a big warning to the left for 2020.

And that ought to be big news, a warning to the impeachment-obsessed Beltway Democrats that the voters aren’t buying into their repeated stunts to unseat President Trump.

The lack of press coverage of what ought to be a front page story almost seems delusionaql 

Trump has noticed that one:

 

 

We all recall the kind of coverage Alabama’s Senate special election got when Democrat Doug Jones won in that nearby state against a flawed GOP candidate. The press couldn’t stop shouting about it. (One wonders what Jones is thinking about as he watches this Louisiana race results right now).

And it comes on top of an uncomfortable pattern of Republicans winning special elections – recall how Republicans won in the recent one in North Carolina, and there have been others, too.

Scarier still for Democrats, the GOP is getting these votes from people who normally vote Democrat:

John Couvillon, a Louisiana-based pollster who surveyed the field extensively, said Republican gains came in districts that had long voted for Democratic legislators, even as they became more culturally conservative — so-called ancestrally Democratic regions in rural areas north and west of Lafayette.

 

“These parishes had never before given Republicans legislative candidates serious consideration,” Couvillon wrote, even though President Trump won all three with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2016.

 

Obviously, the GOP is energized and it’s translating to not just money raised and large crowds at rallies, both of which have been dismissed as unimportant by political analysts, but now actual votes. President Trump has helped significantly, holding a big popular rally in the state which may have either been his riding a wave or else turning things pivotally. Trump enthusiasm has got to be behind much of this and Trump isn’t stupid.

Democrats are being wiped out both by their impeachment obsesssion as well as by their way-out-of-the-mainstream leftwinger, and it’s being done by the people themselves sneaking up on them. As of now, they’re all deluding themselves that nothing is happening. 

Image credit: Twitter screen shot

via American Thinker Blog

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Here’s the Full Letter Trump Had Sent to Congress About Refusing To Cooperate, and It’s a Doozy

In a scorching letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and several committee chairmen, the White House tore apart the House Democrats’ attempts at impeachment piece by piece.

The letter, issued Tuesday on behalf of President Donald Trump, dismantles the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as biased and unconstitutional.

Along with Pelosi, the letter specifically names Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California, Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel of New York.

For an official document, this missive doesn’t pull any punches.

“Put simply,” it states, “you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen. Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away.”

TRENDING: Resolution To Expel Nancy Pelosi from Congress Introduced Pursuant to Article 1, Section 5 of the US Constitution

Considering all the Democrats have put Trump and his team through, it’s shocking that this aggressiveness is just now being seen.

As the letter mentions, some Democrats’ careers depend on impeachment. People like Rep. Al Green of Texas are expected to deliver on their years-old promises to oust Trump from his office. A failure to do that could see another Democrat take them on with great success.

For a president who has allegedly committed impeachable offenses, Trump has been remarkably open.

A transcript of his July phone call with the president of Ukraine, the subject of the original whistleblower’s complaint, was released right after the accusation of wrongdoing was made public. Guilty people don’t usually share evidence like this.

Will Democrats ever abandon their impeachment obsession?

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Speaking of evidence, the letter lands a direct hit on Schiff for his fabrication of dialogue relating to the call.

“The fact that there was nothing wrong with the call was also powerfully confirmed by Chairman Schiff’s decision to create a false version of the call and read it to the American people at a congressional hearing, without disclosing that he was simply making it all up,” the letter reads.

Schiff also lied about his connections with the whistleblower, something for which even liberal media outlets criticized him.

The letter doesn’t stop with Schiff, either. It goes on to list numerous ways in which the inquiry is “constitutionally invalid.”

“In the history of our Nation,” it says, “the House of Representatives has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the President without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision by voting to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step.”

RELATED: Resolution To Expel Nancy Pelosi from Congress Introduced Pursuant to Article 1, Section 5 of the US Constitution

The letter further says Pelosi and the Democrats have stripped Trump of “most basic protections demanded by due process under the Constitution.”

In another scorching paragraph, the letter cuts to the heart of the impeachment inquiry and the reasoning many suspect is really behind it: an attempt to keep Trump out of the 2020 election.

“The effort to impeach President Trump — without regard to any evidence of his actions in office — is a naked political strategy that began the day he was inaugurated,” it says, “and perhaps even before.”

Slamming the inquiry for a lack of “any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections,” the letter makes it clear that the president won’t cooperate in this obviously partisan attack.

With the impeachment obsession now interfering with Trump’s ability to do his job of leading the country, the document sent to Democratic leaders begs them to join with him and begin tackling the real issues facing the nation.

The letter asks Democrats to abandon the clearly biased impeachment inquiry and instead focus on creating the change that Americans really want to see.

With how deep those on the left have dug themselves into an impeachment hole, however, it now looks like their only option is to keep on digging until the walls fall in on them.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

via The Western Journal

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Univision Is an Immigration Lobby With a Broadcast License

In advance of oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court, Univision’s open advocacy of DACA serves to remind us all that the network is little more than an immigration lobby with a broadcast license. Check out the full post to see UNews’s anchor Andrea Linares tees up her interview of a DACA advocate:

via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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Soros-Funded ACLU ($37,359,845) Litigating SCOTUS Case Could Redefine Sex

Another Supreme Court LGBTQ-agenda showdown is in the works. A crucial case dealing with whether the term “sex” in The Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be expanded to include “sexual orientation” is being spearheaded by the George Soros-funded American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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WALSH: Kids Aren’t Suffering From ‘Video Game Addiction.’ They’re Suffering From A Lack Of Parenting.

Parents in Canada have filed a class action lawsuit against Epic Games, the company that made the popular video game Fortnite. The distraught plaintiffs accuse the devious minds behind Fortnite of intentionally creating it to be “as addictive as possible.” This addiction has destroyed their children’s lives, they say.

The lawsuit says that one of the supposedly addicted children has played around 1,800 Fortnite matches in seven months, while the other has logged about 7,000 matches and often stays up playing until the early morning hours. Google tells me that a Fortnite match typically takes about 20 minutes. If this is a good estimate, then these children have spent 600 hours and more than 2,000 hours, respectively, playing the game.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the alleged scourge of video game addiction. Just this week it was announced that children in the UK will receive treatment for their addictions through the National Health Service. Kids who suffer from this affliction can meet with psychologists and psychiatrists at the newly minted Centre for Internet and Gaming Disorders. Kids in our country, too, seem to be coming down with this mysterious disorder at an alarming rate. Fortnite, according to Bloomberg News, is even “forcing kids into video game rehab.”

Most kids hopefully aren’t putting 2,000 hours a year into their video game habit — excuse me, “addiction” — but they are averaging over two hours a day, according to some studies. That’s a significant chunk of time when you consider that it is just an average — many kids are playing for significantly more time than that — and it doesn’t include all of the other time spent on other forms of media. But does it justify treating video games as an addiction? And who exactly should we be blaming for the problem? Are video game companies guilty of using some sort of voodoo to hypnotize kids and compel them to keep playing, or is there a more mundane and localized explanation?

On the first question, as professors of psychology Christopher J. Ferguson and Patrick Markey pointed out in a recent op-ed, video games are not “in any meaningful sense” addictive. Yes, the pleasure of playing video games involves the same areas of the brain that drug use activates, but the same can be said for just about every enjoyable activity. If this simple neurological fact justifies the comparison between Fortnite and cocaine (a comparison made in the Fortnite lawsuit), then you could also argue that reading a book is tantamount to using heroine and going for a jog is like smoking crystal meth. The only similarity between these activities is that the person doing them enjoys them, and they all involve, therefore,  the part of your brain that facilitates the enjoyment of things.

The op-ed cites a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry which finds, at most, 1% of gamers who “might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder” (emphasis mine). But even this 1% figure is dubious. People who play video games — even people who spend way, way too much time playing them —  are not chemically dependent on the games the way that a heroin addict is dependent. Video games also don’t, in and of themselves, cause physical damage to the player. Sure, if you sit around all day playing games, you’ll get fat. But you’ll get fat if you sit around all day doing anything. On the other hand, if you sit around all day drinking alcohol, you might die directly from the effect the alcohol has on your internal organs.

What does this all mean? It means that a word like “addiction” is out of place when discussing video games. The compulsion to pick up a video game controller obviously belongs in a different category from the compulsion to pick up a crack pipe. They are not the same kind of thing, and they do not warrant the same kind of label or the same kind of treatment. By slapping “addiction” onto every bad habit, we are medicalizing normal and controllable human behaviors. Suddenly we have turned a lazy kid who just needs to get out of the house into a psychiatric patient who needs medication. In so doing, we have removed all of the power and control from his, and his parent’s, hands.

Speaking of parents, I think we have just answered the second question posed above. Who is to blame for all of this supposed video game addiction? Well, I’ll put it this way: 10-year-old children aren’t going out and buying their own games. They aren’t buying their own TVs, phones, and computers, either. If a child is playing games for several hours a day, it is because his parents have chosen to invest a considerable amount of money into fueling the hobby. So, why is your kid playing video games so much? Let us solve the mystery: it is because you are allowing and funding it.

I will never understand these parents who sit around with perplexed looks trying to figure out how to stop their kids from playing video games. The “how” is not difficult or complicated. Set boundaries. Tell them they are only allowed to play for a fixed amount of time during an appointed time frame. What if they disobey? Well then, take the games and drop them off at Goodwill. Or throw them in the fireplace. Or smash them with a hammer. Have some fun with it. They’re your video games, after all. You bought them. You can do what you want with them. And if you want to hand them over to your kid so that he can play them for six hours a day, barely stopping to bathe or eat and rarely leaving the house, that’s your choice. And your fault. Your child isn’t suffering from addiction. He’s suffering from a lack of parenting.

via The Daily Wire

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Planned Parenthood to Spend $45M to Beat Trump, Flip Senate

Planned Parenthood announced Monday it expects to spend $45 million or more during the 2020 election season, with the goal of winning the White House and snatching the Senate from Republicans.

“The stakes are higher than ever, and we’re coming out more powerfully than ever with the largest investment we’ve ever made,” Kelley Robinson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, told the Hill.

The effort is expected to be focused in the states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The nation’s largest abortion business plans to tell voters Republicans have led a “coordinated attack” in state legislatures to curb access to abortion with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade at the U.S. Supreme Court.

“To all the politicians working to take away our rights and undermine access to health care — you’ve been warned,” Robinson said. “We have steadily been building our power over the last decade and we are ready to set the table on our terms. We are fired up, we are engaged, and we are going to win.”

Planned Parenthood Action Fund also boasted in a press release, “Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations are an elections powerhouse,” and added:

Together, we elected the most pro-choice, pro-reproductive health House of Representatives ever. Together, we helped to put reproductive health champions in control of multiple state legislatures where they can protect our rights and our access to care. We show up and we show out to ensure that all people — no matter how much money they make, where they live, their sexual orientation, etc. — have access to the full range of comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare, including abortion, no matter what.

“We know we can win,” Planned Parenthood said. “Public opinion is on our side.”

Lila Rose, president of pro-life organization Live Action, said Planned Parenthood’s announcement of its intention to spend $45 million to help get pro-abortion politicians elected is yet another sign of its “ruthless prioritization of politics and their bottom line over women’s health care.”

Rose continued:

The nation’s largest abortion chain – which ends the lives of 921 preborn children per day, committing over 300,000 abortions per year – receives about half a billion dollars from tax payers every year thanks to pro-abortion politician. Americans shouldn’t be forced to fund a pro-abortion political advocacy group which has chosen to spend tens of millions to secure its government revenue streams while destroying human lives.

Planned Parenthood continues to assert, “This election will determine our access to birth control,” though women are purchasing birth control at many drugstores and supermarkets.

The organization described President Donald Trump as someone “who is determined to crush our reproductive rights.”

The group said it plans to work heavily to mobilize young black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ voters.

Planned Parenthood recently opted out of the federal Title X family planning funding when the Trump administration decided to enforce the rule that recipients of funds from the program cannot perform or refer for abortions. About $60 million in funding that had been granted to Planned Parenthood through Title X in the past was then redirected to comprehensive healthcare providers that do not perform abortions.

Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood still receives over $500 million annually in taxpayer funding through Medicaid reimbursements.

via Breitbart News

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KNOWLES: Trump Baits The Media On Ukraine. They Fall For It.

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about how President Trump doubles down and trolls the press with his remarks on Ukraine and China. Video and partial transcript below: 

But then President Trump himself, a unique character in American politics, decides he’s not going to stay quiet; he’s not going to defend himself; he’s going to double down. And so here is President Trump’s response on colluding with foreign governments over the question of the Bidens’ corruption. 

TRUMP: Well, I would think that if they were honest about it they would start a major investigation into the Bidens. It’s a very simple answer. They should investigate the Bidens, because how does a company that’s newly formed, and all these companies, if you look at by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened to China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine. So I would say that President Zelensky, if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.

TRUMP: Because nobody has any doubt that they weren’t crooked that was a crooked deal a hundred percent. He had no knowledge of energy, didn’t know the first thing about it. All of a sudden he’s getting fifty thousand dollars a month plus a lot of other things. Nobody has any doubt. And they got rid of a prosecutor — who was a very tough prosecutor — they got rid of him. Now they’re trying to make it the opposite way, but they got it. So if I were the president, I would certainly recommend that of Ukraine.

Absolutely the perfect response to this. I guess it gets back to our point: sometimes the wrong decision is better than indecision. I don’t think this is the wrong decision. I think it’s perfectly defensible to tell Ukraine to look into corruption and their own interference in the 2016 election, and I think it’s perfectly right for President Trump to double down on that. Because what’s he going to do? He could apologize and explain himself to the press that’s not going to get him anywhere, and there’s no reason for him to do it. He doesn’t owe those people one word of explanation. 

So, what he does is he goes out there, and he makes a joke. And even Marco Rubio, who is obviously no particular fan of the president, Marco Rubio was asked about this response from Trump and he just explains to the press — not President Trump’s remarks — he explains to the press how stupid the press is. 

REPORTER: You think it’s okay for President Trump to ask China to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?

RUBIO: I don’t know if that’s a real request or him just needling the press knowing that you guys are going to get outraged by it. He’s pretty good at getting everybody fired up, and he’s been doing that for a while and the media responded. Right on right on right on task. 

REPORTER: You’re one of the loudest critics of China and its human rights abuses. I mean is it okay to ask him to say that?

REPORTER: I don’t think it’s a real request, I think he did it to get you guys. I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it. I said, I mean, he plays it like a violin and everyone falls right into it. That’s not a real request.

Of course. I mean, this is now Senator Marco Rubio not acting like a senator — he’s acting like he’s a panelist on Special Report. He’s acting like a political analyst and he’s saying, You idiots! 

If President Trump were going to use the weight of the federal government to leverage all of that and get a foreign power and an adversarial power like China to investigate his political opponents, if he were really doing that, he’d probably pick up the phone. If you were really doing that, maybe you wouldn’t pick up the phone, he’d get some back channel-spy to go in and ask and they would basically do it like Obama did it, like Obama and Hillary and the Democrats did it. But that’s not what Trump is doing. He’s forcing the press, and manipulating the press, to expose their own hypocrisy. 

Listen to full episodes of “The Michael Knowles Show” on iTunes. 

Watch “The Michael Knowles Show” on-demand!

via The Daily Wire

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