Mueller Investigation: the Obama Accounting

JAMES FREEMAN:

Mueller and the Obama Accounting: The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.

The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents. . . .

It’s time for this lawyer and alleged passionate defender of the Bill of Rights to explain the actions of his overzealous and overreaching executive branch. If he didn’t find out about the wiretapping until after the fact, when exactly did he learn about it and how did he respond?

What has always seemed clear is that Mr. Obama never actually believed the now-discredited claim that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to rig the 2016 U.S. elections. . . .

If Mr. Obama never bought into the collusion conspiracy theory, then the question is why he endorsed or allowed the use of federal surveillance tools against the party out of power—a direct threat to the democratic process that is at the heart of our country’s greatness.

Mr. Obama might have room to deny any knowledge of the details of the surveillance abuses, given the story his FBI director told Congress—if anybody could believe that story.
The absolute bare minimum that Mr. Obama owes this country is an explanation of the actions of his government in spying on a presidential campaign.

Put him under oath.


UPDATE:

McConnell: Mueller memo ‘conclusively’ exonerates Trump — but not Obama.

137Posted at 8:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

Reimagining Republicanism - Arizona RINO Revenge

ReimagininArizona Illustrates the RINO Revenge

By Henry Olsen| November 13th, 2018

Arizona’s Senate race was perhaps the most surprising, and disturbing, midterm result for Republicans and Trump fans. Many struggle to understand how Barry Goldwater’s home state will send a former pink tutu-wearing antiwar activist to Washington. The answer is instructive regarding what Trump Republicanism must do to build a majority.

The biggest reason Martha McSally lost is the same reason Republicans lost control of the House: RINOs. Across the nation, moderate college-educated independents who had frequently backed Republicans in prior elections switched sides. We can see this trend both in the Arizona exit polls and the results reported to date.

Support for Republicans has collapsed since 2012 among college-educated Arizonans when Mitt Romney cruised to a 54-44 win over Barack Obama, crushing him by a 63-36 percent margin among college graduates. This year, while Republican Governor Doug Ducey even more easily won victory by a 56-42 margin, he barely carried college grads with only a 51-46 margin. McSally ran against a much tougher opponent in Kyrsten Sinema and ended up losing college grads by a 52-47 margin. Since college grads cast nearly one-quarter of the state’s votes, that 10-point swing added nearly 2.5 percent to Sinema’s margin. Since her lead is currently below two percent, this was the difference between victory and defeat.

Support for Republicans has also declined since 2012 among the smaller, and more liberal, groups of voters with graduate degrees. In 2012 Romney won them by a 54-42 margin. Ducey got clobbered among them 59-40, and McSally lost by an even larger 62-37 percent margin. They cast 14 percent of the vote, so that extra six-point difference added nearly another one percent to Sinema’s victory margin.

The actual returns bear this out. Phoenix’s Maricopa County is home to 60 percent of all voters and a much higher percentage of Arizona’s college grads. Romney carried it easilyin 2012 by a 55-43 margin. McSally, however, lost it to Sinema by a 51-47 result, the first time a Republican had lost Maricopa County in a contested race for President, Governor, or Senator since the last century. Game, set, match

McSally is far from the only Republican to lose because of the RINO’s revenge. Four Republican-held State House seats flipped parties, each in districts that had moved dramatically in favor of the Democrats between 2012 and 2016. Tucson’s 10th District voted for Obama by 5 percent and Hillary Clinton by 10 percent; the Republican there was living on borrowed time. But the other seats were in—you guessed it, Maricopa County—with between 39 and 46 percent of residents holding a four-year or a graduate degree. The 17th voted for Romney by 14 percent but only 4 percent for Trump, while the 18th and 28th both flipped from Romney to Clinton districts. House districts with similar profiles account for the lion’s share of Republican losses nationwide.

Other states could make up for the RINO defection with votes from blue-collar voters who switched from Obama to Trump. Arizona, however, does not have many of them. In the Midwest it is common to find areas where Trump outpolled Romney by 10-20 percent. Trump outpolled Romney in only two Arizona legislative seats, however, and by only 3.5 and 1 percent.

McSally was also harmed by a small number of defections from Trump-supporting Republicans. The exit poll shows she lost 12 percent of the Republican vote and 11 percent of people who approve of Trump’s job performance. This was higher than any of the other Republican challengers in targeted races except West Virginia’s Patrick Morrissey. Removing Morrissey, Republican candidates in six other similar targeted races (Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and North Dakota) lost on average about 7 percent of Republicans and 9.5 percent of Trump approvers.

However you look at it, McSally’s higher defection rates made an even bad situation worse. Her higher GOP defection cost her about 1.9 percent of the total vote or about 3.8 percent on the margin, much more than Sinema’s 1.9 percent lead. Her higher defection rate among those who approved of Trump cost her about 0.75 percent of the vote or about 1.5 percent on the margin, nearly enough to close the gap.

These “MAGA fans for Sinema” were likely disgruntled backers of one of McSally’s two, more conservative GOP primary competitors, Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio. McSally had not crafted a strong conservative record prior to her run for Senate and she had been the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate. McSally also attacked Ward in the primary for being insufficiently supportive of President Trump, which was more than ironic since Ward’s criticism of Trump was that he was being too liberal on one issue. We could just be dealing with survey error, but it appears some conservatives did not forgive and forget after the primary.

Some might contend McSally’s loss was simply a matter of liberal women coming out for a liberal woman, but the exit poll again shows this view is wrong. Both Democrats and Republicans comprised larger shares of the electorate this year when compared with 2016. The exit polls do show Sinema doing much better among both Democratic and Republican women than Clinton did, but they also show a significant shift of opinion among independent men. Trump beat Clinton by ten percent among independent men while losing to her by seven points among independent women. McSally, however, lost independent men and women by an identical three-point margin. The race would be a dead heat had she won these men by three points instead of losing them.

McSally’s defeat shows just how tenuous the Trump coalition’s hold on power is. Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by over two percent of the vote, something that had not been done in nearly 150 years. Trump has not added to that coalition in his first two years as president, and that cost his party control of the House while also preventing them from gaining more than two Senate seats on a highly favorable map. It’s possible he could gain a narrow re-election without gaining support if the Democrats nominate someone as unacceptable to moderate voters as Hillary Clinton. But he cannot change the direction of the country without secure and substantial majorities in Congress, and that will not be forthcoming without a change in course.

At a crucial moment in the Peter Jackson’s epic movie, “The Return of the King,” Elrond Half-Elven visits Aragorn with sage advice. “You are outnumbered,” he tells the Ranger. “You need more men.” So it is with Trump. Whether it is regaining a portion of the RINOs or a winning a much larger share of Hispanic or African-American votes, he and the MAGA movement need more supporters to succeed. If not, 2020 will see many more Martha McSally’s, making even a successful re-election a Pyrrhic victory.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

______________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: Getty Imagesg Republicanism

By Patrick Maines| November 14th, 2018

For at least 25 years, the Republican Party has been promoting policies damaging both to its own political standing and to the middle class. In the face of the growing radicalism of the Democrats, and the need—more crucial now than ever—for the GOP to assemble a majority coalition of voters, it must reexamine those policies.

Broadly speaking, the areas in need of reconsideration are tax policy, trade policy, foreign affairs, and antitrust policy.

Tax Policy. Supply side economists argue persuasively that tax cuts benefiting corporations and the upper classes have a more profound impact on the economy overall than tax cuts for the middle class. But whatever the correct answer to this broad economic question may be, the political consequences, as shown in exit poll data from the midterm elections, have not been to the GOP’s advantage.

It is also worth considering whether the broad economic consequences of sound policies on tax cuts actually do much to benefit those most in need of relief, at least in the near term. Getting the economic calculus right is not the same thing as getting the political calculus correct.

More than this, one guesses that the public’s opinion of the extraordinarily rich—billionaires like Tom Steyer, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Koch brothers—has taken a hit in recent years as their political activities and immense wealth are seen as frightening and no longer on a human scale.

It has been reported that President Trump is considering a middle class tax cut. How about combining it with a tax increase, perhaps through a wealth tax on, say, individuals with net assets of $100 million or more? It wouldn’t require such people to switch from vichyssoise to gruel, but it would disarm the Democrats’ criticism of GOP tax policy as “favoring the rich” and be deeply popular with the middle class.

Antitrust Policy. The technology companies that are referred to by investors as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), have grown to such a size they now have a market cap of some $3 trillion and account for 11 percent of the value of the S&P 500.

But it’s not just their size that is gargantuan, so too is their impact on other industries. Take Google and Facebook, for instance. These two companies have decimated the advertising revenue of newspapers and magazines, to the point that their continued survival is in doubt, while Netflix is doing the same thing to the motion picture studios and theaters. The point here is not to lionize the Hollywood studios or newspaper publishers per se. As I am about to make clear, neither are friends of the GOP. What’s important, however, is that the motion picture and newspaper industries remain viable.

In 2012, the FTC wrapped up a years-long investigation of the competitive practices of Google. Despite a (leaked) staff report that recommended legal action against Google for tactics that harmed internet users, the agency let Google off with a slap of the wrist in August of that year.

Though it was little remarked at the time, in March 2012, just five months before that FTC decision, it was announced that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was under consideration for a cabinet position within the Obama Administration. Google and its employees had contributed millions of dollars to Obama’s reelection campaign and to other Democrats. Of course, there’s no chance at all (wink, wink) that then-FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, another Obama appointee, was aware of Google’s political heft within the administration as he overruled his staff’s recommendation.

Part of the problem for Republicans in embracing strong antitrust positions has been that many quasi-libertarians in the party see antitrust as just another government intrusion in the marketplace. But as with the continued existence of the Libertarian Party, it’s something the GOP is just going to have to deal with and get over.

Tariffs and Free Trade. President Trump’s decision to go after countries, and earlier trade deals, that work against the interests of American companies and workers is the correct policy but it is not currently embraced with enough enthusiasm by Republican legislators.

Their diffidence is largely explained by the lobbying of S&P 500 companies, many of whom are thought of as “American” largely just because they are domiciled here. A recent report in USA Today indicated more than 44 percent of total sales of these companies came from abroad, not to mention the large number of S&P products being made overseas. In other words, these companies are more concerned about their sales and manufacturing abroad than they are about the impact on American companies and workers—past, present, and future.

The hollowing out of the manufacturing capability of so many American towns and cities is the legacy of these “free trade” policies, that, and the canard that America could get by just on service companies.

Foreign Affairs. Easily the most disastrous policies pursued by earlier Republican administrations and congressmen are those connected to military activity abroad, either as part of America’s role as the world’s policeman or in pursuit, as the neocons put it, of “nation building.” The mess that is the Middle East today speaks volumes about the folly of such policies.

But there’s another dimension to this problem: It is impossibly blinkered in that it implies that our nation has the resources and relative strength among nations to engage in these wars. But we don’t.

Indeed, until just the last two years, China’s economy was growing at a rate that was at least double our own, and China is also expanding its military at light speed. Even Russia, though not in the same league economically, is itself expanding its military and teaming up with China in military exercises.

Going forward, the GOP should wholeheartedly embrace, as Trump is advocating, “nationalism” rather than “globalism,” and Main Street rather than Wall Street. And GOP legislators should resist the lobbying of corporations that despise them, like the entertainment industry and the legacy media. It isn’t enough that such companies are “corporations” for the GOP, the party of business, to support their policy positions in Congress or with the regulatory agencies. The political damage these companies do to the GOP is orders of magnitude worse than whatever minuscule gifts they can bestow on compliant GOP legislators.

In sum, the politics of a generation ago needs updating, even as the principles that animated the party remain constant. It is not enough to recur to position papers of 30 years ago to understand what we need to do today. In order to maintain those principles of freedom and self-government that we all should care about, we have to adapt our policy positions in order to meet current political realities.

Photo Credit: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images

Democrats as the Party of Slave Power Tyranny

UDemocrats as the Party of Slave Power Tyranny

By Ken Masugi| November 7th, 2018

The Republican surrender of the House of Representatives to Democrats and the reestablishment of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ought to remind us of the history of Democratic tyranny.

They are, after all, the party of slavery, the Klan, and segregation. This criticism is not just dated, but outrageously unfair you say? After all, aren’t the Democrats the party with overwhelming black support and two recent black presidents—Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama?

Let’s review the history.

Thinking about the question of tyranny—which is a better way to say injustice—in terms of race, as we now automatically seem to do, disguises the most fundamental problem: the lust for power that animates tyranny. Democrats not only have always despised restraints on their power, whether internal or constitutional—they have always been the slave power, by which I don’t only mean chattel slavery (though they certainly did their bit to support that).

Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party (which is the antecedent but not exactly the same thing as today’s Democrats) defended the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence by putting up a fight against the power of the Adams-Hamilton wing of the then-dominant Federalist government, by working through the state governments.

But this changed in the early 19th century, as the meaning of the Declaration of Independence began to be forgotten and distorted. Shedding the view that the founders regarded the necessary evil of slavery as shameful, the nation beheld the enhanced economic advantages slavery brought to them and became increasingly convinced of the positive case for slavery.

The slave-holding South controlled the national government, with the 3/5 clause distorting its advantage in the House, and more senators, with the expansion of slave states; this added up to an electoral college advantage for presidential candidates favorable to slave interests. And of course there followed a pro-slavery judiciary.

From a protector of natural rights who stood in opposition to the Federalists for fear of their expansion of national power, the Democratic-Republicans became a party that protected slavery. The Slave Power was unchallenged (with the exception of two war-hero Whig Presidents) until the unlikely coalition that led to the rise of the Republican Party.

Lincoln attacked the core injustice of slavery: you work, I eat. His attack had nothing to do with race. And Lincoln refused to condemn the slaveholders as evil men: they are what we would be if our places were reversed. Only such a president could deliver the Second Inaugural, with its plea for “charity for all.”

Following the Civil War, the Democrats attempted to restore the tyranny of slavery through the tyranny of Jim Crow laws. Republican resistance to these forced Democrats to be more clever about their grabs at power. The Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson then tried to destroy our greatest defense against tyranny by denouncing the Declaration as irrelevant and outmoded. But Wilson was, like most tyrannical souls, arrogant, in presuming he could so readily, so fecklessly dispose of the central document protecting American freedom.

Franklin Roosevelt had a shrewder idea—he would reinterpret both the Declaration and the Constitution to favor unlimited government power. His First Inaugural said it all: the crisis of the Depression required all Americans to obey their anointed leader as soldiers do their commander! (Ronald Reagan called ordinary Americans heroes, who are their owncommanders.) In his 1944 State of the Union Address, in the midst of World War II, FDR compared Republicans to fascists and declared that the war was wasted effort if that was what America would return to.

Not to be outdone, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, accused Republicans of shielding fascist, racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic forces. Very little in Democratic campaign tactics has changed since those days. The only Republican who appears to have learned from Truman’s victorious strategy is Donald Trump. Democrats today, however, retain this preposterous comparison of Republicans with the worst enemies of America—for the purpose of justifying lawless tactics against those who love their country.

Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all did their part in constructing an administrative state, a bureaucracy headed by activist intellectuals that shuts down self-governing citizens with their edicts, hostility to religion, and political correctness. “You work, I eat” is a politically incorrect view of what the security state means for citizens. The tyranny of the administrative state can be soft—offering security in place of choice and freedom—though it can also be harsh, as the EPA’s lawless dictates reveal. But object to this unconstitutional arrangement, and you’ll be accused of being fascist, racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. It’s an old story, with the twist that now condemns those who are the real fighters for freedom.

The tyranny of the Democratic Party was most visibly on display in their conspiracy to destroy Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Here a completely fabricated case was foisted upon the American public and then embellished with stories that their peddlers now admit are fake. No Democrat raised objections at the time to this ghastly proceeding. Now no Democrat dares defend this shameful scene, which defamed a jurist for unproven episodes that allegedly took place in his high school days. That’s the tyrannical procedure radical feminism wishes to foist into employment, education, and society overall.

How has the world’s oldest political party come to such a shameful condition as it now presumes to share elected power with the Senate and presidency?

They were aided in part by slavish Republican timidity. The Republican story begins with the idea of freedom as the purpose of politics, which was the Democrats’ forgotten purpose as well. In each instance of tyranny, Democrats preferred groups over citizens. Most all of these groups were also worthy of being part of American political life—immigrants, Catholics, blacks, intellectuals (some, at any rate), and so on. But they were interesting to Democrats only insofar as they were instrumental in bringing them to power. Their actual status as Americans was always secondary.

In empowering them as groups rather than equal and individual Americans, Democrats brought out the worst in their character and encouraged them to form factions, that is, tyrannical groups that know no moderation. This fanaticism is best exemplified in our current obsession with multiculturalism. Claremont Institute Board Chairman Thomas Klingenstein clarified the relationship in a recent essay: “During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850s, is an existential threat.”

Times change, but the themes of tyranny and freedom remain constant.

A just nation needs to know itself as an arrangement of constitutional offices and, above all, of citizens—it is not a “Hunger Games” of competing and various identity groups. Telling the stories of both imperfect parties together is America’s never-ending and necessary task of creating a politics of the common good.

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CNN’s Existential War With Trump

CNN’s Existential War With Trump

 

By Victor Davis Hanson| November 4th, 2018

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names
But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?

Why did CNN anchor Chris Cuomo falsely assert that only the media (i.e., outlets like CNN) could download the hacked email trove of John Podesta—as if it was illegal for anyone else to do the same (e.g., “Remember, it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us.”)? What CNN legal counsel gave him such absurd advice?

Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely Lanny Davis—later deny he had ever given CNN any information that Donald Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump, Jr.? Why did not the authors of the false story, Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen, retract in full the allegation, or at least explain exactly why their not-so-anonymous source Lanny Davis was claiming that he never told the three that his client Michael Cohen had professed foreknowledge of the meeting on the part of Trump.

Why were Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, the supposed dream team of CNN investigative reporters, all forced to resign from CNN? Was it their collective but false report that Anthony Scaramucci was connected to a $10-billion Russian investment fund? What were the sources for that fake account? Did that news account hurt the Trump transition? Would they have been so fast and loose with the truth in the case of president-elect Hillary Clinton? Might they instead have reported at about the same time on the Clinton’s campaign funding of the Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele project?

CNN’s Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus, remember, also had erroneously reported that former FBI Director James Comey would in congressional testimony soon contradict President Trump’s prior assertion that he was told by Comey that he was not under investigation. That report proved false—and yet it too had helped to whip up anti-Trump hysteria on the eve of the Comey appearance. Why is it that one can easily predict the particular political slant of these fake news stories?

This Is CNN’s Shoddiness
Even in trivial matters, CNN has fudged the truth and always in a predictably biased direction—as, for example, in its selective viewing of a video that suggested Trump buffoonishly had preempted the Japanese Prime Minister and overfed fish during a joint photo-op (“Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”). In truth, Trump simply followed the feeding model of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Earlier, CNN had reported that singer Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the music of her father Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”—a story of her purported anger that Sinatra denied. During the lead-up to the Neil Gorsuch nomination announcement, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny inaccurately announced that the Trump White House was purportedly “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest” by creating two “identical Twitter pages” for both possible nominees Justices Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. Later Zeleny sheepishly retracted that falsehood.

The shoddiness in reporting about Trump and the occasional flat-out inaccurate new stories reflect a toxic network culture in which partisanship is now standard and apparently to be expected. A certain furor over Trump often erupts in repeated, obscene anti-Trump and unprofessional outbursts of CNN journalists, contributors, and anchors—whether Anderson Cooper trashing a pro-Trump panelist by profanely retorting, “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!” or CNN religious scholar Reza Aslan referring to Trump as “this piece of sh-t,” or perhaps the late CNN host Anthony Bourdain joking in an interview about poisoning Trump or CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo-poseholding a facsimile of Trump’s severed head.

After a while, the pattern becomes undeniable. We saw such biased activism during the Ferguson drama when the entire newsroom of CNN panelists (on the supposedly straight news “CNN Newsroom”) in December 2014 adopted an on-air “hands up, don’t shoot” photo-op pose—an emulation of the false narrative surrounding the shooting death of Michael Brown that was proven fantastical by grand jury testimonies and an investigationby Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

Apparently, CNN has created a landscape in which not only are journalists likely to relax professional standards when it comes to reporting on Trump, but there is a sloppy environment of crude disparagement of the candidate and later president, and a general indifference to journalistic ethics.

The permeating ethos is perhaps best illustrated by the CNN staffers working with CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux during the campaign who were caught on a hot micjoking about the crash of Trump’s jet. CNN commentator Donna Brazile leaked a primary debate question to candidate Hillary Clinton, and then shamelessly lied that she had not done so. CNN panelist Julia Joffe (previously fired from Politico for tweeting that the president and his daughter Ivanka might have had an incestuous relationship) claimed that Trump had radicalized more people than had ISIS. CNN contributor and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has suggested that President Trump is being duped as if he was a de facto Russian asset, while another CNN contributor, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, on more than one occasion has compared Trump and his policies in various ways to Hitler, U.S. immigration enforcement to the Holocaust, and America under Trump to Nazi Germany.

CNN anchor Don Lemon recently asserted that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men”—another false assertion, given that radical Islamist terrorists have killed far more Americans in terrorist acts than have white men, whether left-wing or right-wing, and despite the fact that while “white men” constitute about a third of the U.S. population, Islamists constitute a mere fraction.

At least Christiane Amanpour (“I believe in being truthful not neutral”) was intellectually honest when she asserted—in some sense echoing the confessions of New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg—that journalists could not and should not be neutral reporters any longer, given their low opinion of Trump and their own belief that he is untrustworthy and a threat to the republic.

Welcome to the Echo ChamberGiven the fabrications and outright falsehoods that were critical to the selling of Obamacare, from those of Barack Obama to Jonathan Gruber’s, I doubt any credible journalist would have dared state that they could no longer stay neutral in reporting Obama Administration policies. What followed the fabrications of Obamacare were Ben Rhodes’ later admissions of creating an echo chamber by which he orchestrated all sorts of narratives among incompetent and compliant young reporters, or Susan Rice’s serial liesabout the Benghazi deaths, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the complete removal of WMD from Syria, and denials that she had requested unmaskings of Trump associates swept up in the Obama Administration’s FISA warrant surveillance.

In fact, the duty of a journalist is to stay neutral and to report the truth, at least as it can be determined by testimonies, evidence, motive, and common sense—without worry whether such reporting injures or aids a particular politician or agenda.

In answer to both Cillizza and Acosta, unfortunately CNN has serially issued false reports, has had to fire hosts, contributors, and reporters, and has had its anchors and panelists engage in wild ahistorical attacks on Trump and traffic in racialist stereotypes and obscenity.

The names of those who have abused the journalistic ethos and the regrettable failure of CNN to uphold media standards are a matter of record.

The best way to stop the chronic Trump attacks on the veracity of CNN is not to unleash a rude and boisterous Acosta to argue endlessly with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but simply to ensure that CNN news reports are fact-checked and not in need of retractions or firings, that CNN hosts, contributors, and anchors do not stoop to profanity, scatology, racism, and ahistorical comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, and that CNN’s staff and hosts do not joke about the president being killed through plane crashes and decapitation.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Caravan Contradictions.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

 Caravan Contradictions.

“A ‘caravan’—the euphemism for a current foot-army of more than 10,000 Central Americans—of would-be border crossers has now passed into Mexico. The marchers promise they will continue 1,000 miles and more northward to the U.S. border, despite warnings from President Trump that as unauthorized immigrants they will be turned away. No one has yet explained how, or by whom or what, such a mass of humanity has been supplied, cared for, and organized. Once at the border, the immigrants further predict that they will successfully, but illegally, enter the United States, then claim refugee status, and finally rely on sympathetic public opinion—and progressive political activism—to avoid deportation. If past experience is any guide, they are quite right in thinking they can melt into the population, ignore future legal summonses, and count on the de facto amnesty that currently protects 22 million illegal aliens, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America.”

 

A“caravan”—the euphemism for a current foot-army of more than 10,000 Central Americans—of would-be border crossers has now passed into Mexico. The marchers promise they will continue 1,000 miles and more northward to the U.S. border, despite warnings from President Trump that as unauthorized immigrants they will be turned away. No one has yet explained how, or by whom or what, such a mass of humanity has been supplied, cared for, and organized.

Once at the border, the immigrants further predict that they will successfully, but illegally, enter the United States, then claim refugee status, and finally rely on sympathetic public opinion—and progressive political activism—to avoid deportation.

If past experience is any guide, they are quite right in thinking they can melt into the population, ignore future legal summonses, and count on the de facto amnesty that currently protects 22 million illegal aliens, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America. Border crashers assume rightly that U.S. security agents and the military will not use force, on the principle that Central Americans appearing on CNN battling helmeted Americans with batons and tear gas is bad American “optics.”

But for all the staged midterm theatrics, the caravan illustrates the abject ironies and paradoxes of the entire illegal alien project.

Refugees, True and FalseCentral Americans claim they are “refugees,” forced out of their homes by violence and endemic lawlessness to save their very lives by migrating to the United States. They insist on that rationale because of quirks in American law that make it more difficult to deport resident “refugees” (especially those with small children) than ordinary illegal aliens seeking improved economic conditions inside the United States.

Yet the migrants are now for the most part well inside Mexico. The Mexican government has generously offered succor. No one is threatening their lives. Mexico has even offered temporary residence for those who seem to have good grounds to be admitted as true political refugees.

In response, the caravan migrants have ignored those offers, because the vast majority are not true refugees. They are mostly no different from the millions of illegal aliens who have entered the United States for higher wages, for the chance to send remittances to their families back home, and for the generous entitlements of American social services that supplement entry-level wages and subsidize remittances. (We keep ignoring that a 15 to 20 percent federal tax on all remittances sent from the U.S. to Central America and Mexico—around $60 billion a year—would, along with a wall, provide a deterrent to caravan immigration.)

To be sure, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are often violent places. They have been so for centuries, both before and after the Spanish conquest. But pause and reflect on the ensuing paradox: fury and fear over endemic lawlessness now prompts thousands to wish to break the law to enter the United States, and continue to ignore statutes by illegally residing here.

Do the migrants ever pause and wonder whether their own past and present attitude to the law in the abstract may in some small part explain why their own country in the concrete is often prone to lawlessness? In other words, why would a host country welcome in aliens who break the law to enter it because their own former home is lawless?

Honduras or El Salvador is not an abstraction. Each nation is a collective of people who likely harbor the same general assumptions as those in the caravan—and neither will improve if its population abandons it or assumes that it can also soon break the law with exemption. It is Orwellian to leave a nation because of its lawlessness and then, first, to enter another nation illegally, and, second, to continue to reside in contravention of the law.

What Is America to Them?Is the United States a saintly or sinful place? Weirdly, and by the very same people seeking its succor, it is often deemed a cruel and awful place—and especially a cruel and awful place because it does not open its borders to the world to enjoy its cruelty and awfulness.

Interviews with some of the migrants reveal this ongoing irony. Most claim that they have no intention of diverting their odyssey to any other country. Only America will do.

Yet often Central American governments, the Mexican elite, would-be illegal aliens, and their sympathizers in the American progressive and identity politics movements obsess on the supposed xenophobia, the racism, the nativism, and inhospitality of the United States.

So what exactly is America—demonic or deified? Why would anyone wish to enter such an illiberal country, so different from the customs and traditions of Central America? Would not Mexico be a much better place of refuge for the caravan people, given multiple affinities of ethnicity, language, history, and culture?

It is not infrequent to hear from American ethnic activists that the current Spanish-speaking migrants are only “reclaiming” their ancestral frontiers in North America (as in American settlers took it from Mexican nationals who took it from the Spanish who took it from indigenous peoples who took it from other indigenous peoples).

Aside from such historical illiteracy (there were few Mexican nationals in western North America even by the mid-19th-century, and those who were here were often quite hostile to non-Spanish-speaking natives), why exactly would such a strange American culture be so attractive to Central American migrants?

Apparently, it is not the fear of Honduras that drives the caravans, but instead the desire to be among foreign Americans—more specifically, to live in a society blessed with constitutional law, protections of private property, free-market capitalism, open inquiry, individual rights, religious tolerance, gender and racial equity, due process, and an independent judiciary? And where exactly did that tradition arise that now oddly seems to work like a magnet for Latin Americans? If the United States is deemed so desirable, why could not the American paradigm be xeroxed in naturally rich, fertile, and inherently wealthy Central America and Mexico?

Assimilation, Intermarriage, and IntegrationFurther, the reason the United States is a nation of immigrants is not because of the enduring multiplicity of tribal affinities. America does not work because a fifth of the population still speaks German, or immigrants from Asia create enclaves that perpetually mimic the culture of China, or because Scandinavians have somehow maintained the socialism of Sweden inside the United States.

Immigrants, the ancestors of most of us, enriched our food, music, fashion, art, and literature by importing ideas, customs and practices from their mother countries, but they do not tamper with our core that has guaranteed our success: religious and political tolerance, adherence to the U.S. Constitution, English as the official language, free-market capitalism, and individual liberty.

Thus assimilation, intermarriage, and integration, the now despised “melting pot,” for over two centuries converted immigrants into Americans. At the moment when Americans fail to continue this tradition of assimilation we will end up like the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, or for that matter most of the countries in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Have any of the would-be immigrants in the caravan thought much about learning English, of soon recalibrating to envision an American from Vietnam or Russia or Somalia as more one’s kindred soul than those who would soon become to them a foreign national in Central America? Are the caravan migrants hopeful of adapting to the laws of the United States, and of transforming their loyalty and affinity to the United States away from their home country? Or, in the spirit of postmodernism, is the United States envisioned just as a safe, secure, and relatively prosperous enclave in which to remain Central Americans without Central America in their midst?

In other words, immigration has been historically a brutal bargain, one that demands of the immigrant not to live as he did in the past, because to do so would replicate the failures from which he was escaping. Those in Tijuana, for example, live according to customs, protocols and laws quite different from those a few thousand yards away in San Diego, which explains why the two municipalities are themselves so different. The melting pot forced the unwilling to accept that reality and thereby allowed the idea of e pluribus unum to work and to avoid the more common and dangerous romance of ex uno plures. Otherwise why would a Central American leave Central America to recreate it in America?

The Irony of Equal RightsA final incongruity is reciprocity. Mexico and Central American certainly would not appreciate it if Americans acted toward their country as they do to ours, specifically to enter illegally, to reside illegally, and then to make demands upon the host. Mexico until very recently had wacky stipulations in its constitution and immigration laws that constrained legal immigration if it endangered the demography of Mexico, its apparent cherished idea of raza. In sum, it would be nearly impossible for an Irish-American, a Somali-American, a Vietnamese-American to emigrate to Mexico or Central America and to be considered a full-fledged citizen of the country with all the constitutional protections and cultural affinities of native-born Mexicans.

Yet Mexican and Central Americans, even when entering and residing in America illegally, naturally and understandably assume they can enjoy the same rights and be treated the same as Americans. Is there any formal appreciation that the United States is the only country in the world where that reality is possible, where superficial appearance is no guide to Americanness?

Or more bluntly put, why is America so unlike China, Russia, or Mexico, in the sense that all immigrants from such countries can become full-fledged citizens and be treated as such, and yet few of those nations would consider an American immigrant who did not look Chinese, Russian, or Mexican to ever be considered fully a compatriot?

No doubt some in the caravan are genuine political refugees seeking their salvation in America. A few already may have applied in their home consulates for legal residence and may already be learning English and the peculiarities of the U.S. Constitution.

But that is not the image the caravan conveys. For some reason, the caravan is a paradox, a contradiction and an irony of many thousands who are quite eager to violate U.S. law, to make claims upon their would-be host without serious reflection about why they are leaving one nation and demanding entrance into another—with the full expectation that their new home has no right to demand that all would-be guests fleeing lawlessness should first abide by laws.Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds