Tom Perez, Keith Ellison and the Meaning of Anti-Semitism

From Caroline Glick, at RCP, "Perez, Ellison and the Meaning of Anti-Semitism":

Was former Secretary of labor and assistant attorney-general Tom Perez’s victory over Congressman Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.

Along these lines, Prof. Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who promised to quit the party if Ellison was elected due to his documented history of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel, hailed Perez’s election. Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz said that Perez’s election over Ellison “is a victory in the war against bigotry, antisemitism, the anti-Israel push of the hard Left within the Democratic Party.”

There are two problems with Dershowitz’s view. First, Perez barely won. Ellison received nearly half the votes in two rounds of voting.

Tipping his hat to Ellison’s massive popularity among the party’s leadership and grassroots, Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced.

There is a good reason that Perez is so willing to cooperate with Ellison in running the DNC. And this points to the second problem with the claim that Perez’s election signals a move toward the center by Democratic leaders.

Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democratic Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”

Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman. Only hard leftists participated in a meaningful way in the race for leadership of the second largest party in America – a party that less than a decade ago controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.

The implications of this state of affairs are disastrous for the US generally. It is inherently destabilizing for a nation when one of the parties in a two-party political system is taken over by people who have a negative view of the country.

While America as a whole will suffer from the radicalization of the Democratic Party, perhaps no group will suffer more from the far Left’s takeover of the party than the American Jewish community. The vast majority of American Jews give their partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party and their ideological allegiance to the Left.

While Perez made a name for himself by fighting the enforcement of US immigration and naturalization laws against illegal immigrants, and Ellison rose to prominence for his activism in radical African American and Islamic circles, thanks to the so-called intersectionality of the far Left, that makes the cause of one faction the cause of all factions, today Perez is as much an apologist for Israel bashers as Ellison.

Perhaps in response to the danger that the far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party represents, Malcolm Hoenlein, the long-serving professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called on Sunday for the convening of a global conference on antisemitism. In a meeting with The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board, Hoenlein said that one of the goals of the proposed conference would be to reach a universally accepted definition of antisemitism...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "7,000 Anti-Semitic Incidents Under Obama?"

President Trump Gets Warm Embrace at #CPAC2017 (VIDEO)

He skipped the conservative conclave last year, suggesting he'd be too radical for the right-wing mobs.

But he was welcomed like the king he is this year. What a blast.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's popularity at CPAC gathering, which he shunned a year ago, shows how he's conquered conservatives":

Conservatives love Trump now b/c 'he has all the right enemies.' But how long this honeymoon? https://t.co/CQ5DoTAYbI @Noahbierman

— Marc Duvoisin (@MarcDuvoisin) February 24, 2017

A year ago, Donald Trump skipped the nation’s preeminent conference of conservatives, underscoring the friction between the populist candidate and many of the warring factions in his party during a heated presidential primary season.

Friday, Trump returned to the Conservative Political Action Conference with the blunt force of a conqueror, planting his brand of nationalist, anti-globalist populism like a flag.

His speech, with rhetoric that even Trump said would have been too controversial at the event even a year ago, marked his takeover of the conservative movement, one of several signs of his dominance throughout the conference, which also featured a rare and well-received speech from his chief intellectual influence and advisor, Stephen K. Bannon.

"There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency or a global flag," Trump said to great applause from thousands of conservatives. "I'm not representing the globe. I'm representing your country."

He echoed ideas he has espoused in the past — denouncing trade deals as the antithesis of "economic freedom," warning that Paris and other great cities of Europe have been ruined by mass immigration, criticizing Democratic and Republican presidents for their interventions in the Middle East.

Although many of the words were familiar, the venue and the passion made Friday's speech remarkable.

Trump spoke directly of his ambition to turn the GOP into "the party of the American worker."

"I'm here today to tell you what this movement means for the future of the Republican Party and for the future of America," Trump said. "The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that [must] put and will put its own citizens first."

While Trump tried to unite conservatives, the speech made little effort to bridge the country's larger political divide. For example, Trump dismissed people who have shown up at town halls around the country to protest reversal of Obamacare.

"They're not you. They're largely — many of them are the side that lost," he said.

The visuals around the waterfront conference outside Washington were just as striking: the red “Make America Great Again” caps, the throngs of college Republicans surrounding Trump’s aides and allies, the giant Trump-decorated pickup truck at the convention center entrance.

As he has repeatedly done in the last couple of weeks, Trump attacked the media for what he sees as unfair coverage. He also showed how much he remembers the details of how his campaign was described in the press, at one point praising The Times for its election tracking poll that consistently showed him leading.

“I must say Los Angeles Times did a great job — shocking,” he said. “A couple polls got it right.”

In reality, the USC Dornsife/L.A. Times “Daybreak” tracking poll overstated Trump’s support, although it did correctly pick up the backing he was getting from disaffected white voters, many of whom had sat out the 2012 election.

Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an outlet that has presented itself as a voice of the white nationalist alt-right movement, joked a day earlier as he sat down for a marquee event about how far he had come.

He used to hold a competing event called “Uninvited” for conservatives whose philosophies were considered too radical for the conference, Bannon said at a panel featuring him and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

Bannon reveled in his newfound influence as the conference organizer interviewed him in front of thousands of people.

He praised Priebus, the former GOP chairman, another indication of how the mainstream of the party has come into Trump’s fold. But both men made clear that Bannon was the dominant force in shaping Trump’s vision.

Bannon spoke about defending his notion of American culture and lashed out against the “corporatist, globalist media” standing in the way of Trump’s “economic nationalist agenda.”

“If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight," he said. "You are sadly mistaken.”

“We're at the top of the first inning of this,” Bannon said near the end of his remarks. “We want you to have our back.”

Conference organizers seemed to have gotten the message.

Breitbart News owns the first booth by the entrance of the convention hall, hawking “Border Wall Construction Company” T-shirts...

Keep reading.

What Comes After Hegemony?

A great piece, from Michael J. Mazarr, at Foreign Affairs, "The Once and Future Order":

What comes after American hegemony? https://t.co/DRA82dsfDF

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) February 7, 2017

The postwar liberal order has proved remarkably stable. But it has always incorporated two distinct and not necessarily reconcilable visions. One is a narrow, cautious view of the UN and the core international financial institutions as guardians of sovereign equality, territorial inviolability, and a limited degree of free trade. The other is a more ambitious agenda: protecting human rights, fostering democratic political systems, promoting free-market economic reforms, and encouraging good governance.

Until recently, the tension between these two visions did not pose a serious problem. For many decades, the Cold War allowed the United States and its allies to gloss over the gap in the name of upholding a unified front against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington fully embraced the more ambitious approach by expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep; intervening to protect human rights in places such as the Balkans and Libya; supporting uprisings, at least rhetorically, in the name of democracy in countries including Egypt, Georgia, and Myanmar; and applying increasingly sophisticated economic sanctions to illiberal governments. In the newly unipolar international system, Washington often behaved as if the narrower concept of order had been superseded by the more ambitious one.

At the same time, the United States often took advantage of its preeminence to sidestep the order’s rules and institutions when it found them inconvenient. The problem with this approach, of course, is that international orders gain much of their potency by defining the sources of prestige and status within the system, such as participation in and leadership of international institutions. Their stability depends on leading members abiding—and being seen to abide—by key norms of behavior. When the leader of an order consistently appears to others to interpret the rules as it sees fit, the legitimacy of the system is undermined and other countries come to believe that the order offends, rather than sustains, their dignity.

An extreme version of this occurred in the 1930s, when a series of perceived insults convinced Japan—once a strong supporter of the League of Nations—that the system was a racist, Anglo-American cabal designed to emasculate it. Partly as a result, Japan withdrew from the league and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy before entering World War II. Today, a similar story is playing out as some countries see the United States as applying norms selectively and in its own favor, norms that are already tailored to U.S. interests. This is persuading them that the system’s main function is to validate the United States’ status and prestige at the expense of their own.

For years now, a number of countries, including Brazil, India, South Africa, and Turkey, have found various ways to express their frustration with the current rules. But China and Russia have become the two most important dissenters. These two countries view the order very differently and have divergent ambitions and strategies. Yet their broad complaints have much in common. Both countries feel disenfranchised by a U.S.-dominated system that imposes strict conditions on their participation and, they believe, menaces their regimes by promoting democracy. And both countries have called for fundamental reforms to make the order less imperial and more pluralistic.

Russian officials are particularly disillusioned. They believe that they made an honest effort to join Western-led institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union but were spurned by the West, which subjected them to a long series of insults: NATO’s attacks on Serbia in the Balkan wars of the 1990s; NATO enlargement into eastern Europe; and Western support for “color revolutions” in the early years of the new century, which threatened or in some cases actually overthrew Russian-backed leaders in several eastern European countries. In a June 2016 speech to Russian diplomats, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained that certain Western states “continue stubborn attempts to retain their monopoly on geopolitical domination,” arguing that this was leading to a “confrontation between different visions of how to build the global governance mechanisms in the 21st century.” And Putin hasn’t just limited himself to complaining. In recent years, Russia has taken a number of dramatic, sometimes violent steps—especially in Europe—to weaken the U.S.-led order.

China also feels disrespected. The financial crisis at the end of the last decade convinced many Chinese that the West had entered a period of rapid decline and that China deserved a more powerful voice in the international system. Since then, Beijing has increased its influence in several institutions, including the IMF and the World Bank. But the changes have not gone far enough for many Chinese leaders. They still chafe at Western domination of these bodies, perceive U.S. democracy promotion as a threat, and resent the regional network of U.S. alliances that surrounds China. Beijing has thus undertaken a range of economic initiatives to gain more influence within the current order, including increasing its development aid and founding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which it clearly intends to compete with the IMF and the World Bank. China has also pursued its interests in defiance of global norms by building islands in contested international waters and harassing U.S. aircraft in the South China Sea.

Worrisome as these developments are, it is important not to exaggerate the threats they represent. Neither China nor Russia has declared itself an enemy of the postwar order (although Russia is certainly moving in that direction). Both continue to praise the core UN system and participate actively in a host of institutions, treaties, and diplomatic processes. Indeed, China has worked hard to embed itself ever more firmly in the current order. In a 2015 speech in Seattle, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that “China has been a participant, builder, and contributor” in, of, and to the system and that it stood “firmly for the international order” based on the purposes and principles outlined in the UN Charter. China and Russia both rely on cross-border trade, international energy markets, and global information networks—all of which depend heavily on international rules and institutions. And at least for the time being, neither country seems anxious to challenge the order militarily.

Many major countries, including China and Russia, are groping toward roles appropriate to their growing power in a rapidly evolving international system. If that system is going to persevere, their grievances and ambitions must be accommodated. This will require a more flexible, pluralistic approach to institutions, rules, and norms...

Still more.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's the author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which I've got on my reading list.

She's got an interesting interview, at ISR, "A Sense of Hope & the Possibility of Solidarity." She's a full-blown, unabashed revolutionary Marxist. Remember, my motto is "know your enemies." I'm constantly surrounded by people just like this at my college, and lots of students suck this stuff up like so many ganja fat ones:

The struggles of Indigenous people have a rich history, and really came together in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s with other movements for liberation. In your books, it’s clear you are making the connection between land dispossession, labor, and class—basically Marx’s approach of historical materialism. You even quoted Marx from Capital in the beginning of chapter two, entitled “Culture of Conquest.” Why is this approach important to struggles for liberation?

I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology.4 He didn’t know much about non-European peoples, yet making generalities about the whole world can seem imperialist. However, I found out when I was doing my dissertation, that using Marxism to look at the history of land tenure in New Mexico at different stages from Spanish colonization through US conquest and colonization was essential. Marx describes the initial looting of the Americas as reckless abandon, as well as the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of Native Americans, and this describes the initial Spanish invasion and occupation of New Mexico, which led to the All Indian Pueblo Revolt driving the Spanish colonists out for more than a decade.5 The second period of eighteenth-century Spanish colonialism was far more of a negotiated relationship. It was still colonialism but it wasn’t the most vicious kind, and the Spanish army was there to defend that zone from French and British expansion.6

Through the history of Mexico becoming independent and then New Mexico being taken by the US, I tried to look at capitalist development and to link this with imperialism. I read all kinds of things from Marx and participated in Marxist study groups. At the time I hadn’t done a real study of Capital. I started reading about Oriental despotism, and Marx’s analysis of how the pyramids were built. These grand public works were built by forced labor, and I connected that to what I was seeing in precolonial Indigenous New Mexico—they had elaborate irrigation systems, which were also throughout Mexico and Central America. You have almost a dictatorship to control water, but the way Indigenous peoples organized it was with serial dictatorships. The ditch boss would be elected for one year and had total control of the water in each pueblo. These ninety-eight city-states along the Rio Grande and its tributaries also went to war with each other periodically over water, so it could be very serious. They could starve as a result of being in the desert. With the water supply, they had an absolute autocratic ditch boss and everyone had to contribute labor. There wasn’t a class of laborers, and after a year the ditch boss could never again be in that position. It had to change every year so that they didn’t get used to the power.

This history shows how people can organize themselves in different ways; capitalism and exploitative labor were not inevitable in human history. Just because capitalism came to dominate the world through European and United States imperialism, forcing the world to live under capitalism does not mean it was inevitable. We need to build upon Marx’s brilliant comprehension of how capitalism arose in Europe and how it works. But the social and political systems that produced ancient irrigation systems and widespread agricultural production in the Americas were not despotic.7 It has been said the beginning of the class system started in ancient Egypt, but I found things that didn’t fit that mold. I tried to apply the basic tenets of Marxism and especially what is known as “primitive accumulation”.

I want to mention here that there are a lot of words Marx used that should be retranslated. For instance regarding primitive accumulation, it’s just easy to say “primary” or “higher” but Marxists don’t know what you’re talking about unless you say primitive. In other languages, primitive means primary.8 It doesn’t necessarily have the baggage that the word “primitive” does for Indigenous peoples subjected to European ethnography. It became clear to me while working on my thesis that the first big onslaught of the primitive accumulationprocess that set off capitalist development happens over and over again, even today. This has entered into a part of Native studies with Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks, in which he makes that argument.9 Coulthard identifies with the anarchist tendency, but he takes on Ward Churchill’s piece in Marxism and Native Americans.10 Coulthard says it’s ridiculous to not use such an important tool as Marx’s work.

In all my work, I try to apply historical materialism. However, I don’t think any of the original Marxists and following generations of European Marxists dealt with colonialism as the avatar of capitalism. Lenin theorized imperialism, but he dealt with it in the most technical way of financial capital, which is really important. And he did deal with national liberation. But I don’t think Marx or Lenin even began to understand the role the US was playing throughout the nineteenth century as the vortex of capitalism, and what I try to show is that from the very beginning the United States was based on colonial conquest, and on overseas imperialism following their independence from the British Empire.

*****

We’ve been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is European, you miss the point of the theory. People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers.

I worked hard on the first chapter of my book about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.”

This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark, but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs.

Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?

Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism. In settler colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today.

I want to make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience. Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.

It’s inaccurate to speak, for instance, of “the California Indians.” The eighteenth-century Spanish colonization of the coastal region from San Diego to San Francisco was carried out by Franciscan missionaries with the use of the Spanish army in seizing people in the whole region to be incarcerated in the missions, and to work for the missionaries in their commercial pursuits. So these weren’t typical settlers, but it was settler colonialism. On the other hand, the nearly half of California north of San Francisco was not colonized until the United States confiscated the northern part of what had become Mexico, and the rush of settlers arrived as gold seekers with the 1850s gold rush. These were not typical settlers either, combining extraction with genocide.

Colonialism in general is disruptive, destructive, damaging, sometimes depopulating entire areas, such as the Natchez villagers of the Mississippi Delta, and the Nahuatl-speaking villagers of western Nicaragua and western Honduras who were seized by Spanish slave traders in the sixteenth century, then transported to work in the mines of Peru. European settlers didn’t arrive to those nearly depopulated areas until later. This was similar to the way villagers of West Africa were captured, enslaved, and sold in the Americas, losing their existence as particular nations and peoples.

I would say that settler colonialism was an exceptional mode of colonialism. English settler colonialism in the North American colonies took its specific form from the mid-seventeenth-century English conquest of Ireland, in which English forces under Oliver Cromwell drove subsistent Irish farmers off their land and gave land grants to English and Scottish settlers. The developing English capitalism based in the wool industry required surplus labor to work in the factories, as well as large swaths of grazing land for commercial sheep production. The process of fencing the commons and driving English farmers off the land created that surplus labor force, but also a pool of settlers who were promised free land in America. The Protestant Anglos and Scots, who settled Northern Ireland, made up the majority of frontier settlers in the British North American colonies.

The Portuguese and the Spanish were specifically seeking gold and silver. Their hoarding of gold and silver actually limited their ability to develop capitalism. They didn’t really have a basis for that in the Iberian Peninsula after they deported all the farmers, craftsmen, architects, and other producers who were Muslims and Jews. Only in the eighteenth century did Spain begin establishing settler-colonies in the southern cone of South America, employing the same genocidal methods of eliminating or driving out the Indigenous peoples, which continued when Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became independent.

However, only the United States developed effective capitalism outside of Britain. By 1840, it was already the largest economic power in the world on the basis of the global cotton trade and textile factories, also providing cotton to the British textile industry. Until recently, economic historians have dated the development of US capitalism to post–Civil War industrialization in the North. Several recent books have convincingly made the case for the cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley being the site of the birth of full-blown capitalism prior to the Civil War, based on slave labor and the capital generated by the value of the slaves’ bodies.13 This development included the parallel expulsion of the five large Native agricultural nations from the Southeast during the 1830s and 1840s, generating huge amounts of capital in land sales.

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Obama says goodbye to a nation he despises":

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief | Frontpage Mag https://t.co/ChVLU6vMsf

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) January 11, 2017

President Barack Hussein Obama bid farewell last night to the nation he despises in what was, for him, a mercifully brief speech.

“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” he said in all apparent seriousness.

After sending aid and comfort to an Islamic supremacist dictator in Egypt, he falsely claimed to have pulled the rug out from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The Nobel Peace Prize winner left out how his illegal war destabilized Libya and the fact that the U.S. military deeply distrusts him.

He pretended the economy is going gangbusters while leaving out the fact that nine days away from his departure from the Oval Office, his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, is collapsing as insurers run away from the so-called insurance exchanges. He acted as if fighting alleged manmade global warming was more important than just about everything.

It some ways it wasn’t much different than the warm and fuzzy victory speech the Divider-in-Chief gave in Chicago in 2008, except in this speech he got to lie about his record while throwing in cheap shots against his critics and the incoming president. (A transcript of Obama’s final great oratorical atrocity is available here.)

In a forum resplendent with the echo-acoustics our megalomaniacal president prefers, the pathologically dishonest Obama tried last night to cast himself as a unifying figure:

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud title, the most important office in a democracy: Citizen. Citizen.

So you see that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

A life form that just arrived from Alpha Centauri might have been moved as Obama tried to whitewash the unmitigated catastrophe his presidency has been.

Deploying all the usual tired old left-wing smears against conservatives, the lawless 44th president recited a long series of America-boosting sayings most of which he has never believed in. He said nice things about the dead white men much-derided by the Left whom we call the Founding Fathers, along with the government-restraining Constitution he has spent so much of his life spitting on. With a straight face this despotic destroyer of the rule of law called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”

Of course Chicago was an appropriate locale for the goodbye address. It’s a violent one-party city that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. He gave the speech at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago, not too far from storied Hyde Park and the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.

The Windy City is where community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings on tactics deeply influenced Obama, learned his craft from the Al Capone crime gang. Obama got his start in nasty Alinsky-style community organizing with the assistance of groups like the Developing Communities Project, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Chicago is where young Obama cut his organizing teeth running the successful get-out-the-vote drive for ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992 that elected the awful one-term senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. She was a friend of Communist Cuba and African dictators who worked closely with agitator Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA, all of which Obama welcomed into his political coalition.

Chicago is where the half-black Obama whose purported father was from Kenya learned to portray himself as what the Left calls “authentically” black, soaking up vile racist hatred while sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s sinister Nation of Islam-like church.

Chicago is where unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn launched his career in electoral politics by hosting a living room fundraiser for his Illinois State Senate campaign. Although his presidential campaign vehemently denied Obama was close to Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader admitted years later that “we served on a couple of boards together.” Chicago is also where Michelle Obama worked at the same law firm as Dohrn.

Giving the speech in Chicago was also appropriate on a symbolic level. Chicago (like Detroit) epitomizes Obama’s failed, bankrupt left-wing ideology, and lack of leadership...

Still more.

Senator Sessions Isn’t a Racist, His Left-Wing Accusers Are

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "They’re coming for Sessions":

They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.

The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.

A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.

But it gets worse.

There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.

I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”

The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.

You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”

Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama's first black tax assessor, who said, "The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law."

Then under "Association with White Nationalist and Hate Groups," the letter, which seems to thrive on parading its own stupidity around, proves that Sessions must be a bigot because he had received awards from the "David Horowitz Freedom Center and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."

Sessions was honored by the Center for Security Policy at the Smithsonian Postal Museum with its Keeper of the Flame award, which recognizes “those individuals who devote their public careers to the propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world.”

Past recipients have included Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Garry Kasparov and Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps the Conference could specify which white nationalist hate group Lieberman and Kasparov belonged to.

Senator Sessions received the Annie Taylor Award from the Freedom Center in 2014. The next year’s recipient would go on to be African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

It’s unknown which white nationalist hate group Clarke belongs to. Perhaps the Conference could ask the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose inept smear of Sessions it appears to have relied on, to tell them.

The Annie Taylor Award has gone to Iranian dissident Amir Fakhravar, journalist Oriana Fallaci, Baroness Caroline Cox and Democratic Senator Zell Miller. But perhaps the most notorious white supremacist to receive the award was Ward Connerly, the African-American chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.

As smear campaigns go, the Conference’s letter is laughably terrible.

“Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity,” it claims. That’s quite a claim and it isn’t backed up.  If Sessions had spent the last 30 years going around shouting racial slurs, you would think that there would be more evidence of that to present in the left’s poison pen letters.

The Conference insists that the Attorney General has to be approved of by “every member of the public”. If that were the case, we couldn’t get a single Attorney General approved.

It states that Sessions supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder raises questions about his fitness. Is the Conference really demanding an Attorney General who won’t uphold Supreme Court decisions?

The Conference’s letter is short on facts and heavy on innuendo. It’s clueless about its own charges. And mostly it opposes Sessions because he doesn’t agree with its radical policy agenda. The letter accuses him of opposing illegal alien amnesty and being skeptical about Global Warming which, according to the letter, “disproportionately affect low-income families and communities of color.”

World ends. Minorities hardest hit.

Further evidence of Sessions’ unfitness is found in that he voted to defund Planned Parenthood, opposed a push for Green Energy and Obama’s pardons for drug dealers. In short, he’s guilty of being a conservative Republican, not a radical leftist.

That’s really why the Leadership Conference opposes him, but it can’t come out and say so. The failed effort to smear Sessions as a racist isn’t about his record; it’s about blocking anyone on the right while cynically abusing a serious accusation for partisan political gain. No one who knows Sessions, including one of the accusers who serves as the basis for many of these smears, believes that he is a racist.

Furthermore the accusations are coming from actual racists like La Raza and the ADC. The ADC honored Helen Thomas after she called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. It was where Ralph Nader insisted that, “Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” The Leadership Conference shows no signs of having a problem with any of this.

Senator Sessions isn’t a racist. His accusers are.

#CrookedHillary's Inescapable Cloud of Corruption

Following-up, "#CrookedHillary: State Department Access Granted to Clinton Foundation Donors (VIDEO)."

From Lisa Boothe, at the Washington Examiner, "Clinton's Inescapable Cloud of Corruption":

While many in the media have declared the presidential election all but over, damning accusations of pay to play at the Clinton Foundation and reports that the FBI found 15,000 work-related documents that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over represent the political land mines that still lie between her and the presidency. Multiple ongoing Freedom of Information Act civil suits, perjury allegations, an IRS probe and alleged joint U.S. Attorney-FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation represent the inescapable cloud of corruption that could be the Democratic nominee's undoing.

As the drip, drip, drip of information highlighting the intersection between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department surfaces, the political fallout for Hillary Clinton is unavoidable. The newly exposed emails demonstrate another lie told by the Clinton campaign. Despite her lawyers stating that only 30,000 emails on her server were related to work, the 15,000 puts that number closer to 45,000. But more importantly, it paints a clearer picture of what Hillary Clinton was attempting to hide by setting up private servers in the first place and attempting to wipe them clean.

What is particularly troubling for Clinton is that liberal publications like the Huffington Post and Boston Globe are calling for the Clinton Foundation to shut down. The calls will undoubtedly grow louder as reports continue to expose the overlap between top foreign donors to the foundation and the access it gained them to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That access puts into question the impartiality of the decisions Secretary Clinton made while in office and the potential conflicts of interest she would be confronted with as commander in chief. The Wall Street Journal has reported that "At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation." And according to the Associated Press, 55 percent of Clinton's meetings and calls with people outside of the government were donors to the Clinton Foundation.

More than 40 percent of the Clinton Foundation's top donors are based in foreign countries, prompting the Washington Post to write, "Rarely, if ever, has a potential commander in chief been so closely associated with an organization that has solicited financial support from foreign governments." Many of those foreign governments have a history of human rights abuses. It is estimated the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries.

Emails recently released by Judicial Watch and reports by Fox News demonstrate the close level of communication between State Department and Clinton Foundation officials. Judicial Watch recently released 725 pages of State Department documents showing coordination between Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin and Douglas Band, a former longtime aide of President Bill Clinton and employee of the Clinton Foundation, who worked together to grant access to then-Secretary Clinton for high-dollar donors like Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain.

After failing to set up a meeting with the secretary of state through State Department channels, Salman, who contributed $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, went through the Clinton Foundation and successfully set up a meeting 48 hours later...

That's the best summary and analysis of this so far.

Keep reading.

A Defense Strategy for the New Administration

From Mac Thornberry and Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., at Foreign Affairs, "Preserving Primacy":

Should the United States fail to protect the global commons, no like-minded power will take its place. https://t.co/Kdh1RRWAIX

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 18, 2016

The next U.S. president will inherit a security environment in which the United States con­fronts mounting threats with increasingly constrained resources, diminished stature, and growing uncertainty both at home and abroad over its willingness to protect its friends and its interests. Revisionist powers in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf—three regions long considered by both Democratic and Republican administrations to be vital to U.S. national security—are seeking to overturn the rules-based international order. In Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized Crimea, waged proxy warfare in eastern Ukraine, and threatened NATO allies on Russia’s periphery. Further demonstrating its newfound assertiveness, Russia has dispatched forces to Syria and strength­ened its nuclear arsenal. After a failed attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow, U.S. President Barack Obama has issued stern warnings and imposed economic sanctions, but these have done little to deter Putin.

Nor has the administration’s “pivot” to Asia, now five years on, been matched by effective action. China continues to ramp up its military spending, investing heavily in weapons systems designed to threaten U.S. forces in the western Pacific. As a result, it is proving increas­ingly willing and able to advance its expansive territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas. Not content to resolve its disputes through diplomacy, Beijing has militarized them, building bases on natural and artificially created islands. The United States has failed to respond vigorously to these provocations, causing allies to question its willingness to meet its long-standing security commitments.

The lack of U.S. leadership is also fueling instability in the Middle East. In Iraq, the Obama administration forfeited hard-won gains by withdrawing all U.S. forces, creating a security vacuum that enabled the rise of both Iranian influence and the Islamic State, or ISIS. Adding to its strategic missteps, the administration fundamentally misread the character of the Arab Spring, failing to appreciate that the uprisings would provide opportunities for radical Islamist elements rather than lead to a new democratic order. The administration also failed to learn from the previous administration’s experience in Iraq when it chose to “lead from behind” in Libya, intervening to over­throw Muammar al-Qaddafi, only to declare victory and abandon the country to internal disorder. It then drew a “redline” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria but failed to act to enforce it. The result is growing instability in the Middle East and a decline in U.S. influence.

The threat of Islamist terrorism has grown on the Obama administration’s watch. Al Qaeda and ISIS, both Sunni groups, have gained new footholds in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and even West Africa. Obama’s negotiations with Iran, the home of radical Shiite Islamism, have not curbed the country’s involvement in proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen or its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. What the talks did produce—the nuclear deal—may slow Tehran’s march to ob­taining a nuclear weapon, but it also gives the regime access to tens of billions of dollars in formerly frozen assets. The ink on the agreement was barely dry when, in March, Tehran tested ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, in blatant defiance of a UN Security Council resolution. Adding to all this instability, military competition has expanded into the relatively new domains of outer space and cyberspace—and will eventually extend to undersea economic infrastructure, as well.

With the current approach failing, the next president will need to formulate a new defense strategy. It should include three basic elements: a clear statement of what the United States seeks to achieve, an understanding of the resources available for those goals, and guidance as to how those resources will be used. The strategy laid out here, if properly implemented, will allow the United States to preclude the rise of a hegemonic power along the Eurasian periphery and preserve access to the global commons—without bankrupting the country in the process...

Sounds great.

Frankly, I'm not worried about the U.S. maintaining its material preponderance, even with China supposedly "catching up."

It's that we need robust, non-politically correct leadership. Global preponderance is a state of mind as well as an objective reality. I'd argue that President Barack Hussein wanted to chop the U.S. down to size, to attack U.S. global hegemony at home, for ideological reasons. He's still doing with his appeasement and apology tours.

America will lead again, in both word and power. It's just a matter of the political dynamics. A Hillary Clinton administration's just going to be four more years of Obama's failed policies. But the pendulum is going to swing back to American exceptionalism at some point. Of that I remain optimistic.

But keep reading, in any case.

Democrats Are Using Khizr Khan to Advance the Cause of Global Islamic Jihad

Following-up from earlier, "Kizhr Khan Khantroversy Nontroversy."

From Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, "Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma":

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump.” Trump responded, elevating Khizr Khan to the status of full-fledged flavor-of-the-moment media celebrity. There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today -- are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes,” killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

Other than those attacks, a Muslim in the U.S. Navy discussed sniper attacks on military personnel. A Muslim U.S. naval engineer allegedly gave an Egyptian agent information on how to sink a U.S. carrier. In 2015, a Muslim National Guard soldier in Illinois planned an Islamic State jihad attack against a U.S. military base. Last February, a U.S. Army enlistee who vowed to “bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep” pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas. Just days ago, a U.S. Air Force veteran was convicted of trying to join the Islamic State.

Then there is the U.S. Muslim who gave the Islamic State U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, firearms accessories, and thousands in cash. Where are those uniforms now?

It is good that there are Muslims in the U.S. military who are loyal. But can we have a discussion about those who aren’t, and why they aren’t, and what can be done about it? Such a discussion is vitally necessary, but it wouldn’t serve the classic objective of the global umma, to increase the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) at the dar al-harb (house of war). Nor would an open discussion of Khan’s Sunday morning assertion on Meet the Press that terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam.”

We constantly are told this, but the repetition doesn’t make it true. In the first place, jihadis repeatedly make clear that they think what they’re doing has everything to do with Islam:

“Jihad was a way of life for the Pious Predecessors (Salaf-us-Salih), and the Prophet (SAWS) was a master of the Mujahideen and a model for fortunate inexperienced people. The total number of military excursions which he (SAWS) accompanied was 27. He himself fought in nine of these; namely Badr; Uhud, Al-Muraysi, The Trench, Qurayzah, Khaybar, The Conquest of Makkah, Hunayn and Taif . . . This means that the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used to go out on military expeditions or send out an army at least every two months.” — Abdullah Azzam, co-founder of al-Qaeda, Join the Caravan, p. 30

“If we follow the rules of interpretation developed from the classical science of Koranic interpretation, it is not possible to condemn terrorism in religious terms. It remains completely true to the classical rules in its evolution of sanctity for its own justification. This is where the secret of its theological strength lies.” — Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

“Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion.” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 defendants

“Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” — Taliban terrorist Baitullah Mehsud

“Jihad, holy fighting in Allah’s course, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam….By jihad, Islam is established….By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim.” — Times Square car bomb terrorist Faisal Shahzad

“So step by step I became a religiously devout Muslim, Mujahid — meaning one who participates in jihad.” — Little Rock, Arkansas terrorist murderer Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad

“And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.” — Texas terrorist bomber Khalid Aldawsari

All of these, of course, may be dismissed as “extremists,” although they were also all devout Muslims who were determined to follow their religion properly. And then there are the many passages of the Qur’an exhorting Muslims to commit acts of violence:

2:191-193: “And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.”

4:89: “They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper.”

Still more.

Two Party Conventions Showcase America's Stark Political Polarization

This is good.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Two conventions, one vast gulf: Republicans and Democrats appear to be speaking to different countries":

One night this week, the Democratic convention featured eight black women whose children had died in shootings or at the hands of police. A week earlier, Republicans repeatedly paid tribute to law enforcement.

In Philadelphia, the billionaire global warming activist Tom Steyer was ubiquitous. In Cleveland, Republicans put a spotlight on the plight of out-of-work miners and pledged to increase use of coal.

A speaker needing applause at a Democratic convention can always praise teachers. Republicans can reliably criticize public employee unions.

As the themes and tableaus of the parties’ conventions illustrated, a deep political gulf separates the country’s two major parties, their elected officials and their most reliable voters. And it is getting wider. Voters not only disagree on solutions to the nation’s ills, they hold starkly different views about what the problems are.

“Rarely in American history,” as Gov. Jerry Brown said here at the DNC, “have two parties diverged so profoundly.”

Both presidential nominees now face the question of whether either can bridge that divide — or whether they even want to try. Each entered the convention weeks with  a strategic choice: Does the path toward victory involve reinforcing party loyalty in hopes of driving more on your side to vote? Or does winning require reaching across the tribal lines of American politics?

In Cleveland, Donald Trump placed a clear bet on the former path. Nearly every element of the Republican convention played to the anxieties and frustrations of the older white conservative voters who form the core of the GOP coalition.

His campaign strategists believe they can do better than the last two GOP nominees in motivating those voters to the polls. They’re also counting on Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable image driving down turnout among Democratic-leaning groups, particularly young people and minorities, who may not back her as readily as they did President Obama.

Clinton confronted a more complicated calculus.

Her party has proved the strength of its electoral coalition — winning the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. But its voters have grown frustrated at the gridlock that has resulted from a divided political system.

Moreover, Trump’s powerful appeal to the economic unease — and the racial resentments — of blue-collar whites has accelerated the trend of such voters identifying with the GOP. To make up for potential losses among them, Democrats need to increase their vote among suburban, college-educated voters who in the past have often sided with Republicans.

“We're trying to bridge that gap, to try to make an argument that the politics of division are dangerous for our country,” Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, said at a meeting with reporters sponsored by the Wall Street Journal.

The Democratic convention, culminating in Clinton’s speech, reflected that imperative. With speakers like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and repeated descriptions of Trump as a dangerously unsteady authoritarian, they sought to make moderate, college-educated Republicans and Republican-leaning independents comfortable with the idea of crossing the line to vote for a Democrat.

Creating such inroads, however, is a tricky task...

More.

Hillary Clinton Expected to Choose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine for Veep

God, it's the year of the ultra-safe veep selections.

Clinton shoulda picked Warren. She's have declared war on the patriarchy and mollified the Bernie or Bust crowd.

At the New York Times, "Tim Kaine Seems Likely for Hillary Clinton’s No. 2, but Liberals Balk":

Tim Kaine may not be liberals’ first choice as Hillary Clinton’s No. 2 https://t.co/uRnRR8xC7q pic.twitter.com/CgSh9H1gyt

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) July 22, 2016

"One group is already disappointed at the prospect of Mr. Kaine on the Democratic ticket: liberals" @amychozick https://t.co/hdaxXHJvDT

— Michael Tackett (@tackettdc) July 21, 2016

Democrats close to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign signaled strongly Thursday that she would choose Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate, rounding out the ticket with a popular politician from a battleground state.

Both former President Bill Clinton and the White House have expressed their support for Mr. Kaine, but aides cautioned that Mrs. Clinton had not yet made a final decision and that other candidates were still under consideration.

Mrs. Clinton is widely expected to announce her choice in an email to supporters while on a campaign swing in Florida on Friday afternoon, an attempt to regain momentum the day after her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, accepted his party’s nomination in Cleveland. With Mr. Kaine emerging as a clear favorite, one group already expressed disappointment at the prospect of the former governor of Virginia joining the ticket: liberals.

Many of the groups that backed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his Democratic contest against Mrs. Clinton had hoped she would extend an olive branch to the liberal wing of the party and choose a vice-presidential candidate whose stances on Wall Street and global trade deals closely aligned with those of Mr. Sanders.

But with the Democratic National Convention beginning in Philadelphia on Monday, the prospects have dimmed for the two liberal senators who were being considered, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. That has led to more liberal scrutiny of Mr. Kaine’s record...

So bland. Yuck.

But hey, you don't want your veep showing you up.

Still more.

The World Crisis of Illiberalism

From Sohrab Ahmari, at Commentary, "Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis":

According to the bland conventional wisdom, Americans frustrated by the failure of the establishment to address issues like immigration and economic inequality have turned to an unlikely pair of political outsiders, a New York developer-turned-reality-TV-star and a Vermont socialist, to set things right. This account is true as far as it goes, but it is also hopelessly parochial and inadequate to the scope of the changes afoot. Trumpism (and Bernie Sanders-ism) are but the American symptoms of a global phenomenon: the astonishing rise of illiberal movements of the far right and far left.

As an ideology and as a governing philosophy, liberalism is fast losing ground. “Liberalism” here is understood not as the American shorthand for those who vote Democratic in the United States, but as the philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets that in theory is shared by the U.S. Republican Party and Scandinavian social democrats alike. As it fades, populism and identitarian politics of all kinds are gaining adherents nearly everywhere. Today’s illiberals are less likely to be organized around systematic philosophies like Fascism and Communism than was the case in the years between the two world wars—the last time liberalism appeared this vulnerable. In our time, illiberal forces are disparate, instinctual, inchoate, more likely to be local in focus, and internally divided. Often various illiberalisms are locked in combat against one another.

Nevertheless there are common patterns that range vastly different geographies and political contexts, suggesting that this illiberal ascendance will be a defining feature of the 21st century. Welcome to Planet Trump...

Keep reading (via Instapundit).

And ICYMI: "'No Free Speech for Fascists!' — Leftist Extremists Launched Violent Attack at Sacramento Rally (VIDEO)."

Labour to Hold Vote of No-Confidence on Leader Jeremy Corbyn (VIDEO)

The best part of the Brexit vote is watching the left's global nuclear meltdown.

At Telegraph UK, "Labour crisis: Jeremy Corbyn sees 33 shadow ministers quit as new MP is told 'keep your phone on, you might be in the shadow cabinet by end of day'":

Jeremy Corbyn has lost more than half his Cabinet and seen more than 30 of his MPs revolt against his leadership over the last 48 hours.

Mr Corbyn has lost 20 of his 31 strong shadow cabinet and seen a further 13 shadow ministers resign this morning.

The rebels have criticised his performance in the EU referendum and he faces further resignations from the junior frontbench ranks amid fresh calls for him to stand down as leader.

Jeremy Corbyn's grip on the Labour leadership looked increasingly weak as Angela Eagle became the most senior member of his shadow cabinet to quit.

Shadow housing minister John Healey, shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy and shadow work and pensions secretary Owen Smith have all resigned - adding to the 12 shadow cabinet members Mr Corbyn lost on Sunday.

Sources said that Mr Corbyn will refuse to step down and will instead try and make public a planned secret vote on his future so that voters can see which MPs are trying to unseat him.

Mr Corbyn has been forced to promote a number of key allies as the revolt against his leadership intesnifies.

A number of the 2015 intake have joined the new shadow cabinet with just a year's experience on the job.

Late on Sunday evening Mr Corbyn issued a bullish statement and vowed to continue as leader despite the resignations. He said: "I am not going to betray the trust of those who voted for me – or the millions of supporters across the country who need Labour to represent them.

“Those who want to change Labour’s leadership will have to stand in a democratic election, in which I will be a candidate.

“Over the next 24 hours I will reshape my shadow cabinet and announce a new leadership team to take forward Labour’s campaign for a fairer Britain - and to get the best deal with Europe for our people.”

More.

And David Cameron's got a good sense of humor about things, considering.

Stop Underestimating Donald Trump

Who's underestimating him?

I'm certainly not.

Trump had a bad couple of weeks surrounding Judge Curiel and a bit from the political correctness following Orlando. But that "bad" couple of weeks is from the point of view of establishment analysts. Yeah, I thought myself he was hitting too hard on the judge, but terrorism's a winning issue for the GOP this year, and Trump's going to bring over disaffecteds and low-turnout constituencies. And it's not just going to be the "white working class." He's going to bring people out to the polls, and those could be minorities and former Democrats in leftist cosmopolitan enclaves. It's really new territory this year in terms of demographics, and a lot will depend on this issue of mobilization. Who comes out to vote? Apparently, younger people in Britain whined more than participated, and if we get an inkling of that kind of thing in November, I guarantee you it's going to hurt the left.

But see the establishment take from WaPo's, James Hohmann (via Althouse), "Stop underestimating Donald Trump. 'Brexit' vote shows why he can win":

The Daily 202 from @PowerPost https://t.co/fOTifEOhQF Stop Underestimating Trump

— Morgan Fairchild (@morgfair) June 24, 2016

Britain's stunning vote to leave the European Union suggests that we've been seriously underestimating Donald Trump's ability to win the presidential election.

When you consider all his controversies and self-inflicted wounds over the past month, combined with how much he's getting outspent on the airwaves in the battleground states, it is actually quite surprising that Trump and Hillary Clinton are so close in the polls. He's holding his own, especially in the Rust Belt.

The British campaign to exit the European Union (known as "Brexit"), like Trump's, was fueled by grievance. Those agitating to cut off formal ties to the continent were less organized and less funded than those who wanted to stay connected, but that deficit didn't matter in the end, because the energy was against the status quo.

"Basically, they took back their country. That's a great thing," Trump told reporters in Scotland, where he is visiting one of his golf courses.

"They have declared their independence from the European Union and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy," he elaborated in a statement. "Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first. They will have the chance to reject today's rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people. I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again."

In the short term, the impending fallout from Brexit will make the presumptive Democratic nominee look good. She advocated for Britain remaining in the union; Trump advocated for leaving. The markets were tanking Friday, and this vote will set off a tsunami of repercussions that could meaningfully damage the global economy. People's 401(k)'s might take a shellacking, and interest rates may spike. Any long-term benefits from breaking away will not be apparent until after the general election.

British Prime Minister David Cameron resigned overnight, triggering political chaos and a succession battle. Scottish leaders are already saying they will push for a new referendum to secede from the U.K.

Looking ahead to the fall, though, loud alarm bells should be going off inside Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters. Globally, there are strong tides of anti-establishment anger, nationalism and populism that bode poorly for the Secretary of State.

"Trump's slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' could easily have been adapted to the messaging of those in the 'leave' campaign," the Washington Post's Dan Balz writes from London. "That desire for a return to an earlier time - to make Britain great again - is expressed through the issue of control. Those who have pushed for Britain to leave the EU want to reclaim a measure of sovereignty by wresting power from the bureaucrats in Brussels. . . . They feel about the EU bureaucracy as tea party Republicans do about the federal government."

Trump still seems far more likely to lose than win, especially when you think about the Electoral College map. But the results across the pond spotlight five forces that could allow him to score an upset:

1. RESENTMENT OF ELITES

... Polls show a long-term trend of voters losing faith in experts and institutions. Surveys suggested that the British resented Barack Obama and other foreign leaders who strongly urged them to remain in a union that they did not feel was serving them.

Forced to choose between their heads and their hearts, the Brits went with their hearts.

2. XENOPHOBIA

... There was a lot of media coverage in the past few days about how the nativist appeals might have gone too far and turned off some moderates in Britain. There were some over-the-top posters and claims about Turks and Syrians flooding the country. But they clearly proved more effective than detrimental...

3. ISOLATIONISM

... Trump wants to scale back U.S. support for NATO and has suggested that he sees Eastern Europe as some kind of Russian sphere of influence. This scares the Baltic States, such as Estonia, which are constantly at risk of being annexed by Vladimir Putin. The NATO alliance, like the EU, has been a bulwark of the post-World War II international system. This now threatens to unravel.

The EU is plunging into an existential crisis. The 28-member union will splinter and significantly weaken, The Post's Anthony Faiola reported from Berlin and Michael Birnbaum filed from Brussels...

4. FLAWED POLLING

The polls showed a neck-and-neck race, and surveys in the past few days showed movement in the direction of "Remain" after Cox's murder. In the end, though, "Leave" prevailed by 4 points...

5. COMPLACENCY

The Remain campaign was burdened by complacency.

Millennials, who overwhelmingly wanted to remain in the EU, did not turn out at the same rate as older voters, who wanted to leave...

As Tim Naftali, an esteemed political historian at NYU noted in two posts:

"Low turnout in Remain areas suggests unwarranted complacency. U.S. Dems beware."

See the whole post at the click-through.

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Following-up from previously, "Noam Chomsky: Today's Republican Party 'Is a Candidate for Most Dangerous Organization in Human History...' (VIDEO)"

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis – the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted "teach-ins" and rallies against America’s right to defend herself; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where "anti-globalist" anarchists have attacked the symbols of markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most likely this man.

There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation – a free, open, democratic society – and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.

For forty years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky’s demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the American dead, but for the "root causes" of the catastrophe that befell them.

One little pamphlet of Chomsky’s – What Uncle Sam Really Wants – has already sold 160,000 copies (1), but this represents only the tip of the Chomsky iceberg. His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a "rebel without a pause"). He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for political insight.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is "the most often cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." On the Web, there are more chat room references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10 times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. This is because Chomsky is also the political mentor of the academic left, the legions of Sixties radicals who have entrenched themselves in American universities to indoctrinate students in their anti-American creeds. The New York Times calls Chomsky "arguably the most important intellectual alive," and Rolling Stone – which otherwise does not even acknowledge the realm of the mind – "one of the most respected and influential intellectuals in the world."

In fact, Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult – as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. This cultic resonance is recognized by his followers. His most important devotee, David Barsamian, is an obscure public radio producer on KGNU in Boulder Colorado, who has created a library of Chomsky screeds on tape from interviews he conducted with the master, and has converted them into pamphlets and books as well. In the introduction to one such offering, Barsamian describes Chomsky’s power over his disciples: "Although decidedly secular, he is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our pundit, our imam, our sensei."

The theology that Chomsky preaches is Manichean, with America as its evil principle. For Chomsky no evil however great can exceed that of America, and America is also the cause of evil in others. This is the key to the mystery of September 11: The devil made them do it. In every one of the 150 shameful demonstrations that took place on America’s campuses on September 20, these were the twin themes of those who agitated to prevent America from taking up arms in her self-defense: America is responsible for the "root causes" of this criminal attack; America has done worse to others.

In his first statement on the terrorist attack, Chomsky’s response to Osama bin Laden’s calculated strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could attribute to former president Bill Clinton. Chomsky’s infamous September 12 statement "On the Bombings" began:

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).

Observe the syntax. The opening reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way, so that he can announce the real subject of his concern – America’s crimes. The accusation against Clinton is even slipped into the text, weasel fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the substantive message itself. It is a message that says: Look away, America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the injuries you have done to them. It is in this sleight of hand that Chomsky reveals his true gift, which is to make the victim, America, appear as an even more heinous perpetrator than the criminal himself. However bad this may seem, you have done worse.

In point of fact – and just for the record – however ill-conceived Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite – a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. Clinton’s missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when it was hit. The target was selected because the best information available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. Chomsky’s use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver, an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the anti-American dementia, which infuses everything he writes and says.

This same psychotic hatred shapes the "historical" perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate – and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla forces of "social justice" all over the world. This was the first time America itself – or as Chomsky put it the "national territory" – had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor doesn’t count in Chomsky’s calculus because Hawaii was a "colony" at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing, of course, in Chomsky’s eyes.

During these years [i.e., between 1812 and 1941], the US annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.

Listening to Chomsky, you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden’s strike on the World Trade Center.

If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who had been exposed to his propaganda – and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples – you too would be able to extend your outrage against America into the present.

*According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."
*According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."
*According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads."
* According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."
*According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing."
*According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust."
* In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

What decent, caring human being would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice?

According to Chomsky, what America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich. America’s crusade against Communism was actually a crusade "to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor."(9) That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against terrorism after the end of the Cold War:

Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift… New enemies have to be invented. It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’ – in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.

According to Chomsky, America is afraid of the success of Third World countries and does not want them to succeed on their own. Those who threaten to succeed like the Marxist governments of North Vietnam, Nicaragua and Grenada America regards as viruses. According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, "except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared [Communist] conquest – they were afraid of a positive example of successful development. "What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That’s basically the US strategy in the Third World.".

No wonder they want to bomb us.

Schooled in these big lies, taught to see America as Greed Incarnate and a political twin of the Third Reich, why wouldn’t young people – with no historical memory – come to believe that the danger ahead lies in Washington rather than Baghdad or Kabul?

It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe – his pathological hatred of his own country.

It would take volumes, however, to do this and there really is no need. Because every Chomsky argument exists to serve this end, a fact transparent in each offensive and preposterous claim he makes. Hence, the invidious comparison of Clinton’s misguided missile and the monstrous World Trade Center attack.

In fact the Trade Center and the Pentagon targets of the terrorists present a real political problem for American leftists, like Chomsky, who know better than to celebrate an event that is the almost predictable realization of their agitations and their dreams. The destroyed buildings are the very symbols of the American empire with which they have been at war for fifty years. In a memoir published on the eve of the attack, the 60s American terrorist Bill Ayers recorded his joy at striking one of these very targets: "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."(12) In the wake of September 11, Ayers – a "Distinguished Professor of Education[!] at the University of Illinois – had to feverishly backtrack and explain that these revealing sentiments of an "anti-war" leftist do not mean what they obviously do. Claiming to be "filled with horror and grief," Ayers attempted to reinterpret his terrorist years as an effort to explore his own struggle with "the intricate relationships between social justice, commitment and resistance."

Chomsky is so much Ayers’ superior at the lie direct that he works the same denial into his account of the World Trade Center bombing itself. Consider first the fact that the Trade Center is the very symbol of American capitalism and "globalization" that Chomsky and his radical comrades despise. It is Wall Street, its twin towers filled on that fateful day with bankers, brokers, international traders, and corporate lawyers – the hated men and women of the "ruling class," who – according to Chomsky – run the global order. The twin towers are the palace of the Great Satan himself. They are the belly of the beast, the object of Chomsky’s lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too cowardly to admit it. He knows that, in the hour of the nation’s grief, the fact itself is a third rail he must avoid. And so he dismisses the very meaning of the terrorists’ target in these words:

The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.

Chomsky’s deception which attempts to erase the victims who were not merely "janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc.," tells us more than we might care to know about his own standard of human concern.

That concern is exclusively reserved for the revolutionary forces of his Manichean vision, the Third World oppressed by American evil. Chomsky’s message to his disciples in this country, the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices, is a message of action and therefore needs to be attended to, even by those who will never read his rancid works. To those who believe his words of hate, Chomsky has this instruction:

The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.

This is the voice of the Fifth Column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, and what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky intend to give them.

In his address before Congress on September 19, President Bush reminded us: "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follw in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies."

President Bush was talking about the terrorists and their sponsors abroad. But he might just as well have been talking about their fifth column allies at home.

It’s time for Americans who love their country to stand up, and defend it.

BONUS: "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness."