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."

Open-Borders Money Backs Marco Rubio

Following-up from yesterday, "A National Security History Lesson for Marco Rubio."

From Michelle Malkin:

Political analysis of the Las Vegas debate immigration dust-up between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio is missing a key ingredient: the money factor.

You can read the lips of the candidates till the cows come home. But you’ll get to the truth much faster when you learn where pro-amnesty power brokers have placed their bets and hitched their wagons.

Rubio’s brazenly fraudulent campaign to paint Cruz as soft on illegal immigration is a flabbergasting attempt to distract from the Florida junior senator’s faithful allegiance to the open-borders donor class.

Here’s what you need to know:

Facebook, Microsoft and Silicon Valley back Marco Rubio. Mark Zuckerberg is a social justice CEO who panders to Hispanics with his pro-amnesty, anti-deportation advocacy; Facebook is an H-1B visa dependent company working hard to obliterate hurdles to hiring an unlimited stream of cheap foreign tech workers. It’s no coincidence that Facebook’s lobbying outfit, FWD.us, was waging war on Sen. Cruz online this week in parallel with Sen. Rubio’s disingenuous onstage attack.

The D.C. front group, which Zuckerberg seeded in 2013 with nearly $40 million during the Gang of Eight fight, has consistently provided political protection for Rubio as he carried their legislative water.

FWD.us’s GOP subsidiary, “Americans for a Conservative Direction,” showered Rubio and pro-illegal alien amnesty Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., with millions of dollars in media ad buys. The group also funded a deceptive, $150,000 ad campaign for immigration sellout Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., which falsely claimed she opposed amnesty to help her fend off a primary challenge. In all, FWD.us spent an estimated $5 million on TV and radio spots in more than 100 GOP districts before the Senate passed the Gang of Eight bill in June 2013.

Zuckerberg personally donated to Rubio, as have pro-H-1B expansionist Silicon Valley CEOs from Oracle, Cisco and Seagate. Microsoft, founded by leading H-1B/amnesty cheerleader Bill Gates, has been Rubio’s No. 2 corporate donor the past five years.

Paul Singer backs Marco Rubio. The hedge fund billionaire announced his support for Rubio in October. Amnesty is and always has been a top agenda item for Singer, who helped fund the National Immigration Forum along with fellow hedge fund billionaire George Soros. NIF propped up a faux “grass-roots” initiative of religious conservatives, dubbed the Evangelical Immigration Table, to lobby for the Gang of Eight.

NIF was founded by far-left attorney Rick Swartz, who opposes tracking/deporting visa overstayers and opposes employer sanctions against companies that violated immigration laws. Swartz also served as an advisor to Microsoft.

The Singer/Soros-funded NIF helped sabotage the Immigration Act of 1990, which was intended to impose modest restrictions on immigration, and turned it into “one of the most expansionist immigration bills ever passed,” as one expert put it. On Capitol Hill, Swartz worked closely with immigration expansionist Sen. Spencer Abraham’s legislative director Cesar Conda and Sen. Sam Brownback’s legislative director (now GOP House speaker) Paul Ryan—-who is busy this holiday season fronting an omnibus bill that will open the floodgates to 250,000 unskilled foreign guest workers.

Side note: Beltway establishment fixture Conda previously worked for the pro-amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and mentored Ryan from the age of 19. Conda guided newbie Rubio as his Senate chief of staff from 2011-2014 and remains his powerful immigration Svengali behind closed doors.

Rove/Bush-tied front groups back Marco Rubio. The American Action Network is a Big Business GOP lobbying organization led by former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and co-founded with John McCain adviser/fundraiser Fred Malek. AAN shares [clarification: shared] its offices with amnesty peddler Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in D.C. AAN’s “action arm,” the American Action Forum, was founded in February 2010 and proceeded to spend a whopping $25 million to attack conservatives who opposed amnesty. [Correction: AAN embarked on the anti-conservative spending campaign.] Jeb Bush sat on the AAF board.

In 2013, the group dumped more than $750,000 into primetime, Fox News Channel ad buys pushing the Gang of Eight immigration bill, including $100,000 in ads to support leading GOP voices for amnesty, including, you guessed it, Sen. Marco Rubio.

Open-borders Democrats love Marco Rubio. As Sen. Schumer brayed last month: Rubio “was not only totally committed, he was in that room with us. His fingerprints are all over” the Gang of Eight monstrosity. Indeed, Sens. Durbin and Rubio plotted strategy during early morning workout sessions at the Senate gym.

Rubio hired Enrique Gonzalez, a Democratic donor and partner with the global immigration law firm, Fragomen Del Rey, to be his chief adviser on the bill. Gonzalez specializes in obtaining H-1B guest worker visas (tripled in the Gang of Eight bill) and EB-5 visas for wealthy foreign investors. After the bill passed, Gonzalez returned to his law firm as managing partner of the Florida office, where he brags about his role as Rubio’s “special counsel” and “principal advisor/negotiator”—read: bill writer.
Bottom line?

Cruz kept his promise to voters. He voted against the Gang of Eight giveaway. Period.

Rubio broke his promise: He paid lip service to border security and the American Dream, while scheming with Sens. Schumer and Durbin on the 180,000-word, 1,200-page Christmas tree for Big Biz, Big Tech and ethnic lobbyists.

Rubio didn’t just vote for the bill. He and his staff were integral to crafting it, shilling for it, and cashing in on the legislative boondoggle dubbed a “permanent pension plan for immigration lawyers.”

When you need the truth about which Beltway crapweasels are selling out America, always follow the money.

The Bleak Reality Driving Trump's Rise

Well, it's particularly bleak if you're a leftist. Democrats are going to get hammered.

From William Galston, at WSJ, "Workers with low or middle incomes sense a deep and alarming economic shift":

Elections are about more than counting votes. They reveal peoples to themselves. They are democracy’s mirror. And what we see is often disconcerting.

In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.

Throughout the West, democratic governments are struggling to maintain a postwar order premised on prosperity and economic security. Since the onset of the Great Recession, established center-right and center-left parties have failed to meet that test, opening the door to the far left and the populist right. From Hungary to France to Poland (long regarded as the poster-child for postcommunist democratization), illiberal populism is on the rise.

Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.

Beneath the dry statistics of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that future emerging. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.

Few Americans know these statistics, but most of them are living the reality they represent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the economy has ceased to work for households at and below the middle. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that the median income for middle-income households is about where it was in 1997. For lower-income households, median income stands where it did in 1996...

Galston's a Democrat analyst, so naturally he's going to dismiss rising populism as "illiberal." It's not. That's the big lie the media's foisting on the American people, designed to help the Democrat Party. The truth is regular folks have had it with political correctness and politics-as-usual, and the first casualties are those responsible for the mess we're in --- establishment politicians from both parties. Next year's election promises a realignment in American politics, particularly if an outsider wins the White House.

More at the link.

And ICYMI, "Donald Trump's Rise Coincides with Decline of the Middle Class."

Paris Climate of Conformity

From the editors, at the Wall Street Journal:

The moment to be wariest of political enthusiasms is precisely when elite opinion is all lined up on one side. So it is with the weekend agreement out of Paris on climate policy, which President Obama declared with his familiar modesty “can be a turning point for the world” and is “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.”

Forgive us for looking through the legacy smoke, but if climate change really does imperil the Earth, and we doubt it does, nothing coming out of a gaggle of governments and the United Nations will save it. What will help is human invention and the entrepreneurial spirit. To the extent the Paris accord increases political control over human and natural resources, it will make the world poorer and technological progress less likely.

***
The climate confab’s self-described political success is rooted in a conceit and a bribe. The conceit is that the terms of the agreement will have some tangible impact on global temperatures. The big breakthrough is supposed to be that for the first time developing and developed countries have committed to reducing carbon emissions. But the commitments by these nations are voluntary with no enforcement mechanism.

China (the No. 1 CO2 emitter) and India (No. 3 after the U.S.) have made commitments that they may or may not honor, depending on whether they can meet them without interfering with economic growth. If the choice is lifting millions out of poverty or reducing CO2, poverty reduction will prevail—as it should.

No less than the supposedly true global-warming believers of Europe are also happy about voluntary commitments because Paris liberates them from the binding targets of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Germany’s high energy costs in particular have been driving companies offshore thanks to its renewable energy costs and mandates.

But no one is happier than President Obama, who would have to submit a binding treaty to the Senate for ratification. As we have learned from the Iran nuclear deal and so much else, Mr. Obama is not into winning democratic consent for his policy dreams. Mr. Obama plans to use Paris as a stick to beat Republicans even as he ducks a vote in Congress. We doubt the Paris climate deal would get 40 Senate votes once Democrats in Ohio, Colorado or North Dakota were forced to debate the costs.

Mr. Obama’s U.S. CO2-reduction targets are fanciful in any case, short of a major technological breakthrough. The President promises that the U.S. will reduce carbon emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, but the specific means he has proposed to get there would only yield about half that. And that’s assuming none of Mr. Obama’s unilateral regulatory policies are declared illegal by U.S. courts.

As for the bribe, rich countries in Paris bought the cooperation of the developing world by promising to send $100 billion a year in climate aid. So the governments of the West are now going to dun their taxpayers to transfer money to the clean and green governments run by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. We can’t wait to see New York’s Chuck Schumer make the case on the Senate floor for American aid to China so it can become more energy efficient and economically competitive...

Lol.

The editors better not talk too much sense. They might get attacked as racist, heh.

Still more.

Focusing on Economic Growth Should Be at Top of Policy Agenda for U.S. Leaders

From David Petraeus and Michael O'Hanlon, at USA Today, "Recipe for American success":

As world leaders gathered and debated each other at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, most of the attention seemed to be on hot spots.  Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, conflict zones in Africa and East Asia, and the latest news from Afghanistan got lots of discussion. In many respects, this was inevitable, and necessary. Indeed, our own careers have been largely shaped and dominated by such pressing issues.

In another respect, however, we need to remember that in a world of troubling headlines, less dramatic and more structural developments could determine the future of the global order even more than the latest crises. Many of these concern technology and economics.

While military might was a necessary ingredient in the West's victory in the Cold War, it was more like a moat than a battering ram — it provided time and protection for the inherent strengths of the Western democratic and economic systems to prevail. This is likely to be just as true in the future.

A few basic realities about the modern world need to be remembered. The post-World War II international order set up by U.S. and other key world leaders 70 years ago produced more economic growth in more places on earth, benefiting a far higher percentage of the human race, than had any previous global order in any period in history for which we have data.

As policymakers and leaders establish priorities for 2016 and beyond, attention to economic fundamentals should play as big a role in their thinking as crisis management and domestic political maneuvering.

Indeed, economics can even shape crisis management, if often with a lag effect. Economic sanctions established by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and many others brought Iran to the table over its nuclear weapons program (an accurate observation whether one likes the actual deal). Sanctions, together with the fall in global oil prices, might not have yet limited assertive (and illegal) Russian interventions, but they could well constrain President Vladimir Putin in the years ahead. China's policies in the East China Sea and South China Sea, even if sometimes more assertive than we would like, have exhibited at least some restraint that might reflect an awareness in Beijing that we could introduce sanctions against China if things got out of hand.

Meanwhile, the North American shale revolution and the North American economic revolution more generally have improved U.S. growth prospects and the fundamental strength of the U.S. economic foundation. They have also helped Mexico provide more jobs to its own workers, reducing demographic pressures and actually making the immigration problem easier to address (even if we have not yet managed to address it appropriately and comprehensively). 

More.

Restoring American Exceptionalism

Dick and Liz Cheney's new book is here, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.

And they write at today's Wall Street Journal, "President Obama has dangerously surrendered the nation’s global leadership, but it can be ours again — if we choose his successor wisely":

In 1983, as the U.S. confronted the threat posed by the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan explained America’s unique responsibility. “It is up to us in our time,” he said, “to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.” It was up to us then—as it is now—because we are the exceptional nation. America has guaranteed freedom, security and peace for a larger share of humanity than any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has been.

Born of the revolutionary ideal that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” we were, first, an example to the world of freedom’s possibilities. During World War II, we became freedom’s defender, at the end of the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals. As British historian Andrew Roberts has observed, “In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must be: all three.”

No other nation, international body or “community of nations” can do what we do. It isn’t just our involvement in world events that has been essential for the triumph of freedom. It is our leadership. For the better part of a century, security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political and diplomatic might. For the most part, until the administration of Barack Obama, we delivered.

Since Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed us the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1940, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have understood the indispensable nature of American power. Presidents from Truman to Nixon, from Kennedy to Reagan, knew that America’s strength had to be safeguarded, her supremacy maintained. In the 1940s American leadership was essential to victory in World War II, and the liberation of millions from the grip of fascism. In the Cold War American leadership guaranteed the survival of freedom, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism. In this century it will be essential for the defeat of militant Islam.

Yet despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an Islamic State caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea and Russia, President Obama has departed from this 75-year, largely bipartisan tradition of ensuring America’s pre-eminence and strength...

Keep reading.

And again, don't miss this essential book, at Amazon, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.

The Only Way to Guarantee 'Peak Leftism' Is to Fight Leftism and Destroy It

A masterful piece from William Kristol, at the Weekly Standard, "‘Peak Leftism’?":

It’s the summer of 2015, and the left is on the march. Or perhaps one should say—since the left presumably dislikes the militarist connotations of the term “march”—that the left is swarming. And in its mindless swarming and mob-like frenzy, nearly every hideous aspect of contemporary leftism is on display.

We see a French Revolution-like tendency to move with the speed of light from a reasonable and perhaps overdue change (taking down the Confederate flag over state buildings) to an all-out determination to expunge from our history any recognition or respect for that which doesn’t fully comport with contemporary progressive sentiment. The left’s point, of course, is not to clarify and sharpen appreciation for our distinctive history; the point is to discredit that history.

And the point is not to advance arguments and criticize alternative views; it is to deny the legitimacy of opposing arguments and to demonize opponents and purge them from the public square.

We see a pitiful aversion to standing up to barbarism abroad and a desperate willingness to accommodate and appease. This requires an amazing ability to shut one’s eyes to reality, and an extraordinary refusal to make tough decisions and assume real responsibilities. As Harvey Mansfield put it in the 1970s, “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. .  .  . Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

We see a wanton willingness on the part of leftist elites to use sophistic arguments to override democratic self-government when the people might not endorse the outcome (say, “marriage equality”) that the left has decided “progress” requires. We see a desperate desire to find a secular substitute for religious belief in the embrace of abstract doctrines (“global warming”) that are appropriately renamed (“climate change”) when the facts complicate matters. And we see a cavalier willingness to impose costs on others less fortunate and less well-protected for the sake of the left’s moral self-regard (by, for example, pledging to end “the era of mass incarceration,” also known as the era of crime reduction).

But as Alexander Hamilton (another recent object of the left’s perpetual discomfort with human achievement) wrote in Federalist 70: “There can be no need .  .  . to multiply arguments or examples on this head.” All the trends and tendencies, the pathologies and perversities that have made the modern left so corrosive of national spirit, so corrupting of self-government, so damaging to Western civilization, are on display front and center in today’s America. As the title of a brilliant article by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review puts it, “We Have Officially Reached Peak Leftism.” ...

The only way to ensure leftism has peaked, and to ensure that it doesn’t drag us further down into the abyss, is to fight it and defeat it. We either overcome peak leftism, or we’re doomed.

I've snipped some of it, so go read it all.

House Rejects Trade Bill, Rebuffing Obama's Dramatic Appeal

Following-up from earlier, "Obama Suffers Stunning Loss as Trade Bill is Defeated by #Pelosi Democrats."

At the New York Times:

The Democratic Party is Officially Leaderless - by @noahcrothman - http://t.co/WmCcSOD3re pic.twitter.com/Qxgri0W0lT

— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) June 13, 2015

WASHINGTON — Hours after President Obama made a dramatic, personal appeal for support, House Democrats on Friday thwarted his push to expand trade negotiating power — and quite likely his chance to secure a legacy-defining accord spanning the Pacific Ocean.

In a remarkable blow to a president they have backed so resolutely, House Democrats voted to end assistance to workers displaced by global trade, a program their party created and has supported for four decades. That move effectively scuttled legislation granting the president trade promotion authority — the power to negotiate trade deals that cannot be amended or filibustered by Congress.

“We want a better deal for America’s workers,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, who has guided the president’s agenda for two terms and was personally lobbied by Mr. Obama until the last minute.

The vote that prevented the president from obtaining trade promotional authority now imperils the more sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement with 11 other nations along the Pacific Ocean that affects 40 percent of the global economy on goods ranging from running shoes to computers.

“They have taken their own child hostage,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, adding, “Does it hurt the president? Of course it hurts the president, but it hurts America more.”

The Democratic revolt left Republican leaders trying to summon support from their own party for trade adjustment assistance, a program they have long derided as a waste of money and a concession to organized labor. Eighty-six Republicans voted for the program, more than double the 40 Democrats who supported it. But the trade adjustment assistance bill failed when 126 voted for it and 303 against.

Republican leaders then passed, in a 219-to-211 vote, a stand-alone bill that would grant the president the trade negotiating authority he sought. But that measure cannot go to the president for his signature because the Senate version of the legislative package combined both trade adjustment and trade promotion...

More.

No, Farmers Don't Use 80 Percent of California's Water

From Representative Devin Nunes, at National Review, "The statistic is manufactured by environmentalists to distract from the incredible damage their policies have caused":

As the San Joaquin Valley undergoes its third decade of government-induced water shortages, the media suddenly took notice of the California water crisis after Governor Jerry Brown announced statewide water restrictions. In much of the coverage, supposedly powerful farmers were blamed for contributing to the problem by using too much water.

“Agriculture consumes a staggering 80 percent of California’s developed water, even as it accounts for only 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic product,” exclaimed Daily Beast writer Mark Hertsgaard in a piece titled “How Growers Gamed California’s Drought.” That 80-percent statistic was repeated in a Sacramento Bee article titled, “California agriculture, largely spared in new water restrictions, wields huge clout,” and in an ABC News article titled “California’s Drought Plan Mostly Lays Off Agriculture, Oil Industries.” Likewise, the New York Times dutifully reported, “The [State Water Resources Control Board] signaled that it was also about to further restrict water supplies to the agriculture industry, which consumes 80 percent of the water used in the state.”

This is a textbook example of how the media perpetuates a false narrative based on a phony statistic. Farmers do not use 80 percent of California’s water. In reality, 50 percent of the water that is captured by the state’s dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and other infrastructure is diverted for environmental causes. Farmers, in fact, use 40 percent of the water supply. Environmentalists have manufactured the 80 percent statistic by deliberately excluding environmental diversions from their calculations. Furthermore, in many years there are additional millions of acre-feet of water that are simply flushed into the ocean due to a lack of storage capacity — a situation partly explained by environmental groups’ opposition to new water-storage projects.

It’s unsurprising that environmentalists and the media want to distract attention away from the incredible damage that environmental regulations have done to California’s water supply. Although the rest of the state is now beginning to feel the pinch, these regulations sparked the San Joaquin Valley’s water crisis more than two decades ago. The Endangered Species Act spawned many of these regulations, such as rules that divert usable water to protect baby salmon and a 3-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, as well as rules that protect the striped bass, a non-native fish that — ironically — eats both baby salmon and smelt. Other harmful regulations stem from legislation backed by environmental groups and approved by Democratic-controlled Congresses in 1992 and 2009. These rules have decimated water supplies for San Joaquin farmers and communities, resulting in zero-percent water allocations and the removal of increasing amounts of farmland from production.

One would think the catastrophic consequences of these environmental regulations would be an important part of the reporting on the water crisis. But these facts are often absent, replaced by a fixation on the 80 percent of the water supply that farmers are falsely accused of monopolizing. None of the four articles cited above even mention the problem of environmental diversions. The same holds true for a recent interview with Governor Brown on ABC’s This Week. In that discussion, host Martha Raddatz focused almost exclusively on farmers’ supposed overuse of the water supply, and she invoked the 80 percent figure twice. The governor himself, a strong proponent of environmental regulations, was silent about the topic during the interview, instead blaming the crisis on global warming.

That is no surprise — President Obama also ignored environmental regulations but spoke ominously about climate change when he addressed the water crisis during a visit to California’s Central Valley in February 2014. Indeed, for many on the left, the California water crisis is just another platform for proclaiming their dogmatic fixation on fighting global warming, a campaign that many environmental extremists have adopted as a religion.

You don’t have to take my word for it; just listen to Rajendra Pachauri, former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the United Nations’ foremost body on global warming. After recently leaving his job amid allegations of sexual harassment, Pachauri wrote in his resignation letter: “For me, the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”

Utterly convinced of the righteousness of their crusade, environmental extremists stop at nothing in pursuing their utopian conception of “sustainability.” The interests of families, farmers, and entire communities — whose very existence is often regarded as an impediment to sustainability — are ignored and derided in the quest for an ever-more pristine environment free from human contamination. In the name of environmental purity, these extremists have fought for decades to cut water supplies for millions of Californians...

More.

Hillary's Culture of Corruption

At IBD, "Hillary Clinton's Culture of Corruption May Doom Candidacy":

.@HillaryClinton's culture of corruption may doom her candidacy http://t.co/EMqPUsTJ1l - #NotHillary2016 - pic.twitter.com/3QpSaeYP8C

— Daniel John Sobieski (@gerfingerpoken) April 21, 2015

Hillary's emails may be only the tip of an iceberg that could include Clinton Foundation donations to shield Boko Haram from being designated a terrorist group and her brother's involvement in a Haitian gold mine.

We doubt Team Hillary was thrilled or her critics surprised Tuesday when the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security named Mrs. Clinton's brother, Tony Rodham, in a report about a firm that allegedly received preferential treatment from the Obama administration.

The firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management, with Tony Rodham listed as its chief executive, allegedly benefited from what the report says was "politically motivated" intervention of then-United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Majorkas, whom president Obama promoted to be the No. 2 official at DHS even as he was under investigation.

Majorkas, according to the IG report, appeared to give "favoritism and special access" to politically connected Democrats who intervened in the application process for the EB-5 (Employee-Based Fifth Preference) visa program, which grants visas to wealthy foreigners who can invest up to $500,000 in U.S. business ventures.

Along with Hillary's brother, Gulf Coast is also linked to now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who served as chair of the Democratic National Committee when Hillary's husband, Bill Clinton, was president. McAuliffe's company was working with Gulf Coast, a firm that specialized in obtaining EB-5 visas for investors.

So we have a high Obama administration official conspiring to grant visas to wealthy investors in a firm run by Hillary's brother, Tony Rodham, that was assisting a firm run by Hillary's political ally Terry McAuliffe.

Now-DHS Deputy Secretary Alejandro Majorkas' intervention on behalf of McAuliffe's GreenTech Automotive company was "unprecedented," according to the IG report.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on another deal involving Rodham that could prove politically embarrassing and damaging for his sister. It seems that he sits on the board of a company that got a coveted gold-mining contract from the government of Haiti after the Clinton Foundation sponsored relief work in Haiti.

In interviews with the Post, both Rodham and the chief executive of Delaware-based VCS Mining said they were introduced at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, which seems more and more to be an unseemly mix of charitable work with the political and business interests of Clinton Foundation donors.

And then there's Hillary's strange dealings regarding the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, which just recently pledged its allegiance to the ever-expanding Islamic State — dubbed the "JV team" by President Obama, who has yet to make good on his pledge to degrade and destroy them.

My god, you'd think the Clinton's care more about the interests of America's enemies more than America's interests!

Keep reading.

The Iranian Regime Remains in Power Through Torture and Murder of Its Domestic Critics

From Douglas Feith, at WSJ, "The Fatal Flaw in Obama’s Dealings With Iran":

The Iranian regime is theocratic and revolutionary. It came to power in 1979 on a wave of extremist religious ideology and remains committed to exporting its revolution. Its leaders despise liberalism and democracy. They particularly hate Western respect for the rights of women and homosexuals. The regime remains in power through torture and murder of its domestic critics. It makes frequent use of public executions—the numbers have increased lately even though President Hasan Rouhani is commonly called a reformer.

Abroad, the Iranian regime acts as a rogue. Its agents and terrorist proxies have committed bombings and other murders in countries including France, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iraq. A U.S. court convicted Iranian agents of plotting in 2011 to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Iranian officials foment hatred of the U.S. and Israel and call for the annihilation of both.

Iranian leaders have a long record of shameless dishonesty. Their aid to the tyrannical Assad regime has been massive since the Syrian civil war began, but they routinely deny it. And they make a practice of lying to United Nations weapons inspectors. Commenting on how the inspectors have repeatedly been surprised by what Iran hides, Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, told this newspaper in 2013, “If there is no undeclared installation today . . . it will be the first time in 20 years that Iran doesn’t have one.”

Iran is a bad actor, and history teaches that constraining bad actors through arms control and peace accords is a losing bet. The arms-control approach is to invite bad actors to sign legal agreements. This produces signing ceremonies, where political leaders can act as if there’s nobody here but us peaceable, law-abiding global citizens. The deal makers get to celebrate their accords at least until the bad actors inevitably violate them.

Nazi Germany violated the Versailles Treaty. The Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, various nuclear-arms treaties and other international agreements. The Palestine Liberation Organization violated the Oslo Accords. North Korea violated the Agreed Framework.

Patterns emerge from this history. When leaders of democratic countries extract promises of good behavior from bad-actor regimes, those democratic leaders reap political rewards. They are hailed as peacemakers. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was cheered when he returned from Munich in 1938 with “peace in our time.” These leaders have a stake in their deals looking good. When those deals are violated, the “peacemakers” often challenge the evidence. If the evidence is clear, they dismiss the violations as unimportant. When the importance is undeniable, they argue that there aren’t any good options for confronting the violators.

In the end, the bad actors often pay little or nothing for their transgressions. And even if the costs are substantial, they are bearable. Just ask Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or Syria’s Bashar Assad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

The Obama administration has wedded itself to a cooperative policy toward Iran. The White House rejects the coercive approach as not viable. But if Iran violates its deal with us, won’t our response have to be coercive? President Obama insists that his policy is the only realistic one. In doing so, he is showing either that he is naïve and uninformed about the relevant history or that he no longer considers an Iranian nuclear weapon “unacceptable.”

Watching the World Fall Apart

From David Solway, at Pajamas Media:

In her valediction to a decade and a half of syndicated journalism, Diana West expresses her disappointment that there has been little or no progress over the years in advancing the debate about Islam and the specter of national decline. In some respects, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. “Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy.” The same is true to varying degrees of other western nations as well. Her summation hits home for many of us: “It is hard to watch the world falling apart.”

The name of the game today is denial of the undeniable all across the spectrum of the major issues that afflict us. Denial that temperatures have been stable for the last eighteen years and that the diminution of sunspot activity heralds an age of global cooling rather than warming, as John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, has decisively established in his recently published Dark Winter. Denial that Israel is the only democratic, morally legitimate state in the Middle East and that the Palestinian narrative of historical and cadastral residence is demonstrably false. Denial that Islam is a totalitarian entity and a religion of war that has set its sights on the ruination of western societies; and denial of the fact that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws, marks the high point of human political, social, cultural and scientific development.

Those who hold to such canting and spurious convictions and attitudes are the real “deniers” among us. And a people that lives in a collective state of denial of the obvious, or of what with a little study and dispassionate research would soon become obvious, is a people without a sustainable future. As SF writer Philip K. Dick said, in a speech aptly titled “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart in Two Days,” later published in his masterful I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Similarly, writes beleaguered Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is currently being prosecuted once again for telling unpleasant truths about unrestricted Muslim immigration into the Netherlands and across many European countries, “Festering political problems do not go away simply because they are kept in a dark corner.” In a sane society, the messenger who brings irrefutable truths — judgments buttressed by solid evidence and logical reasoning — would not be shot or shot down, mocked or slandered. Such bearers of crucial tidings would be attended to and honoured. But we clearly do not live in a compos mentis society. Indeed, even those who have grasped the essential issues at stake increasingly believe that telling the truth is a tactical blunder and merely alienates the constituency they wish to persuade. And yet all they manage to accomplish is to weaken the strength of their argument, lose once-committed followers, and bring their own integrity and courage into question.

I used to think that only a monstrous catastrophe could save us, could provoke people to think again and to see the world as it really is, and could convince us to rise at last to our own defense — I mean something really enormous, that would make 9/11 look like a mere skirmish. Now I’m not so sure. We would probably find some way of temporizing, of refusing to examine or even recognize the causes of our misfortune, evincing, as Flemming Rose aphoristically put it in The Tyranny of Silence, “the infamous ability of humans to adapt.”

And how they — we — do adapt to the absurd, the false and the shameful in every walk of political and cultural life, of whatever magnitude! When the multi-billion dollar swindle that is “global warming” devastates the economy and temperatures begin to decline, leading to reduced crop growth and a crisis of hunger in various parts of the world, people will still insist that “the science is settled.” As it becomes increasingly evident that the media constitute a tribe of liars and fabricators operating as a fifth column, people will continue to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Salon and the Huffington Post, and get their news from the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, forming their opinions therefrom. Although it is by now indisputable that our elite universities have become latrines of left-wing dogma, anti-Zionist propaganda and a subversive pedagogy, we continue to subsidize their existence via donations and attendance rather than seek and support responsible academic alternatives. The more that questions arise regarding President Obama’s still-sealed academic records and mysterious documentary discrepancies, the more people will say “nothing to see here” and move on. As a Palestinian enclave without a legal government and no viable historical claim to the territory it covets resorts to anti-Semitic indoctrination of its denizens and unleashes episodes of outright terrorism, governments around the world will persist, in plain violation of international law, in recognizing it as a state. As Iran marches toward a nuclear bomb and perfects ballistic technology, western governments will declare that it is a rational actor supplementing its electrical grid. Should one of our cities be rendered uninhabitable for 60 years following a dirty bomb strike or half its population succumb to water poisoning, Islam would still emerge as the religion of peace and federal officers would be stationed around mosques to prevent a “backlash.” All such reactions are practically foreordained — until reality forecloses on its mortgage and a subprime debacle of existential proportions ensues, when it may be too late to reclaim what we have sacrificed to fear, lassitude and craven imbecility.

Keep reading.

Solway concludes with the the most hilarious joke, heh.

Progressives and Disorder

At the Wall Street Journal, "The next two years may be the most dangerous since the Cold War ended":

As the calendar turns toward the final two years of the Obama Presidency, this is a moment to consider the world it has produced. There is no formal Obama Doctrine that serves as the 44th President’s blueprint for America’s engagement with the world. But it is fair to say that Barack Obama brought into office a set of ideas associated with the progressive, or left-leaning, wing of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment.

“Leading from behind” was the phrase coined in 2011 by an Obama foreign-policy adviser to describe the President’s approach to the insurrection in Libya against Moammar Gaddafi. That phrase may have since entered the lexicon of derision, but it was intended as a succinct description of the progressive approach to U.S. foreign policy.

***
The Democratic left believes that for decades the U.S. national-security presence in the world—simply, the American military—has been too large. Instead, when trouble emerges in the world, the U.S. should act only after it has engaged its enemies in attempts at detente, and only if it first wins the support and participation of allies and global institutions, such as NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and so on.

In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Mr. Obama offered an apt description of the progressive foreign-policy vision. “When it comes to ISIL, us devoting another trillion dollars after having been involved in big occupations of countries that didn’t turn out all that well” is something he is hesitant to do.

Instead, he said, “We need to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding our schools, our roads, our basic science and research here in the United States; that is going to be a recipe for our long-term security and success.”

That $1 trillion figure is one of the President’s famous straw-man arguments. But what is the recipe if an ISIL or other global rogue doesn’t get his memo?

ISIL, or Islamic State, rose to dominate much of Iraq after its armed forces captured the northern city of Mosul in June, followed by a sweep toward Baghdad. With it came the videotaped beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aide worker Peter Kassig.

Islamic State’s rise was made possible not merely because the U.S. wound down its military presence in Iraq but because Mr. Obama chose to eliminate that presence. Under intense pressure from the Pentagon and our regional allies, the White House later in the year committed useful if limited air support to the Iraqi army battling Islamic State. Without question the U.S. was behind the curve, and with dire consequences.

Islamic State’s success has emboldened or triggered other jihadist movements, despite Mr. Obama’s assurance that the war on terror was fading.

Radical Islamists are grabbing territory from U.S. allies in Yemen. They have overrun Libya’s capital and threaten its oil fields. Boko Haram in Nigeria, the kidnappers of some 275 schoolgirls in April, adopted the ISIL terror model. U.S. allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are struggling to cope with the violence spreading out of Syria and Iraq. Mr. Obama can only hope that the Afghan Taliban do not move now to retake Kandahar after he announced this week with premature bravado “the end of the combat mission.”

The crucial flaw in the Democratic left’s model of global governance is that it has little or no answer to containing or deterring the serious threats that emerge in any region of the world when the U.S. retreats from leadership...

A chilling editorial.

The left's "model" is making each and every American less safe. Keep reading. The next two years will be the most dangerous for America since the end of the Cold War.

The Rise of the John Birch Left

Heh, a great piece from Ed Driscoll, at Pajamas Media:

The modern left is built around a trio of laudable principles: protecting the environment is good, racism is bad, and so is demonizing a person over his or her sexual preferences. (In the chapter of his book Intellectuals titled “The Flight from Reason,” Paul Johnson wrote that “At the end of the Second World War, there was a significant change in the predominant aim of secular intellectuals, a shift of emphasis from utopianism to hedonism.” ) But just as the Bircher right began to see communists everywhere, the new Bircher left sees racism, sexism, homophobia, and Koch Brothers everywhere.

They’re lurking around more corners than Gen. Ripper imagined there were commies lurking inside Burpelson Air Force Base. They’re inside your video games! They own NFL teams! They’ll steal your condoms! Disagree with President Obama? Racist! (That goes for you too, Bill, Hillary, and your Democratic supporters.) Not onboard for gender-neutral bathrooms? Not too thrilled with abortion-obsessed candidates like Wendy Davis and “Mark Uterus”? Sexist! Disagree with using global warming as a cudgel to usher in the brave new world of bankrupt coal companies and $10 a gallon gasoline? Climate denier!

And as with the original Birchers, don’t get ‘em started on fluoride.

More.

RELATED: "Far-Left Democrat Ideology Brutally Rejected in Midterms (VIDEO)," and "Crushed Democrats Now Grappling with Unelectability Problem."

Is Canada Now More American Than America?

From John Fund, at National Review:

The merger of U.S. hamburger giant Burger King with Tim Hortons, Canada’s favorite coffee shop, will create the world’s third largest fast-food company, with a total of 18,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. It is also a piercing wake-up call for the U.S., because the new company will make its global headquarters in Canada’s province of Ontario. That underscores what savvy businesses everywhere have learned — the U.S. is an increasingly less attractive place to do business. “Canada has quietly and politely become, well, more American than America,” says columnist Stephen Green.

Since 2003, more than 35 major U.S. companies have moved their headquarters and reincorporated overseas. Rather than rail against such “inversions,” as President Obama does, or call for an economic boycott, as Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown does, we should figure out what is driving U.S. companies offshore. Here’s a clue: The U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate of any industrialized country, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is “even now looking for ways it can unilaterally raise corporate taxes without going to Congress.”

Without going to Congress?

Same as it ever was...

More.