Category: Donald Trump

The Democrats and Their Narrative

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Watching the impeachment hearings this morning — Democrat lawyer Daniel Goldman is “testifying,” which is to say lecturing, uninterrupted by questions — one gathers the impression that Democrats believe (a) nothing Hunter Biden did in Ukraine was wrong, (b) it was perfectly OK for Ukraine to “meddle” in the 2016 U.S. election, and (c) it was therefore wrong for President Trump to urge Ukraine to investigate corruption.

The argument Goldman is making is that Trump (and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani) wanted Ukraine to do something that would be politically beneficial to the president’s 2020 re-election campaign — and, according to Democrats, anything that is good for Republicans is inherently wrong.

It is important to Democrats that they keep repeating this narrative of how wrong it would be to investigate Burisma (and Alexandra Chalupa, etc.) because they can’t give the American people a minute’s peace in which to think about all of this and to say in reply, “So what?”



 

The Impeachment Circus Continues, But Does Any Sane Person Actually Care?

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I’ve spent the past week ignoring the impeachment circus, but did you know that “the Trump campaign took in $15 million in small-dollar donations in the first three days after Pelosi announced the inquiry”? Did you know that Trump’s approval rating has gone up since the Shifty Schiff UkraineGate hearings began last month? Not to dismiss the seriousness of all this — the fact that Nancy Pelosi believes she has a mandate for impeachment is disturbing, even if you think it’s absurd — but it is difficult to see how this is going to be anything other than a political catastrophe for Democrats. And CNN, but I repeat myself:

If Democrats and their media allies thought that the impeachment of President Trump would be his undoing, I’ve got bad news for them: it’s actually undoing them. The Democrats’ favorite (fake) news channel CNN is suffering from a three-year low in ratings.
According to Disrn, CNN “reached a three-year low in ratings over the Thanksgiving holidays, averaging 643,000 primetime viewers. The news outlet also saw its worst week for viewers among the 25-43 demographic.” In that group, CNN only pulled 138,000 viewers. That’s pathetic.
Fox News, on the other hand, “posted higher ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined, averaging nearly 2.2 million viewers during primetime last week. The network also pulled in 303,000 viewers ages 25 to 54,” which is the most important target group for advertisers.
In other words, Fox News is utterly and completely destroying the competition. Now, there’s nothing new about that in itself, but what is new is CNN’s complete and utter irrelevance in the news world. If you’re thinking to yourself, “CNN? I never watch it!”, you’re not only talking for yourself but for just about every single American. There’s literally just about nobody watching any of its programs — let alone those scheduled outside of primetime.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) To have an audience of less than 700,000 viewers, in a nation of 325 million, in the midst of what the media keep calling a “historic” impeachment proceeding — well, look up the word “pathetic” in the dictionary and you’ll find it illustrated with a photo of Don Lemon.

Look, I hate to break it to King Creole‘s viewers — whoever they are, trapped in an airport somewhere — but most Americans don’t give a crap about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, and most Americans are also smart enough to figure out that Hunter Biden never would have gotten that Burisma gig if his name had been “Hunter Smith” or “Hunter Jones.”

With Cocaine Mitch running the Senate, there is no way this impeachment will result in President Trump’s removal from office, so that the American people will decide the issue next November, and who are the Democrats going to nominate against him? Not Kamala Harris — because Democrats are racist sexists who hate black women.

If I were asked to wager on the Democrat nomination, my money would be on Elizabeth Warren, the fake Cherokee Harvard professor, and if you think working-class voters in Wisconsin are going to dump Trump to elect Warren, you need to turn off MSNBC, sit down and contemplate how you’ve reached this nadir of bleak desperation.



 

Barr Disputes IG Horowitz Report

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What could this possibly mean?

Attorney General William P. Barr has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report — that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horo­witz, is due to release his long-awaited findings in a week, but behind the scenes at the Justice Department, disagreement has surfaced about one of Horowitz’s central conclusions on the origins of the Russia investigation. The discord could be the prelude to a major fissure within federal law enforcement on the controversial question of investigating a presidential campaign.
Barr has not been swayed by Horowitz’s rationale for concluding that the FBI had sufficient basis to open an investigation on July 31, 2016, these people said. . . .

Frankly, I am so bored with this witch-hunt that until something actually happens — not this “sources say” stuff — I’m content to ignore it. Do Democrats really intend to go through an impeachment proceeding less than a year before the next election? Crazy times . . .



 

Is This the Kanye Factor?

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Let’s not over-interpret these numbers:

A pair of recent polls show that 34 percent of black likely voters approve of President Donald Trump’s presidency, a stunning development that could have a massive impact on his re-election campaign in 2020.
A Rasmussen poll released Friday showed black likely voter approval of Trump at 34 percent. An Emerson Poll showed 34.5 percent approval by the same demographic.
“Boom,” wrote black author and Trump supporter Deneen Borelli on Twitter, calling the results “Democrats worst nightmare.”
The Trump campaign celebrated the news.
“It might shock Democrats that support for President Trump is rising with Black Americans but it shouldn’t,” Trump campaign Principal Deputy Communications Director Erin Perrine said to Breitbart News. “Blacks are more prosperous than ever because of President Trump with record-low unemployment and rising paychecks.”
The polling bump only bolstered the Trump campaign’s decision to launch a “Black Voices for Trump” political coalition in November.
“We’re going to campaign for every last African American vote in 2020,” Trump said in a speech, launching the group with black supporters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Perrine said the news would energize the coalition going into the president’s re-election effort for 2020.
“The Black Voices for Trump coalition will help get the facts and truth out there about the strength of America for Blacks under President Trump,” she said.

The Trump campaign has made a commitment to winning over black voters in 2020, an effort unprecedented in recent Republican campaign history, and we must keep in mind that it is not necessary for Trump to win a majority of black votes to have a huge impact. For decades, the GOP has suffered from an image problem on race issues, and too many Republican consultants have been averse to making a real effort to fix that problem. In district after district, state after state, election after election, Democrats just assumed that they would win 90-95% of the black vote, which enabled them to win offices in close elections where a majority of white voters went for the Republican candidate. If Trump can get to double digits — 12%-15% — with black voters in 2020, that would probably doom the Democrats in states like Florida and North Carolina. And having stronger black support will also help Trump with the kind of suburban white women who don’t want to be perceived as “racist” for voting Republican. Polls show increasing opposition to the Democrats’ impeachment witch-hunt, and it’s entirely possible — I mean, a long shot, but you can’t rule it out — that Trump could win a 1972-style landslide.

Keep in mind you have four white people — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — currently leading the polls among Democratic presidential candidates. The only black candidate with a chance, Kamala Harris, is at 4% nationally and has gone “all-in” on winning the Iowa caucuses. But three of the four most recent Iowa polls show Buttigieg leading, while Harris is in sixth place in the RCP average of Iowa polls. In other words, Iowa Democrats support the gay white mayor over the black female Senator, and do you think this makes black Democrats happy? You ain’t been paying attention to social media, then, because they’re angry as hell. Black Democrats hate Buttigieg.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Kanye West, said to be a Trump supporter, released an album entitled “Follow God” that zoomed to the top of the charts. I mean, Democrats might be getting ready to nominate this gay white guy, and here the multi-platinum black rapper who (allegedly) supports Trump is throwing down some Jesus on the people?

All we can do is pray. And maybe you could hit my tip jar?





 

The Impeachment Carnival Is a Distraction From What Really Matters

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While the televised circus in the House Intelligence Committtee was consuming the attention of the national media, the real news was happening behind the scenes with the Horowitz report:

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has found evidence that an FBI lawyer manipulated a key investigative document related to the FBI’s secretive surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser — enough to change the substantive meaning of the document, according to multiple reports.
The show-stopping development comes as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News that Horowitz’s comprehensive report on allegations of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant abuse against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page will be released on Dec. 9. “That’s locked,” Graham said.
The new evidence concerning the altered document, which pertained to the FBI’s FISA court warrant application to surveil Page, is expected to be outlined in Horowitz’s upcoming report. CNN first reported the news, which was largely confirmed by The Washington Post.
The Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved was underneath Peter Strzok, the FBI’s since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.
Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee who modified the FISA document falsely stated that he had “documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis” for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly “altered an email” to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.
In its initial 2016 FISA warrant application, the FBI flatly called Page “an agent of a foreign power.”

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have endlessly condemned as a “conspiracy theory” — “unsubstantiated,” with “no evidence” — every suggestion that the origin of the investigation of the Trump campaign was tainted by partisanship and corruption.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)


 

The Secret of Liberal ‘Success’

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Readers will please excuse last week’s paucity of blog content, as I’ve gotten sucked into The Dreaded Research Vortex again, and at some point you have to commit to 48 hours’ worth of ideological spelunking in a 72-hour span. Add in a few hassles in so-called “real life,” including a trip to the Veteran’s Administration and some baby-sitting duty with a grandchild, and a few hours of nightmare-lashed sleep, you can blow most of a week rather easily this way. Fear not, however, because if I can ever pull this story together, it might be a new book — or maybe another reason for the Southern Poverty Law Center to use me as a “extremist” bogeyman to scare old liberals out of their money. But I digress . . .

The Great Impeachment Witch Hunt has continued, and you didn’t need me to point out the obvious flaws in Chairman Schiff’s show-trial proceedings, because there is always Ace of Spades. God bless that man, who can inform us and laugh out loud at the same time:

Schiff has made up New Rules — unilaterally — that the only Republicans permitted to ask questions are Devin Nunes and a staffer who I think is named Castor. A source says Castor is a good lawyer, but people are telling me he’s coming off as a real blank on TV.
And Schiff made up a rule saying that he would be one of the only twp people to question “Masha” Yavonovich, the former Obama-holdover ambassador to Ukraine fired by Trump.
Of course Trump is permitted to fire her; but the media and Democrats have decided — as they last decided during the Bush presidency, when they declared it was an abuse of office for Bush to fire all of Clinton’s US Attorneys — that Republicans must always retain the political appointees that a Democrat president has hired.
When Nunes moved to yield his time to Ellie Stafanovic, Adam Schiff and his Ten Inch Neck started banging the gavel to shut her up.

No fair-minded person fully informed about this situation would believe that President Trump had done anything wrong (or unconstitutional) in urging Ukraine’s newly-elected president to investigate corruption that appears linked to the “Russian collusion”/MuellerGate attack. Therefore, liberals seek to win by ensuring that the people are not fully informed, but instead are subjected to a nonstop stream of anti-Trump propaganda from CNN and other anti-Trump media outlets. Any fact that contradict the Democrat-dictated narrative are dismissed as “Fox News right-wing conspiracy-theory Republican talking points” or whatever.

At some point, however, the ability of the Democrat-Media Complex to generate a plausible alternative reality is strained beyond its power. Prissy puritanical Chairman Schiff makes a poor “face” for the Democrats, whose base is largely female and/or non-white (and not actually concerned much about U.S. foreign policy). It remains to be seen what will become of this witch-hunt, but the propaganda strategy behind it is obvious. It’s a smear — character assassination — intended to demonize the President, and erode his support.


 

The Deep State and UkraineGate

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Have I ever mentioned how much I hate keeping up with the day-to-day partisan warfare in D.C.? Many journalists crave such a diet, but I find it tedious, mainly because it’s “pack” reporting, everybody chasing the same story, whereas I prefer to find some little-noticed incident nobody else is covering and turn that into a story. All this to explain why I dread this “UkraineGate” impeachment carnival — the Beltway press corps will love it, but there’s no real fun to be had in trying to cover the same story that’s being covered by a thousand other reporters and drawing commentary from a thousand pundits. How can I possibly make any really valuable contribution to such a story? But never mind my personal problems, there’s a witch-hunt underway in Washington:

Though Democrats have been working hard to keep the identity of the whistleblower under wraps, reports this week published his alleged identity — and conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh says that now that more details are out, it’s painfully clear why Trump’s political enemies wouldn’t want the whistleblower identified.
“The guy was a plant in the White House by the CIA to do exactly what he did,” Limbaugh said Thursday. “We know his name. He’s one of a dime-a-dozen Yale or Harvard graduates, literally a 30-year-old Pajama Boy doing the bidding of John Brennan in the White House.” . . .
“This guy’s a leaker! He’s not a whistleblower!” said Rush. ” … This guy was involved from the get-go, starting in 2016, doing John Brennan’s bidding from the West Wing on furthering the whole Trump-Russia collusion operation of which there wasn’t one!”
“[T]hey don’t want us to know who he is for these obvious reasons,” he added. “Now Schiff and his buddies are saying, ‘Well, we don’t need to know the young whistleblower’s identity. We don’t really need to hear from the whistleblower.’ Of course we don’t now … ”
Limbaugh stressed that “everybody has known who this guy is for weeks,” including Trump and his aides, yet his name wasn’t leaked until now, which he described as “a classic illustration of the swamp protecting itself.”

All very true, and since the nation’s most popular radio host has said it, there’s not much for me to add. Nevertheless, I must try:

Nancy Pelosi proclaimed Thursday that the party-line impeachment vote in the House of Representatives was about protecting “democracy.” Madame Speaker was actually close to speaking the truth for once, because what the impeachment circus is about is protecting Democrats, particularly the Obama administration officials who sought to sabotage President Trump both during the 2016 election campaign and after Trump won. The vote Thursday — 232 to 196, with all but two Democrats in favor and all Republicans voting “no” — followed several days of secret testimony in deranged California Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, conducted prior to any authorizing vote on the House floor. Now that Democrats have formally voted to climb aboard the “Ukrainegate” impeachment train, however, Pelosi and her party have signed a sort of suicide pact. They must destroy the president in a desperate effort to prevent Americans from learning what Obama, the Democratic Party, and “deep state” bureaucrats did to Trump.
It was perhaps symbolic that this House vote happened on Halloween, inspiring the president to remark on Twitter: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!” . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.


 

Party-Line Impeachment Vote

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Robespierre (D-California) and her Jacobins vote to build a guillotine:

Democrats rammed a package of ground rules for their impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump through a sharply divided House Thursday, the chamber’s first formal vote in a fight that could stretch into the 2020 election year.
The vote was 232-196, with all Republicans against the resolution and two Democratic defectors joining them.
The vote laid down the rules as lawmakers transition from weeks of closed-door interviews with witnesses to public hearings and ultimately to possible votes on whether to recommend Trump’s removal from office. . . .
Democrats spoke of lawmakers’ duty to defend the Constitution, while Republicans cast the process as a skewed attempt to railroad a president whom Democrats have detested since before he took office.
“What is at stake in all this is nothing less than our democracy,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. . . .
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Trump had done nothing impeachable and accused Democrats of trying to remove him “because they are scared they cannot defeat him at the ballot box.” Noting that elections are just a year away, he added, “Why do you not trust the people?”
No. 3 House GOP leader Steve Scalise, R-La., accused Democrats of imposing “Soviet-style rules,” speaking in front of a bright red poster depicting the Kremlin.
The investigation is focused on Trump’s efforts to push Ukraine to investigate his Democratic political opponents by withholding military aid and an Oval Office meeting craved by the country’s new president.

Joel Pollak notes:

Democrats on the House Rules Committee rejected all 17 Republican amendments to the proposed resolution on the “impeachment inquiry” against President Donald Trump — including one that would require the other investigating committees to hand over exculpatory evidence to the House Judiciary Committee.

Our latter-day sans-culottes don’t care much for evidence. They are running this impeachment to satisfy the media wing of their party.