Bookworm Beat 5/17/17 — the slow motion assassination of Donald Trump

A look at the bad (the media’s slow motion assassination attempt) and the good (which is that your vote for Trump was a good thing and he’s doing fine).

White House lockdown slow motion assassinationMy post title blatantly copies Scott Adams’ post today — The Slow-Motion Assassination of President Trump” target=”_blank”>The Slow-Motion Assassination of President Donald Trump. Adams pulls no punches. After making the point that there is nothing impeachable about the President saying he “hopes” his friend is cleared, Adams explains the slow motion assassination that’s taking place before our eyes:

Watch the headlines and pundits today transmogrify “hope” into “asked to end the Flynn investigation.”

That isn’t news.

That is an assassination.

I also think we are seeing with the recent leaks the first phase of Mutually Assured Destruction of our government. The leaks will destroy Trump if they continue. But if that happens, no Democrat and no anti-Trump Republican will ever be able to govern in the future. Payback is guaranteed. The next President to sit in the White House will be leaked to the point of ineffectiveness. And that’s how the Republic dies.

Adams actually things the digital revolution which pave the way from our Constitutional representative democracy into some sort of electronic direct democracy. I’m not so sanguine. I see chaos, followed by a dictatorship (because that’s invariably what ends chaos), followed by . . . well, I don’t actually know, but it’s not good.

I don’t want to talk long-term now, though. This post is dedicated to a series of quick links examining the current state of our politics, the slow motion assassination that Adams identified, and the reasons that you’re not crazy to have voted for Trump and to continue to support him. Indeed, if you pull back from the obsessive media behavior and the puppet-like responses in D.C. to media malice, you’ll see that things really aren’t that bad.

A full-throated intellectual defense of Donald Trump. This article came out in January and I’m just shocked that I missed it. Daniel Bonevac, an academic (yes! an academic) from the Univesrity of Texas in Austin (where he’s the only conservative in his department), explains precisely why he voted for Donald Trump. And he gets it. He totally gets it.

The article is long and I can’t find a specific quotable quote because it’s so dense with ideas (although never stuffy, confusing, pompous, or boring). I can assure you that you’ll feel smart, happy, patriotic, and reasonable once you read it. Then you should share it with your fellow Trump supporters because, in the face of months of sustained attack, it’s a real morale booster. I’m not exaggerating. Bonevac’s post one of the best things I’ve read in I don’t know how long and every non-Leftist, whether a Trump supporter or not, should read it.

Donald Trump is the perfect antidote to Leftism. A Leftist who knows I’m conservative asked me how I could support Donald Trump knowing now what we do about him. I said I supported him more now than I did when I voted for him. Despite the appalling, libelous opposition aimed at him, he’s slowly but surely fulfilling his promises — including building a virtual wall simply by allowing ICE to enforce existing immigration laws. The Leftist was shocked that I was proud, not ashamed.

Well, I am proud of my vote and, looking at the utterly appalling Left, I feel no shame:

Why do people hate [Trump] so?

Because he won’t accept this appointed condition. He has no white guilt. He doesn’t feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt. He talks about the United States with uncritical approval—“America First”—and that’s a thought crime in the eyes of liberals. It ignores slavery, Jim Crow, the Indian wars, Manzanar . . . Donald Trump would never refer to America as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did frequently, and that makes him worse than a conservative. President Trump is a bigot.

He enjoys the company of attractive women and makes no apologies for it. A man of proper male guilt would have bowed out after the bus tapes were released during the campaign, but there he was in the second presidential debate talking about jail time for Hillary.

And he wouldn’t say, “Black Lives Matter,” either, a slogan that implies whites don’t care about black lives, but insisted, “All lives matter.

Finally, while Christians, especially Catholics and Evangelicals , are supposed to feel guilty for their doctrine on gender roles and abortion, President Trump quickly dropped gender identity from Title IX and nominated a religious conservative to the Supreme Court.

That’s what happens when a political leader doesn’t share the guilt, and progressives know it. For decades they have pushed a campaign of guilt in classrooms, museums, movies, books, and newsrooms precisely to forestall those moves. If you can persuade an opponent that he’s wrong about a political issue, you can win the day’s debate. But if you can make him feel guilty about his opinion, you’ve got him on the defensive forever.

Leftists crank up the moral hatred. The fact that we shouldn’t feel guilty for our beliefs doesn’t offset the fact that the entire left continues to crank up the guilt meter — and it’s companion, the “you’re morally foul” meter. When Jimmy Kimmel went on air and basically accused Trump and all of those who dislike Obama care of being evil, John Hawkins had enough. It wasn’t just the lies behind Kimmel’s fairy tale of newborns ever being denied service in an American hospital. It was the moral hatred that propelled Kimmel that got John’s goat:

Jimmy Kimmel favors a certain political policy. It’s one that has been a disaster for tens of millions of Americans, including a lot of children.

Jimmy Kimmel could have said, “Obamacare may not be perfect and it may have been sold with a lot of lies, but I believe it’s worth it for everyone else to pay more so the small percentage of the population with pre-existing conditions and no insurance can be covered.” That pitch may not be a political winner, but at least it would be an honest argument.

Instead, Kimmel is essentially arguing that ONLY people who agree with him care about the healthcare of children and the rest of us want children to die.

This sort of rhetoric has become commonplace on the Left and it’s not just dishonest, it’s evil. It’s bad for the country. It could even potentially split the country apart one day because we won’t be able to continue to live with each other. In fact, we’ve already reached the point where California’s threats to secede are being met with cries of “faster please, what can we do to help?” from millions of conservatives.

Yes, it may currently give liberals some small temporary political advantage to claim that everyone who doesn’t support gay marriage hates gays, everyone who doesn’t think rape culture exists supports rape, that everyone who doesn’t back free birth control for women hates them, everyone who wants to stop illegal immigration hates Latinos and that everyone who doesn’t want to tear down Confederate statues hates black Americans, but it also injects pure poison into our culture.

If you believe someone doesn’t want kids to have healthcare, hates gays, hates women, hates minorities and wants more rapes to happen, you will probably detest that person. However, liberals seldom consider that the reverse of this is also true. You will also probably detest people who falsely accuse you of not wanting kids to have healthcare, hating gays, hating women, hating minorities and wanting more rapes to happen. In the Palestinian territories or Syria, there might be significant numbers of people who believe many of those aforementioned beliefs. In America, there are very few. What this means is that there are large numbers of people liberals have inspired hatred towards via falsehoods and also large numbers of people who’ve grown to abhor liberals after being targeted by their lies.

Put another way, liberals are CREATING an America where it’s natural to HATE people of differing political views. Not disagree with, HATE.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Fallon, although a Leftist, remains committed to entertainment for all Americans, not just the self-chosen few. If I were to watch late night shows, I’d watch his.
Obama, Malcolm Gladwell, and the internet media changed American foreign policy. Lee Smith is one of the smartest writers around. That’s why you won’t regret reading his article about the profound changes in American foreign policy, all of which are driven by a media anxious to find new angles on things, in a Malcolm Gladwell kind of way, and a president whose “cool” inspired them:

It wasn’t that long ago, of course, when reporters used to recoil from the idea of rewriting press releases faxed to them by some PR shop, even—or especially—if it was centered in the White House. That’s partly because they were cynical bastards who distrusted authority—also, they resented the PR guys, who were getting paid a lot more than they were. Except now, what reporters and editors who were still around from the old days saw in front of them was a catastrophe that no one could have imagined even five years earlier. Newspapers were closing around the country, and even those papers that managed to survive couldn’t afford the kinds of departments that are central to a free press—like investigative teams, and national and foreign bureaus.

The new generation of opiners gladly stepped into the cost-cutting breach. Their model was Malcolm Gladwell, a hugely talented and even more hugely successful writer for The New Yorker who became famous by finding the angle on all other angles: Everything you think you know about the world is wrong.

Of course, it turns out that most things you know about the world are right, because there are only so many different ways to view familiar situations. By rejecting all conventional wisdom, however, the Obamites were able to pretend that handing nuclear weapons to a tyrannical theocracy that has an eschatology based upon its bringing around Armageddon is better than a conventional war, because “in war, there are no winners.”

The Left’s “Jew-ization” of Donald Trump. Robert Avrech has noticed that the media is busy turning Donald Trump, the rich, all-American boy, into the “other” who is ferociously libeled, just as Jews always have been.

Time to pile on the execrable Comey. The only thing Donald Trump did wrong about Comey was to wait so long before firing him. Comey was an execrable, self-righteous, self-dealing, self-promoting political hack and needed to leave. Here are a few articles that explain why I feel as strongly as I do:

James Comey: Not Just Incompetent But He Placed American Lives at Risk.

The FBI Does Not Need Another Don Quixote as Director. (And please note, that this article analogizes, not to Don Quixote the romantic, but to Don Quixote the insane person.)

Former Bush AG On Comey’s 2007 Brush With Scandal: ‘Jim’s Loyalty Was More To Chuck Schumer.’

And one final point about Comey, which is that he got the firing that was coming to him, rather than the dignified farewell the media insists all Democrat operatives receive. Surber gently disputes Victor Davis Hanson who, while strongly agreeing that Comey had to go, thought that the method Trump employed to fire him was too crude. Not so, says Surber (whose blog is a cheering place for those overwhelmed by hard-Left media madness):

Hanson made the mistake of judging the action by Washington standards. You bring the guy in. You let him resign gracefully to spend more time with his family.

Trump is not Washington. He went to human resources — deputy AG Rod J. Rosenstein — and told them to get rid of the man. Letters were written, meaning to send. That Comey was not called while he was on the West Coast was a fitting touch. It kept Comey from cleaning out his files, et cetera.

What is with this rallying “his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision”? The former work for him and the latter have been calling for Comey’s head for nearly a year, going back to Comey’s Fifth of July stabbing of justice in the back by not recommending Hillary’s indictment.

Outside of Washington and Hillary Country, people view the howling — the cries of impeachment — as evidence of swamp draining. The cries of foul come from hypocrites who blamed the election outcome on Comey and the Russians. This bull-in-the-china-shop action by Trump is exactly what we signed up for.

President Trump has every right to flip Washington the bird. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made Trump wait a full three months before approving every Cabinet member. That is an outrage. Congressional leaders are swamp creatures who felt insulted by his Inaugural Speech.

They should.

This is a messy?

It should be.

When you drain a swamp there is a lot of stink and a lot of mud. This is not for the faint of heart.

Circa is trying to keep up with media errors. I say “trying” because, in the age of Trump, that’s a tough job. Every day’s so-called news is the next day’s fake news, but a Circa is making a valiant effort to keep up by dedicating an entire section of its site to “accountability.”

So much of the errors and hatred comes from federal employees. One chart tells you everything you need to know about the Swamp that Trump is trying to drain and that, in its defense, is trying to drown him in its disgusting ooze.

Conservatives and Bernie supporters are united in their disdain for the WaPo. A really charming Bernie supporter I know posted on Facebook a Medium article announcing “There’s Major F*****y Afoot With The Washington Post, And I Think I Know Why“:

The Washington Post, if you need a refresher, was purchased in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, who as the fifth wealthiest person on planet Earth has billions upon billions of reasons to want to maintain the status quo that has made his extreme financial dominance possible. That same year, Bezos was awarded a $600 million contract (more than twice what the Post cost him) with the Central Intelligence Agency, a conflict of interest which Bezos’ paper to this day never discloses per universal journalistic protocol when reporting on US intelligence. Prior to the purchase, Bezos had proved his loyalty to America’s unelected power establishment by booting WikiLeaks from Amazon’s computer servers in 2010. Since the purchase, WaPo has become the single most virulently pro-establishment outlet in the top-tier corporate media, as well as a preferred outlet for leaks from the CIA, and has been shamelessly lying about Russia ever since the 2016 elections.

[snip]

So I think it’s understandable if people want to take it with a teensy weensy grain of salt when this glorified CIA trade rag tells us that anonymous sources say Donald Trump is colluding with those darn Russians again. In fact, I think it’s understandable if, knowing what we know about the CIA’s massive surveillance systems, we all found the timing of this release to be highly suspicious. After all, the fact that it’s getting harder and harder to dispute that the DNC emails WikiLeaks published were indeed a leak and not a hack does put a major damper on the “Russia hacked the election” narrative that corporate propaganda outlets like WaPo have been hammering the American consciousness with day in and day out since July of last year. Seth Rich being the leaker effectively kills the entire Russian hacking narrative, and thus the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative that was built upon it, and thus all the manipulations which were built upon the collusion narrative. Could the CIA have known in advance that this propaganda-killing narrative was about to hit the airwaves? Of course. Would they have wanted to distract America in order to ensure the continued manufactured consent for escalations with Putin and regime change in Syria? Yes. Did they? Come on.

I never thought I’d go all conspiracy theory but, honestly, there is something very bad going on between the Deep State (which includes the CIA) and the media, especially the WaPo. Sometimes it’s the crazy people who, unfettered by polite preconceptions, are attuned to what’s really going on.

There’s a slow motion assassination in play. We need to stop it and we do so, in part, by focusing strongly on actual facts and moral truth.