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POLITICS

Trump’s Beltway Critics Failed in Afghanistan Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/23/trumps-beltway-critics-failed-in-afghanistan/

Turns out, the same class of experts that claims the president is the biggest threat to global security in 70 years has been the legitimate threat.

As I wrote earlier this week, Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden has plenty of explaining to do and not just about his son’s sweet gig with a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.

Biden, in the wake of an explosive exposé by the Washington Post, needs to account for his nearly two-decade involvement in the disastrous war in Afghanistan.

Few politicians in Washington have more fingerprints on the war’s failed planning and execution than Joe Biden: As the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 10 years, then vice president for eight, Biden supported the 2001 invasion; co-authored the 2002 bill to authorize reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan (at a cost of least $130 billion in U.S. tax dollars and climbing) and went along with Barack Obama’s surge of U.S. troops, which began a decade ago this month.

Despite his possessing almost the reverse of a Midas Touch when it comes to foreign affairs—Afghanistan is just one of Biden’s many and storied mishaps—Biden is earning endorsements from the Beltway’s national security crowd, Democrats and Republicans alike. Coincidentally, many of Biden’s supporters populate the same disgruntled diplomatic corps that has opposed Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy and now are attempting to oust him from the White House: The House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry was animated by the self-righteous musings of career State Department bureaucrats who think they, not the president, should set foreign policy.

David Marcus:National Review’s Dangerous Third Way On Impeachment

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/23/national-reviews-dangerous-third-way-on-impeachment/

An editorial at National Review badly misunderstands the Republican position on impeachment and the future of the conservative movement.

The editors at National Review published a baffling editorial today on the impeachment saga, one which, if its advice is taken, could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The article makes three basic points. One, Republican senators actually think what Trump did was wrong and want a way to say so; two, the GOP ought to admit what Trump did was wrong but does not justify removal; and three, the argument that without a crime a president can’t be removed is legally unsound.

Let’s take each in their turn and then examine the effect that taking on this entire suite of positions would have on impeachment and the general political climate.

The first assertion is that “Senate Republicans, by and large, have reached an unspoken consensus about President Trump and Ukraine,” namely that he should not have delayed aid, or dared suggest investigations that might impact potential political rival Joe Biden, and should not have kept insisting that his call was perfect. Frankly, there is no evidence of such a consensus among Republican senators, and much to suggest that it simply does not exist.

Since the beginning of this recent unpleasantness we have been hearing that behind closed doors Republicans in Congress are very worried. Prominent members of the Never Trump movement had assured us that their intel promised more than a few GOP votes to impeach Trump in the House existed. In reality, there were none. Now National Review, without any proof, appears to be making the same calculation for the Senate.

There is sparse evidence of this. Take Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, who said this week that what Trump did didn’t amount to a speeding ticket. He went on to say that what came out of the House was an abuse of the Constitution for political purposes. This does not sound like somebody waffling on whether Trump committed some foul act. And let’s face it, Cruz is far more representative of the GOP Senate caucus and the voters they represent as opposed to a Susan Collins or Mitt Romney, who sometimes take the bold stance of hinting at being troubled.

Another Bernie supporter is outed as a Marxist with a lust for blood By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/another_bernie_supporter_is_outed_as_a_marxist_with_a_lust_for_blood.html

Last week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, doing the investigative reporting the media refuses to do when Democrats (or “socialist democrats,” aka Marxists) are involved, uploaded two videos introducing people to Kyle Jurek, a Bernie field organizer in Iowa. Jurek openly supports a communist takeover, dismisses Soviet gulags as mere “re-education camps,” and thinks it would be a fine thing to have similar camps in America for Trump supporters. Jurek also assured the undercover journalist that he was not alone; there are others, he said, who shared his goals.

Bernie never commented on the video nor did his campaign dismiss Jurek.

Today, Project Veritas released a third video proving that Jurek was right when he said he was not an anomaly within the Bernie campaign. Project Veritas’s latest video looks at Martin Weissgerber, a South Carolina Field Organizer for the Sanders Campaign. Weissgerber is a red diaper baby, who boasts about his Belgian father’s participation in the 1968 French civil unrest and bemoans the fact that his mother has to tone down her politics a bit for her work at an NPR affiliate.

Weissgerber is cut from the same cloth as Jurek, for he insists that the gulags weren’t that bad and openly describes himself as a Marxist who wants “anarcho-communism. His big dream is to send all of America’s billionaires to his gulag camps where they can “build roads . . . rebuild our roads, rebuild our dams, rebuild our bridges. Let’s force them,” he says. He thinks it would be an equally good idea for all Republicans to get re-educated too.

Other goals that Weissgerber hopes that Bernie can realize are the dissolution of the American government with a Bernie dictatorship (although he worries that Bernie is not strong enough to make the best of it); the women’s rights the Soviet Union offered (because it was the “most Progressive place to date in the world); and the seizure of all private property for total nationalization.

Hillary Clinton finally gets her revenge against Bernie Sanders By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/hillary_clinton_finally_gets_her_revenge_against_bernie_sanders.html

2008 was supposed to be Hillary’s year – except that she was overtaken by a charismatic, young black man unburdened by her decades of scandals. Hillary swallowed her resentment and made nice with Obama.

By 2016, her time had come. She’d earned it.

This time, though, an open socialist who looked like a crazy uncle, but appealed to hard-left young voters, threatened to end her inevitable coronation. Hillary and the DNC, however, worked together to rig the system so Bernie didn’t have a chance. Fortunately for America, it turned out Hillary didn’t have a chance either.

What may have helped Hillary’s defeat was that passionate Bernie supporters – the “Bernie Bros” – weren’t good sports. With Bernie gone, they didn’t throw their support to Hillary. Instead, they sat out the election. To conservatives, Hillary lost because she was an arrogant, tin-eared, corrupt candidate. Hillary, though, thinks she lost in part because of Bernie and misogyny.

These themes emerged in a lengthy interview Hillary gave to the Hollywood Reporter, while shilling a new documentary about herself. Hillary was plain mean about Bernie:

In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” That assessment still hold?

Yes, it does.

Feel the Purge . . . er, Bern The statements captured by Project Veritas do not damn Bernie Sanders. But they are an accurate snapshot of a significant portion of this following. Ray McCoy

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/21/feel-the-purge-er-bern/

On January 14, the investigative outlet Project Veritas released undercover footage of dialogue between one of their embedded journalists and a senior member of the Iowa field operation for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

In the video, Kyle Jurek predicts with relish violence in the event of a Democratic convention in which the Vermont senator is denied the nomination. And, of course, cities will burn if Donald Trump wins reelection. Jurek also praised the approaches of Joseph Stalin and the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba toward counterrevolutionaries, and said Sanders could not campaign by openly espousing views such as his own.

As usual, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe teased at the end that this was not even the most inflammatory footage of Jurek. The campaign staffer, in fact, was arrested in Iowa earlier this month for driving while intoxicated and related offenses.

If recent history is a guide, it would be a mistake to give journalists the standing of rock stars. Nevertheless, O’Keefe’s track record would make him the Jimmy Page of investigative reporting, at least on the Right.

But O’Keefe’s latest scoop could use some perspective. Jurek’s private statements do not necessarily reflect the views of Sanders, other campaign staffers, volunteers, or reporters. Certainly some of Jurek’s disparaging remarks about his candidate—particularly calling him a poor judge of character for retaining long-time campaign manager Jeff Weaver as an advisor—shouldn’t be ascribed to the campaign.

Biden Says Only Felons Should Be Deported And He Doesn’t ‘Count Drunk Driving as a Felony’ By Tobias Hoonhout (!!!!????)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-says-only-felons-should-be-deported-and-he-doesnt-count-drunk-driving-as-a-felony/

Former vice president Joe Biden said Monday that “I don’t count drunk driving as a felony” during a Vice News panel on minority issues, despite falsely claiming for years that his first wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver.

Biden’s comments came after he was asked “what exact changes would you bring to ICE as an agency,” and he responded by saying he would fire an agent who tried to deport an undocumented immigrant not charged with a felony.

“You change the culture by saying you are going to get fired. You are fired if, in fact, you do that. You only arrest for the purpose of dealing with a felony that’s committed, and I don’t count drunk driving as a felony,” Biden said.

Following a 1972 tragedy in which Biden’s first wife and baby daughter were killed when their car was struck by a tractor-trailer, Biden stated that the other driver was drinking at the time of the accident, despite the driver never being charged with drunk driving.

Afghanistan Is Joe Biden’s War Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/20/afghanistan-is-joe-bidens-war/

It’s easy for the Democratic frontrunner to claim now that he would order troops home if he’s elected president. But first, the former vice president needs to account for the disaster that he and Barack Obama left for Donald Trump to clean up.

Joe Biden often brags that he was Barack Obama’s foreign affairs consigliere during their eight years together in the White House.

“One of the reasons Barack Obama picked me as vice president is because he lacked the background in foreign policy,” Biden told an NPR reporter in December. “He knew what he wanted to do, he knew how to get it done. But notice every time we had a problem on Capitol Hill, who went up and got it fixed?” Biden, of course, was referring to himself.

But as Obama’s legacy on international affairs implodes under the glare of Donald Trump’s brighter achievements, the role of Obama’s self-proclaimed BFF and global guru deserves long-delayed scrutiny. And no other Obama-era debacle merits more scrutiny than the war in Afghanistan, America’s longest-running war that continues to cost young lives and tens of billions in U.S. tax dollars each year.

In an explosive series published last month in the Washington Post, “The Afghanistan Papers” provides firsthand accounts from the war’s closest managers. Dozens of interviews offer insight into how the conflict has been mishandled from the start; how intelligence has been politicized; and how top officials, including former commanders-in-chief, have deceived the public and Congress about the real status of the war.

Bernie Supporters To Boycott Election If Biden is Nominee, ‘People Will Sit At Home’ By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/election/bernie-supporters-to-boycott-of-election-if-biden-is-nominee-people-will-sit-at-home/

Bernie Sanders supporters are known for their steadfast loyalty to the socialist Vermont Senator, and some are promising to sit at home on Election Day if Joe Biden becomes the party’s nominee. These supporters warn that nominating another establishment candidate will ensure Trump’s reelection because they’ll sit it out.

Sanders’ supporters feel he “isn’t getting his due though he’s proven to have staying power in public opinion and fundraising, even after suffering a heart attack last October,” reports the Washington Examiner. “As of last week, he leads a tight four-horse race in Iowa ahead of the first-in-the-nation caucuses on Feb. 3, raising a record figure of $34.5 million in the final financial quarter of 2019 for a total of $96 million.” Despite his strengths in the primary, they feel he’s being ignored and underestimated, and the possibility of nominating a socialist-lite candidate, they say, will dampen the enthusiasm of the grassroots.

“When I look at some of these other candidates out there, I can see them just sucking any enthusiasm from any undecided voters. So anyone who might have been for Bernie won’t vote for Biden, or any of the others out there,” said Joe Jackelen, a Bernie Sanders supporter in Iowa, to the Washington Examiner. “I think that people will sit at home because they see establishment Democrats that don’t really care. The only thing that they bring to the table is that they’re not Trump. That is not going to drive enough people out that will get a win over Trump,” he added.

Will Bernie Sanders’ diehard supporters will actually sit out the election if Bernie doesn’t win the nomination in appreciable numbers?

WHO IS MANU RAJU? HE IS JUST WHAT McSALLY CALLED HIM….A LIBERAL HACK….

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/az-sen-martha-mcsally-calls-cnn-reporter-a-liberal-hack-triggering-liberal-hacks-on-twitter/

AZ Sen. Martha McSally Calls CNN Reporter a ‘Liberal Hack,’ Triggering Liberal Hacks on Twitter Debra Heine

Commentary editor Noah Rothman simply called McSally’s words “pretty uncalled for.”

But they were called for, as Raju is one of the Hill’s most shameless and reliable mouth pieces for Democrats.

Until the Russia Collusion hoax fizzled, Raju was one of its biggest peddlers.

In December of 2017, for instance, Raju was involved in”one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media,” as the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald put it.

With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
***

There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent afterWikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

Federalist co-founder Sean Davis challenged Tapper to explain how the CNN reporter could have gotten that story so wrong without being either a liberal hack or “too stupid to read the date on the email.”

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway called Raju “a favorite and reliable leak recipient for Democrats.”

The Democrat candidates have consistently ignored Israel in their debates By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_democrat_candidates_have_consistently_ignored_israel_in_their_debates.html

A Jerusalem Post article points out something interesting about the Democrat Party debates to date: They are loudly silent about Israel. While each of the six candidates who made it to the January 2020 debate had a great to say about Iran, and especially how wonderful Obama’s Iran Deal was and how all would handle Iran so much better than President Trump ever could, none even whispered the word Israel.

Things would have been different, says Herb Keinon, at a Republican debate:

Were the tables reversed, were this a debate among Republican contenders, Israel would most likely have been a major part of the conversation, even if the thrust of the discussion was Iran and not the Palestinian issue. Republican candidates – in talking about Iran or the nuclear deal – would surely have inserted lines about “the need to keep Israel safe” or “working strongly with our close ally Israel.”

As former Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller told the Jewish Insider after the debate, “Had it been a Republican debate, with Iran as focus, they would have been stumbling over one another with pro-Israeli references.”

What the debate reflects, says Keinon, is a profound change in the Democrat Party as a whole. The candidates have determined that supporting Israel is no longer an advantage to a candidate:

The current candidates – those on the debate stage and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was not there – apparently feel they have little to gain politically right now by speaking on Israel.