Misplaced Patriotism Is Damaging to Our Constitutional Order By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-misplaced-patriotism-damaging-to-constitutional-order/

In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency. We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters.

Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.

Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.

Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.

On the first day of the impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff called his initial two witnesses, career State Department diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent. Far from providing damning evidence of criminal presidential behavior, Taylor and Kent mostly confined themselves to three topics: their own sterling résumés, their lack of any firsthand knowledge of incriminating Trump action, and their poorly hidden disgust with the manner and substance of Trump’s foreign policy.

Oddly, both had little clue that their demeanor and thinly disguised self-importance were a perfect example of why Trump got elected — to come up with new ideas antithetical to the conventional wisdom of unelected career bureaucrats.

Taylor and Kent announced that they are simply high-minded civil servants who serve the presidential administrations of both parties without bias.

But by nature, the huge federal bureaucracy counts on bigger government and more taxes to feed it. So naturally, the bureaucracy is usually more sympathetic to big-government progressives than to small-government conservatives.

From Impeachment to the Debates — and Back Again By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-impeachment-inquiry-democratic-debate-proves-to-be-afterthought/

After three days of Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry, we are left with only the monotony. We know in advance all the questions, the subjective mood answers and bureaucratic mindset of the witnesses, the ensuing spin, and the congressional posturing.

In lieu of a Jaworski or Starr special prosecutor’s damning report, a White House tape, or even a blue dress, there is only “I assumed,” “I gathered,” “I presumed,” and “my personal belief is that” — without direct knowledge of impeachable wrongdoing or some smoking-gun email or document.

The next “star” witness, Ambassador Sondland, played perfectly the Janus consummate businessman — nodding first to Democrats, only then turning to grin at Republicans.

Sondland seemed at last to offer Schiff the chance to run out to announce to the captive press a proverbial MSNBC/CNN “bombshell.” But it was mostly a dud, with Sondland referencing a hoped-for Ukraine meeting in the White House (that never happened) for Ukrainian statements on corruption (that never happened), rather than a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Ukraine — at least according to Sondland’s “own presumption.” He even mentioned a “quid pro quo,” but that was focus grouped out to “bribery” days ago. (Sondland, like most major ambassadors, should be an expert in quid pro quos, given that it is a hallowed and bipartisan American tradition to sell off the most prestigious European ambassadorial slots to the most generous campaign donors.)

But then the cagey Sondland tacked back by reciting his phonecall question to the president, in which he asked the existential question of what Trump wanted from Ukraine — with Trump answering “Nothing!” Checkmate?

All day long, the grinning Sondland played Roadrunner to Adam Schiff’s Wiley E. Coyote, as he slowed and pulled up to offer up Trump — only to scoot away in a puff of dust as soon as Schiff tried to wrap his hands around him.

What we are left with so far are two inconvenient truths that won’t go away.

Jonathan Greig: Macy’s holiday breach highlights retailer’s need for encryption and scrutiny of third-party systems

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/macys-holiday-breach-highlights-retailer-need-for-encryption-and-scrutiny-of-third-party-systems/

Attackers were collecting user credit card information for an entire week from the Macy’s website before they were alerted. Here’s how retailers can protect themselves.

Just a few weeks before America spends billions of dollars on Black Friday, Macy’s is facing a PR nightmare after it was forced to notify thousands of customers that their credit card information was sent to cybercriminals during a hack on October 7. 

The billion-dollar retailer, which controls nearly 600 stores across the country, said hackers injected malicious “card-skimming” JavaScript into their ‘Checkout’ and ‘My Wallet’ pages, meaning the credit card information, addresses and names of thousands were recorded on another website that could be accessed by the attackers. 

Sycophants Who Flatter Child Climate ‘Oracles’ Deserve Unrelenting Ridicule by Frank Bullit

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/21/sycophants-who-flatter-child-climate-oracles-deserve-unrelenting-ridicule/

Following the Greta Thunberg path to fame is an Australian boy who gained notoriety for fuming about “narrow-minded” politicians. While the pair’s excesses can be attributed to their youth, the behavior of the shallow adults insisting the two are prophets who must be listened to cannot be excused. The proper response to these “grownups” behaving as high schoolers is harsh ridicule.

The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her. She was even considered last month as “the one to beat” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for putting an end to his country’s decades-long conflict with Eritrea.

Now comes Australia’s “Outback schoolboy” Dylan Storer, not as famous as Thunberg, but just as green, and we don’t mean that in an environmental sense. Storer, also 16, “has been praised on social media after slamming ‘narrow-minded’ politicians while weighing in on Australia’s bushfire crisis,” the Daily Mail reports.

“It’s not political opinion to say climate change hasn’t contributed to these horrific bushfires,” he said earlier this week on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” broadcast.

Of course Storer’s words were “met with huge applause from the audience,” because who can’t resist showing just how hip they are by airing their enthusiastic support of a raving child?

Radical Son: The Rise of Chesa Boudin San Francisco elects a D.A. rooted in the Weather Underground. Paul Kengor

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/radical-son-rise-chesa-boudin-paul-kengor/

On October 20, 1981, the guys and gals of the Weather Underground finally did it. They at last carried out a criminal act that not only led directly to deaths but also landed at least some of them in prison. Unlike Bill Ayers, one of several Weather Underground fugitives fleeing the FBI who would later boast, “Guilty as hell, free as a bird! America is a great country!,” the orchestrators of this incident didn’t get away with it.

This time, the plotters, including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, pulled off an armed robbery of a Brinks truck outside the Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York, in which two “pigs” (read: police officers) and a Brinks guard were killed, plus three other officers seriously wounded. Losing their lives that day were Brinks guard Peter Paige and police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly “Chipper” Brown.

Brown, incidentally, was the only black officer on the force; in fact, he was the first African American member of the Nyack, New York, police department. This was ironic given that the perpetrators did the job in part to finance their war against “racism” in America, the apotheosis of which would be the establishment of a “New Afrika” in America’s southern states.

Kathy Boudin was driving the getaway truck, a U-Haul. The haters of capitalism stole away with over a million bucks they stuffed in their greedy pockets — quite literally blood money.

Boudin was no stranger to violence. She had escaped a precarious brush with death a decade earlier. On March 6, 1970, three Weather Underground troops were fatally injured in an accidental explosion at an apartment in a wealthy section of Greenwich Village in a plan that went awry. As David Horowitz has documented, the original plan had been to produce nail bombs to detonate at a military dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where the communist revolutionaries hoped to murder young Vietnam vets reunited for an evening of happiness with their wives. The plan backfired.

Arabs Against Boycotting Israel It has harmed the region and the Palestinian cause. By Mostafa El-Dessouki and Eglal Gheita

https://www.wsj.com/articles/arabs-against-boycotting-israel-11574293923

London

Boycotting Israel and its people has only strengthened both, while doing great harm to Arab countries, and not least to the Palestinians. For the sake of the region, it is long past time to move forward to a postboycott era.

That’s where the Arab Council for Regional Integration aims to go. The council formed this week in London and is made up of 32 civic actors from 15 Arab countries, including us. The council isn’t a government organization—members include heads of NGOs, prominent media figures, Muslim clerics, and even musicians. The only political figures who attended were a former Kuwaiti information minister and an Egyptian legislator who also heads a political party there. Regardless of profession, those gathered espoused a spirit of partnership that knows no borders and repudiates the culture of exclusion and demonization that has wreaked havoc across the Arab world. First on our list is the generations-old boycott of Israel and Israelis.

The boycott evolved in stages. In the mid-20th century, Arab elites enacted exclusionary policies against 900,000 Jews indigenous to Arab lands, culminating in their mass dispossession and forced migration. In the 1940s, the internal crackdown developed into an intergovernmental Arab effort to target the young country to which most of these Jews fled—Israel—through political, cultural and economic isolation. The goal was to uproot them and their European Jewish brethren from the area. Next came a ban on all civil engagement with Israelis, even and especially in countries nominally at peace with Israel.

The latest iteration is driven largely by foreigners: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aims to drive a wedge between Israelis and their global partners. Each boycott has failed to defeat Israelis. Instead, the economic pressure inspired innovative responses that invigorated their economy and society.

Sondland’s Unimpeachable Offenses Witnesses are providing more detail about what we already know.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sondlands-unimpeachable-offenses-11574294949

The House impeachment hearings roll on, but the most important news is how little new we are learning about President Trump and Ukraine. The witnesses from the diplomatic and national-security bureaucracy are filling in some details—many of which are unflattering about how policy is made in this Administration—but none change the fundamental narrative or suggest crimes or other impeachable offenses***

That includes Wednesday’s testimony by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union who described what he saw and heard from May through September. His account essentially confirms that Mr. Trump had a negative view of Ukraine, was reluctant to keep supplying U.S. aid, and asked Mr. Sondland and others to work with Rudy Giuliani to press Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce that he was opening an anti-corruption probe.

Some nasty anti-president quotes to offer perspective Seth Swirsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/some_nasty_antipresident_quotes_to_offer_perspective.html

Here are just a few choice quotes leveled at the president (read to the end):

“The president has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation.”

“He is evidently a person of very inferior character.”

“The president is a fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism, a worse tyrant than has existed since the days of Nero.”

“Those who vote for the president’s re-election are traitors.

“He is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity.”

“There is a strong feeling among those who have seen the president, in the way of business, that he lacks practical talent for the job.  It is thought that there should be more readiness.”

Yes.  These nasty things were said about President…Lincoln. By Democrats and “NeverLincolns” of their day.  All while he won the Civil War and ended slavery. 

So keep fighting, President Trump.  While your opponents try everything they can to demean, demoralize, and depose you, the decent people of this country appreciate your tireless efforts in giving us this great economy, a stronger military, better trade deals, and a restored sense of America’s true greatness.

Seth Swirsky is a songwriter and filmmaker living in Los Angeles.

Pew Research: 6-in-11 Americans Want More Deportations of Illegal Aliens

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/17/pew-research-6-in-11-americans-want-

A majority of Americans say they want to see more deportations of illegal aliens and increased security along the United States-Mexico border, a new survey finds.

The latest Pew Research Center survey reveals that nearly 70 percent of all Americans believe increased security at the porous U.S.-Mexico border is very or somewhat important — including more than 90 percent of Republican voters.Another 54 percent of Americans said more deportations of the nation’s 11 million to 22 million illegal alien population is very or somewhat important. Republican voters by a majority of 83 percent said increasing deportations of illegal aliens is important ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The findings come as President Trump’s administration has constructed less than 80 miles thus far of border wall along the southern border, though officials have repeatedly said hundreds of miles of construction is on its way.

For almost a year, the Trump administration has promised that 500 miles of border wall will have been completed before next year’s election in November.

Adam Schiff, ‘Lt. Col.’ Vindman and the impeachment ratings flop The Democrats thought they could transform this tawdry revenge fantasy into reality. It isn’t working Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/schiff-vindman-impeachment-flop/

No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’

That pretty much sums up yesterday’s testimony.

‘Did you receive any indication whatsoever, or anything that resembled a quid pro quo?’

Former envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker: ‘No.’

Devin Nunes to Tim Morrison, former NSC official: ‘Did anyone ever ask you to bribe or extort anyone at any time during your time in the White House?’

‘No.’

This follows the responses of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the question of whether he was offered a quid pro quo: US aid in exchange for investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with the natural gas company Burisma: ‘No.’

Ditto Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the European Union: was there a quid pro quo: ‘No.’ (Sondland’s testimony has just begun at the time of writing: rest assured it will be more of the same.)

Last week’s hearings were preposterous, a disaster for the Democrats. This week’s hearings are shaping up to be even worse news for the partisans of the Adam Schiff Show.

Remember that old hippie slogan, ‘suppose they gave a war and nobody came?‘ It’s been updated and applied not to international conflicts but partisan intramural sniping: suppose they gave a hearing and nobody came?

For that’s the truth of the matter. The ratings for this reality TV show are in the tank. During Watergate, during the Clinton impeachment, people were glued to the news. Now, despite the screaming CNN chyrons, anti-Trump Washington Post and New York Times sermons, nobody cares.