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The Winter of NeverTrump Discontent By Brian C. Joondeph

Posted By on February 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_winter_of_nevertrump_discontent.html

If the last few weeks have been bad for Democrats, imagine the dyspepsia and insomnia of the NeverTrump brigade. These are the so-called elite conservatives, intellectuals, smarter than your average Republican rube, the voice of reason and wisdom for the conservative movement.

They have beclowned themselves into irrelevancy since before Donald Trump was even elected, doubling down on stupid as they became punch lines on Twitter. Their latest outrage is President Trump’s impeachment and non-removal from office.

Impeachment is all but over, a wasted exercise in partisan derangement. It was a shiny object for media dogs and cats to chase around the room, never quite catching it.

For President Trump, it was a boost in his popularity, hitting 50 percent total approval in the Jan. 31 Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, the same day the U.S. Senate declined to call additional witnesses, since the House had already heard from 17 hand-picked Democrat witnesses, essentially ending the Senate impeachment trial.

Despite “mountains of evidence” and a “slam dunk case” that was “overwhelming,” House legal eagles Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler failed to make the case for removing a president from office for the unpardonable sin attempting to do his Constitutional duty investigating government corruption.

On schedule, the whiny NeverTrump brigade turned to Twitter to fuss and pout, much like children when told “it’s time for bed” in the middle of a good game of pin the tail on The Donald.

Start with Bill Kristol, founder of the failed Weekly Standard and constant Trump critic, who after impeachment had his “coming out of the closet” moment, revealing what everyone has known for years, that he is really a Democrat.

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Brexit Supporters Say ‘Free at Last’ as Britain Leaves the EU By John Fund

Posted By on February 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/brexit-supporters-overcome-decades-establishment-opposition/#slide-1After decades of opposition from the establishment — from Obama to Blair to the BBC and the IMF — the Brexiteers won the day

William F. Buckley Jr. entitled one of his anthologies of conservative thought “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” In it, he expressed his hope that the ideas in it would become reality.

Last Friday, I attended a party in London where leading Brexit supporters celebrated their nation’s departure from the European Union. Several of them privately told me they never thought that such a day would ever arrive. But the left-wing Guardian newspaper paid the Brexit rebels their due in 2016. It noted that they’d “worked for little else, with no reward, and with no sign that they would ever prevail.” The paper compared the Brexit “sect” to medieval monks who copied their manuscripts “waiting for the Dark Ages to come to an end.”

Friday’s party, organized in part by Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts and held at a private club in Mayfair, was full of toasts and speeches reminding the world of the great odds that battlers for Brexit had overcome. Rising just before the clock struck 11 p.m., the point at which Britain formally left the EU, Roberts brought the house down by declaring:

We faced an establishment that hadn’t been so unanimous on any single issue since appeasement and Munich. It was the BBC, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, David Cameron, the powers of Oxford and Cambridge, the civil service, the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industries, Goldman Sachs, and even the International Monetary Fund which warned Brexit would lead to a 10 percent decline in GNP — a decline greater than that during World War II.

But, Roberts continued: “The British people were conscious of their history, an extraordinary thing given they hadn’t been taught it in schools for the last half century. They instinctively understood the patriotic part of it. They were lions, they never were daunted, and the lions roared back in 2016.”

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London Police Shoot Suspect after ‘Terrorism-Related’ Knife Attack By Tobias Hoonhout F

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/london-police-shoot-suspect-after-terrorism-related-knife-attack/

A man was shot dead by police in London Sunday after stabbing two people in what police are calling a “terrorism-related” incident.

Three people — two stab victims and one injured by broken glass — were taken to the hospital, with one man in critical condition. London’s Metropolitan police added that they believed the attack to be “Islamist-related.”

The attack occurred around 2 p.m. in Streatham, south London, and eyewitnesses said the man shot dead by police appeared to have a device strapped to his chest.

“I was crossing the road when I saw a man with a machete and silver canisters on his chest being chased by what I assume was an undercover police officer,” a man told the PA news agency.

An off-duty security officer who lives in the Streatham area told CNN that the body had “something that looked like a device strapped to him.”

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Fanning the Flames By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

http://politicalmavens.com/

In a country reeling from the uptick in violence such as school shootings, cop-killings, anti-semitic, anti-Christian and racist massacres, not to mention the daily news reports of random street and subway stabbings, slashings and shootings – the NYTimes chose to offer this as its front page article on the impeachment :
(2/2/20): “Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson said, ‘ you must kill him.” This advice, quoted by the Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker sounds very similar to that issued by various Islamic religious leaders who have urged their followers to kills Jews anywhere they find them, using any implements at their disposal, particularly knives and large trucks Unfortunately, it resembles some of what Black Lives Matter urges on its followers with signs hailing “Kill the Pigs.”

The quote was originally a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s request to Emerson to critique the paper he was writing about Plato for the course he was taking as a Harvard undergraduate Emerson, obviously concerned about the loose ends Holmes had left in the paper, gave the young student some strong metaphoric advice: Plato was the king and though Holmes had struck him, he had not successfully completed his arguments against him.

Seen in the newspaper which has blamed most of the divisiveness in our society on Trump’s “racist rhetoric,” this little known quote, completely out of context, can be seen as an inflammatory invitation to the deranged malcontents in a lawless and dangerous society, one which also increasingly has trouble parsing the meaning and intent of metaphor.

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Remembering the Great Jewish Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb by Edward Alexander

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/02/remembering-the-great-jewish-historian-ge

Gertrude Himmelfarb, prolific historian of the Victorian period, professor emeritus of history at City University of New York, graduate of New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College, student at both University of Chicago and Cambridge, and powerful voice for moral and political conservatism, died in December at her home in Washington, DC. She was 97 years old.

She belonged to one of the first families of American conservatism, broadly defined: She was the sister of Milton Himmelfarb, long a brilliant contributing editor at Commentary and the widow of conservative thinker Irving Kristol — with whom she had formed a husband-wife team to equal Lionel and Diana Trilling. Their son, William Kristol, was the influential editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard.

Himmelfarb also belonged to that remarkable knot of New York Jews who were the children of immigrants yet chose to relocate themselves imaginatively within a European culture: Irvin Ehrenpreis from Manhattan became the biographer of and supreme authority on Jonathan Swift; Lionel Trilling, from the Bronx, became the biographer of Matthew Arnold; and Brooklynite Himmelfarb became the biographer of statesman Lord Acton (not only English but Catholic).

Unlike Ehrenpreis and Trilling, Himmelfarb did not distance herself from her Jewish roots. Quite the contrary. She found and celebrated Jewish values that were deeply rooted within Victorian values, firm ideas of right and wrong, the recognition that “thou shalt not” predominates over “thou shalt.” It was that link which brought her to the attention of Margaret Thatcher, who had been derided by her “progressive” political opponents for embracing Victorian values as the foundation stone of British greatness.

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TRUMP- ALINSKY RULES AND IMPEACHMENT BLOWBACK

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/alinskys_revenge_haunts_the_democrats_as_they_turn_to_billionaire_bloomberg.html

Alinsky’s revenge haunts the Democrats as they turn to billionaire Bloomberg
Thomas Lifson

The oldest political party in the world is on the verge of implosion. While a lot can happen in nine months (ask any obstetrician), the tectonic plates of American politics are shifting, and the Democrats’ political edifice is built on top of a gigantic set of fault lines. Were Saul Alinsky still alive, instead of spending quality time with the entity to whom he dedicated Rules for Radicals, he would be laughing his head off over the mess the party that claims the mantle of advancing the poor has made of its election prospects.

I have long suspected that Donald J. Trump has absorbed Alinsky, for he is a skillful practitioner of most, if not all of Alinsky’s rules. Keep them in mind the next time you watch a Trump Rally on TV or in person (if you can squeeze in):

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/impeachment_blowback_trump_supporters_feeling_good.html

Impeachment blowback: Trump supporters feeling good By Karin McQuillan

President Trump’s voters have been on a slow burn ever since the Russia hoax was launched to frame him.  We got angrier as it dragged on for two endless years, dirtying the president up with baseless investigations, and suppressing his approval ratings.  When the rigged investigation flopped, and the responsible Obama officials came under investigation by the DOJ, we thought it was behind us.  The respite was brief.  The Ukraine Hoax rolled out, the sham impeachment was launched, and Trump supporters entered a stage of cold, implacable rage and the determination to win. Dems have no interest in and no idea of the impact of their antics on normal Americans. We deplorables don’t count as people to them.  Dems have no idea that millions of Americans deeply love and understand the American Constitution.  That we see precisely the ugly relationship between Marxist activists, self-serving pols, preening liberals and a corrupt press that is the new Democrat power base. 

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Shock: Release of Famed Iowa Poll Cancelled at the last Minute After Buttigieg Campaign Complains Debra Heine

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/01/shock-release-of-famed-iowa-poll-cancelled-at-the-last-minute-after-buttigieg-campaign-complains/

The final Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers was pulled Saturday night shortly before it was to be released, supposedly because of a complaint that a name was left off the list of choices. As a result, the historically accurate, 76-year-old Iowa poll will not be released before Iowa voters caucus on Monday.

CNN had planned an hour-long show to cover the results of the poll live and had to cancel at the last minute.

The announcement stunned the political world and led to widespread speculation that the real reason the poll was spiked was because they didn’t like the results.

According to The New York Times, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained that his name was left off the list of candidates in one call interview.

The poll is conducted by telephone from a call center, where operators read from a prepared script of candidates’ names to determine who a voter plans to support. One operator had apparently enlarged the font size on their computer screen, perhaps cutting off Mr. Buttigieg’s name from the list of options, according to two people familiar with the incident who did not have permission to speak about it publicly.
After every phone call, the list of candidates’ names is randomly reordered, so Mr. Buttigieg may not have been uniquely affected by the error, one of the people said. But the poll’s overseers were unable to determine if the mistake was an isolated incident.

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‘Walls Are Closing In’ on the Democrats Buy stock in popcorn companies in anticipation of the entertainment to come. Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/01/walls-closing-in-on-the-democrats/

On Friday, as I and about 456,874 other people predicted, the Senate voted against calling yet more witnesses in the make-believe, 100 percent certified partisan impeachment fiasco run by the Democrats and their media cheerleaders.

That vote brought this lucrative entertainment to an end, de facto if not de jure. The official, signed-sealed-and-delivered end will come Wednesday, we’re told, when the Senate will vote on whether to acquit the president of the two charges on which he was impeached by the House. Spoiler alert: They will.

A quick refresher. Those two charges were “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.”

Let’s take them in order. The alleged abuse of power charge stemmed from President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelinsky. Trump was keen to have Zelinsky look into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He was also keen to have him look into allegations that Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who is campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, was knee-deep in corrupt activities.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” President Trump said, “that [Joe] Biden stopped the prosecution [of Burisma, the corrupt company on whose Board Hunter sat and from which he collected more than $50,000 a month] and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

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Manuel Quezon: Little-known savior of Jews By Michael Curtis

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/manuel_quezon_littleknown_savior_of_jews.html

A new film debuted around the world last month, an account of events during World War II in Manila: Quezon’s Game directed by Matthew Rosen, a filmmaker who began in London and lives in the Philippines. 

The film provides, using three languages, a version of a little- known story, of which there is no definite official statement and a lack of historical manuscripts, of the rescue organized by President Manuel L. Quezon starting in 1938 of 1200 German and Austrian Jews, coincidentally the same number of Jews saved by the well-known Oskar Schindler, who found shelter from the Holocaust in the Philippines.  Quezon had proposed an “Open Door policy,” one that would admit up to 10,000 Jews, but only 1280 made it. The ambitious and generous plan failed because of events in World War II and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

The context of the story is that the country, which by the Treaty of Paris 1898 that ended the Spanish-American war was ceded to the U.S as a territory, was trying to get full independence from the U.S. which it finally obtained on July 4, 1946. Until then the country was a protectorate of the U.S.  The Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1946 was the administrative body governing the country, preparing for a transition to full independence, controlled visas for entry.

Manuel Quezon in October 1935 won the first national presidential election, gaining 68% of the vote. As president he was determined to allow Jewish immigrants from Europe into the country but has to contend with internal critics and American policy on the issue.  Suffering from tuberculosis, he was fluent in English, a gifted pianist, brilliant lawyer, card player of poker and bridge, and had been a playboy who shaved off his moustache because it tickled the girls too much.  Quezon was a compassionate individual, a light of morality, and his story deserved to be better known.

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Wuhan Revisited By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on February 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/wuhan_revisited.html

For a number of years in the 20-aughts, I worked in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China.

China being China, and Wuhan being a provincial outpost of old China, an amalgamation of three towns incorporated under the one name, observations of life there then might be of interest now, given the tumult over the mushrooming conflagration of the coronavirus.

Because I lived on the outskirts of town, near a squealing pig farm, many buffalo in the fields, goats occasioning the streets, wild dogs inoffensively wandering about most of the open-air eateries not presumptuous enough to call themselves restaurants — a few plastic chairs and unwashed PVC tables scattered near a rough kitchen, basically — I was faced daily with the critical choice: Shall I risk whatever microbes or bacteria or whatever we might ‘catch’ or go along with the locals, who ate whatever was on offer without much of a tremor or fret.

Most of the time, frankly, I was hungry, and my colleagues and I trusted to Providence to keep us out of what the local Wuhanites called the doctor’s office, or the uncontemporary places they called hospitals, where  if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the stalls, your relatives brought you food, bed linens, and whatever else you needed that was outside the pill regimen or ‘treatment’ you were being accorded.

At night, because my brand- new apartment had been completed with a living room, a bedroom and a marble-floored Western bathroom, a major prize considering everyone else having a squat toilet, even at work, but no kitchen at all, I would  do my work, try to fight off the plagues of mosquitoes that bedeviled me every single night. Despite my burning Citronella candles as an encircling talismanic circle around my work-desk in a vain attempt to discourage the fierce buggers, every morning I’d have a field of itching bites up and down any exposed flesh.