Covfefe

With tariffs and tweets, President Trump eggs on a trade war between China and America. With no trade talks on the horizon, relations are unlikely to improve soon. That seems to be what Trump, a self-styled "fighter," wants.

He is right to see China as a rival. He is also right that Washington needs to take action against China's predatory policies. But the president is woefully wrong in the actions he is taking. Instead of developing a coherent strategy, targeting China’s misdeeds, and mitigating its threat, he’s provoking a broad trade war and simply irritating Beijing with his unfocused tariffs and whiny comments.

Supreme Court justices should not have life tenure. Maybe ten years, staggered term endings for fairness. Just my opinion. #MeToo has been successfully weaponized, regardless of the validness of the claims. Sad for women who have legitimate cases but limited evidence.

he who feels threatened by "weaponized" women-type complaints ought, you know, ponder being born as a penetratee.

Supreme Court justices should not have life tenure

I can think of at least one politician that might be interested in lifetime tenure.

LOS ANGELES — Former rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight pleaded no contest Thursday to voluntary manslaughter for running over and killing a Compton businessman nearly four years ago. The Death Row Records co-founder entered the plea in Los Angeles Superior Court and has agreed to serve 28 years in prison.

All of which brings us to the issue of Trump's performance to date. The initial conundrum was: could he shift from being the slashing, caustic ex-reality show star of the campaign to a more measured, presidential persona? Perhaps to the dismay of his diehard critics, Trump did indeed make that transition at the Capitol on inauguration morning, when he appeared grave and focused, palpably conveying a sense of the awesome burdens of the highest office. As for his particular actions as president, I am no fan of executive orders, which usurp congressional prerogatives and which I was already denouncing when Obama was constantly signing them (with very little protest, one might add, from the mainstream media).

Trump's "travel ban" executive order in late January was obviously bungled—issued way too fast and with woefully insufficient research (pertaining, for example, to green-card holders, who should have been exempted from the start). The administration bears full responsibility for fanning the flames of an already aroused "Resistance." However, I fail to see the "chaos" in the White House that the mainstream media (as well as conservative Never Trumpers) keep harping on—or rather, I see no more chaos than was abundantly present during the first six months of both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Trump seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises, notably regarding the economy and deregulation—the approaches to which will always be contested in our two-party system. His progress has thus far been in stops and starts, partly because of the passivity, and sometimes petulance, of the mundane GOP leadership.

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Last week, that conceptual gap was on prominent display, as the media, consumed with their preposterous Russian fantasies, were fixated on former FBI director James Comey's maudlin testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Comey is an effete charlatan who should have been fired within 48 hours of either Hillary or Trump taking office.) Meanwhile, Trump was going about his business. The following morning, he made remarks at the Department of Transportation about "regulatory relief," excerpts of which I happened to hear on my car radio that afternoon. His words about iron, aluminum, and steel seemed to cut like a knife through the airwaves. I later found the entire text on the White House website......

Of course this rousing speech (with its can-do World War Two spirit) got scant coverage in the mainstream media. Drunk with words, spin, and snark, middle-class journalists can't be bothered to notice the complex physical constructions that make modern civilization possible. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status. But if they dare to think for themselves and vote differently from their liberal overlords, they are branded as rubes and pariahs.

In summary: to have any hope of retaking the White House, Democrats must get off their high horse, lose the rabid rhetoric, and reorient themselves toward practical reality and the free country they are damned lucky to live in.

apogee

Sep 24, 2018 - 06:17pm PT

No, there’s another strategy at work here, below the radar of the ranting of the right and left here. McConnell is a shrewd f*#ker...he’s got other cards to play yet.

Several months ago, the very night the Stormy Daniels story broke, I appeared on Don Lemon’s show on CNN. The producer told the guests a few minutes before we went on air that Lemon wanted our reaction to the Daniels allegations. The first guest said something trite about how “she may be doing this to call attention to herself, but we have to treat these charges against Trump very seriously.” Next, Lemon turned to me for my reaction. I really had no opinion about this story, so I just blurted out the first thing that popped into my head: “Gee, Don, who would have ever thought a stripper would want to call attention to herself?”

Now, if you are a normal person, you probably at least laugh a little or smile about that line. But the video went viral on YouTube because the other three guests, all liberals, and Lemon sat stone faced when I said that. They didn’t crack even the slightest hint of a smile. There was just a long awkward silence until I finally said, “Hello, that’s a joke.”


The point of this story is that liberals just don’t have a sense of humor anymore. The rage that the left feels now about President Trump, tax cuts, conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and more has become so all consuming that it has made many liberals miserable to be around.

Consider the statement by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who lashed out last week at her Republican colleagues regarding the sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh: “Guess who is perpetrating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country. I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up.” It’s not just that she said it, but she now wears this nastiness as a badge of honor. She even received a standing ovation in the Capitol the other day from abortion activists.

Similarly, the ugly incident when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant weeks ago wasn’t an aberration. Liberals are so filled with a sense of moral superiority and rage that they literally don’t want to sit in the same dining room with us.

Last week, I gave a talk at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley to some 250 technology executives and the venture capitalists who fund them. I asked at the start of my speech how many of them have a positive opinion of Trump. Now, mind you, if any group has been transformed into gazillionaires because of Trump policies, it was this crowd. Out of the 250 attendees, about three people dared to raise their hands. I knew that liberalism is transcendent in the Bay Area, but I didn’t realize groupthink was this lopsided.

After the speech, about 20 to 30 of the attendees came up and said they enjoyed my talk. Several whispered that they really like what Trump is doing. Huh? Why didn’t they raise their hands? The answers: “I have clients here and I will lose them if they know I support Trump;" "I will be ostracized if my friends know my real feelings;" "I didn’t want to get into an argument with people;” and so on.

The sad irony is that it is liberals who are running the sanctimonious and moralistic crusades to end bullying in America. Yet, apparently, there are just some views that aren’t worth tolerating. A conservative friend of mine always uses a line about liberals hating Trump more than they love America. It would be one thing to hate Trump if his policies were failing, as liberals unanimously believed would happen. But, lo, we now are nearing the end of 2018 as one of the most prosperous periods in modern times, and that has only further infuriated Trump haters.

Perhaps it is just human nature to hate the one who keeps proving you wrong. Some are like comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, who admits he wants millions of Americans to lose their jobs, so that we can get rid of Trump. Yes, that’s just what this country needs now, a little more misery.

The economic boom is now palpable to nearly all Americans. It transcends spin. Polls are showing that Trump is unpopular, but Americans are upbeat about the economy. Consumers are spending like there’s no tomorrow. That is what is so disconcerting about liberal rage. They are bitterly unhappy at the very moment that the American economy is as prosperous as at anytime in modern history, and when median family incomes just hit an all time high, when black and Hispanic unemployment have hit record lows. What’s so bad about feeling good?

What a difference a generation makes. It used to be conservatives who were the stuffy ones. Liberals were the fun ones to be around. Now the ones who are so uptight are the liberals like actor Jeff Bridges, who once was funny but now is so embarrassed by modern day America that he seems to want to be anywhere on this planet, except here. OK, then, just go! Liberals are making it clearer with each passing day that they don’t want to associate with conservatives any longer. As a conservative, I hate to say it, but more and more the feeling is mutual.