VDH on President Trump and the Election

McClintock on the Propositions

Tom McClintock on the November 2020 California ballot propositions:

Proposition 14 = No
Proposition 15 = No
Proposition 16 = No
Proposition 17 = No
Proposition 18 = No
Proposition 19 = No
Proposition 20 = Yes
Proposition 21 = No
Proposition 22 = Yes
Proposition 23 = No
Proposition 24 = No
Proposition 25 = No

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Trump Still Stands

From VDH:

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative.

When that did not work, more than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks. Then San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer toured the country and lavished millions on advertisements demanding Trump’s removal by impeachment—and was sorely disappointed when he discovered that billion-dollar-fueled virtue-signaling proved utterly bankrupt virtue-signaling.

When that did not work, celebrities and politicians hit social media and the airwaves to so demonize Trump that culturally it would become taboo even to voice prior support for the elected president. Their chief tool was a strange new sort of presidential assassination chic, as Madonna, David Crosby, Robert de Niro, Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, and a host of others linguistically vied with one another in finding the most appropriately violent end of Trump—blowing him up, burning him up, beating him up, shooting him up, caging him up, or decapitating him. Apparently, the aim—aside from careerist chest-thumping among the entertainment elite—was to lower the bar of Trump disparagement and insidiously delegitimize his presidency.

When that did not work, during the president’s first year in office, the Democrats and the media at various times sought to invoke the 25th Amendment, claiming Trump was so mentally or physically impaired that he was not able to carry out the duties of president. At one point, congressional Democrats called Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee to testify that Trump was unfit to continue. In fact, to prove her credentials, Lee edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that offered arguments from 27 psychiatrists and other mental health experts. In May 2017, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met secretly in efforts to poll Trump cabinet members to discover whether they could find a majority to remove Trump from office—again on grounds that he was mentally unbalanced. According to McCabe, Rosenstein offered to wear a wire, in some sort of bizarre comic coup attempt to catch Trump off-guard in a confidential conversation.

When that did not work, 200 congressional Democrats in late 2018 sued in federal court to remove President Trump, claiming he had violated the esoteric Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that forbids federal officials from taking gifts, jobs, and titles from foreign governments. They alleged Trump’s presidency has enhanced his overseas real estate holdings and interests. Yet, according to some sources, the various Trump companies have lost some $1 billion in value after he took office—to the delight of the same critics who swore he has profited enormously as president.

When that did not work, the ongoing “Resistance” both covertly and overtly sought ways to retard or destroy the Trump presidency—often by leaking presidential memos, conversations, and phone calls. An anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times on September 15, 2018 boasted of a plan of resistance to his governance and initiatives from those in the administrative state from inside the Trump Administration, most of them allegedly establishment Republicans.

When that did not work, progressive heartthrob lawyer and now indicted Michael Avenatti reintroduced pornographic film star Stormy Daniels to the public. He claimed that Daniels had somehow been tricked into signing a supposedly improper and now invalid non-disclosure agreement not to talk about an alleged sexual encounter of a decade earlier with private citizen Trump in an exchange for a payment of $135,000.

Allegedly, Trump’s acquiescence to Daniels’ veritable blackmail demands had now impaired her own opportunities of further profiting to a far greater degree from the past alleged tryst with a now President Trump. Until his recent indictment for a number of felonies, Avenatti himself had translated his work with Daniels into media celebrity-hood, appearing over 100 times on cable news shows to damn Trump, predict his impeachment, and prep his promised 2020 presidential run against Trump.

When that did not work, federal law enforcement officials stormed the offices of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, in search of incriminating materials. Cohen quickly was leveraged by federal attorneys, flipped, and offered anti-Trump testimonies and documents in exchange for leniency. He produced stealth tapes of private conversations with his own client Trump—and shortly afterward was disbarred by the New York State Supreme Court for pleading guilty to a series of felonies.

When that did not work, Russian collusion hysteria continued to sweep the country. The moribund phony Steele dossier (that had failed to derail the Trump campaign and transition) was reignited by the media and progressive politicos after the firing of FBI director James Comey, leading to the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the emergence of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.

Rosenstein then appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel—in a series of events prompted by none other than fired James Comey, who admitted that he illegally leaked confidential, if not some classified, presidential memos to create the conditions necessary for such a special appointment. Mueller’s subsequent media darling attorneys—praised as the “dream team,” “all-stars,” “army,” “untouchables,” and “hunter-killer team”—of mostly Democratic partisans, some Clinton donors, and a few who had defended either the Clinton Foundation or Clinton aides then spent 22 months, and between $30-40 million trying to build a case. In the end, they leveraged mostly minor Trump satellites on process crimes, misleading testimonies, or past business deals in hopes of finding collusionary guilt. Leaking was a Mueller team trademark as each week the collusionary media announced another “bombshell” or “noose tightening” around the neck of Donald Trump—or mysteriously showed up at the home of the next Mueller victim, to wait for the arrival of SWAT teams to swoop into make an arrest.

When that did not work, congressional committees and the left-wing mob next went after William Barr, Trump’s “hand-picked” attorney general (are not all AGs “hand-picked” by the president?). Barr’s crime was that he had followed the law to the letter. And so Barr spent a few days after the arrival of the exonerating Mueller collusion report to ensure first, before releasing it to the public, that it did not endanger national security or besmirch the reputations of innocent named individuals. If in a blink, “collusion” had died, soon in its death throes it birthed “obstruction”—as if Trump’s objections to vast resources wasted on chasing an imaginary non-crime of collusion was obstruction

When that did not work, congressional committees mobilized to sue and force Trump to release at least six years of his private income tax records, elements of which already in bits and pieces had been leaked.

Are such efforts in the future to be institutionalized?

Will the Left nod and keep still, if Republicans attempt to remove an elected Democratic President before his tenure is up? Are appeals to impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, and a Special Counsel the now normal cargo of political opposition to any future elected president?

Is it now permissible in 2020 for Trump’s FBI director to insert an informant into the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee? If Joe Biden is the 2020 nominee, will the Trump Justice Department seek FISA warrants to monitor the communications of Biden’s campaign team—in worries that Biden son’s business practices in the Ukraine had earlier compromised Biden who had intervened on his behalf by threatening to cut off aid to Ukraine? Will they investigate Biden’s propensity to hug and kiss under-aged girls? Will Trump’s CIA director contact foreign nationals to aid in spying on Biden’s aides? Will National Security Advisor John Bolton request that the names of surveilled Biden campaign officials become unmasked as a way of having them leaked to the media? Will Trump hire a British ex-spy to gather together rumors and gossip about Biden’s previous overseas trips and foreign contacts, especially in the Ukraine, and then see them seeded among the Trump CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and State Department? Is that the sort of country we have now?

America over the last half century had been nursed on the dogma that the Left was the guarantor of civil liberties. That was the old message of the battles supposedly waged on our behalf by the ACLU, the free-speech areas on campuses, and the Earl Warren Court.

Not now. The left believes that almost any means necessary, extra-legal and anti-constitutional or not, are justified to achieve their noble ends. Progressive luminaries at CNN and the New York Times have lectured us that reporters need not be disinterested any more in the age of Trump—or that it might be a crime to shout “lock her up” at a Trump rally. Will those standards apply to coverage of future Democratic presidents?

No reporter seems to care that Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to work with other foreign nationals to sabotage, first, her opponent’s campaign, then his transition and his presidency, along with the wink and nod help from key Obama officials at the Department of Justice, State Department, National Security Council, FBI and CIA.

The final irony? If the CIA, FBI, and DOJ have gone the banana republic way of Lois Lerner’s IRS and shredded the Constitution, they still failed to remove Donald Trump.

Trump still stands. In Nietzschean fashion what did not kill him apparently only made him stronger.

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The Folly of the Mueller Investigation

A great synopsis of the Mueller investigation by former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.

McClintock on the Propositions

Tom McClintock on the November 2018 ballot propositions.

They Know So Many Things That Aren’t True

A Russian Ham Sandwich

From Derek Hunter:

If there’s one thing Special Counsel Robert Mueller is exceedingly good at it is indicting Russians over whom he has zero jurisdiction. Mueller had previously indicted 13 Russian individuals and companies, and Friday he added 12 more to the list.

It’s a neat little trick – bring charges against people you’ll never get in court, therefore you’ll never have to prove them. This allows Mueller and his team to say they’re “doing something,” that the American people are getting something for the millions his investigation has cost us, while not having to actually prove anything.

Maybe there is something to these charges. I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t care. I do know the old saying that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich, proving those charges are something else entirely.

What the Russians are alleged to have done amounts to nothing – Facebook posts, fake social media accounts, etc. It’s nothing 12-year-olds couldn’t do, and likely do regularly.

The one thing they are alleged to have done that is serious is hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee. That’s a serious charge. It’s also completely unprovable, which makes it a brilliant political move by Mueller.

It’s a serious charge. But if any of the people charged with doing it were to show up in court, which is highly unlikely, their lawyers would demand to see the DNC’s servers so they could have their experts examine them. Mueller says Russians hacked them, but the servers have magically disappeared. So how can anyone be certain who hacked them, or if they were even really hacked at all?

Since none of those charged are going to show up in court, there will be no challenge to the allegation, no demand to see the evidence, and no legal embarrassment for Mueller when the charges are dropped because the key piece of evidence not only can’t be provided to the defense, it wasn’t even examined by the prosecutor. He appears to have simply taken the word of the Democratic Party about what happened.

Democrats, naturally, have a vested interest in advancing a story of Russian hacking costing Hillary Clinton the election because the alternative is she was a horrible candidate, the American people wanted nothing to do with her or her ideas, and they ran an awful campaign.

The fact that their “hacked” server disappeared should be a red flag. It’d be like someone claiming they cleaned up a murder scene they stumbled across before calling the police because they’re a neat freak, not because they’re trying to cover up their guilt.

This “problem” with the server having vanished won’t be an issue because there’s no one to make it an issue. But there are plenty of people willing to exploit the charges because this is Washington, and Washington doesn’t need proof or have standards when there is a narrative or an agenda to advance.

And let’s not forget that John Podesta’s email password was “password,” and he gave it to a hacker by falling for a fishing email. Not exactly James Bond-level spying.

Elected Democrats immediately started whining about how President Trump should cancel his planned meeting with Vladimir Putin Monday.

Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, the proud chieftain of the “so white she’s almost translucent” tribe, told the President to “cancel your ridiculous Putin summit and get your butt on a plane back to the United States.” Kamala Harris of California, whose record in the Senate makes Barack Obama’s look like it was riddled with accomplishments, said, “It’s unconscionable for the President to meet one-on-one with Putin, especially given these latest indictments. We need to prevent the next attack, not reward the attackers.”

And that’s just a sampling of the liberal brain trust considered leading contenders for their party’s 2020 nomination.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Mueller investigation, but I do know what is being portrayed as a major development really isn’t. I also know that the idea that politics stops at the water’s edge is now dead. Liberals so hate Donald Trump they’re willing to do anything in an attempt to damage him.

Prepare for more hyperventilating about Russians from leftists than there was during the Cold War, when they actually were trying to destroy us. But keep this in mind – Democrats are now clamoring for “something” to be done to protect our elections in the future. OK, fine.

But first remember no votes were changed, and nothing related to voting or vote counting was “hacked,” even though Democrats and media like to fudge that fact. Second, if you want to protect the integrity of the election bring back paper ballots and require photo ID.

Computer voting started after Democrats claimed paper ballots were flawed after they lost in 2000. After Hillary lost they went in the opposite direction. Their real problem is the American people not wanting them in the White House, because their complaints disappear when they win.

Liberals love to talk about the importance of the integrity of the vote, but they aren’t willing to do literally the least they could do to protect it by requiring people to prove they are who they say they are when they show up at the polls.

Instead of something that will matter, we will get posturing about the need to regulate the Internet to “protect” people from fake stories planted by Russians. Not mentioned will be the fact that, if the allegations are true, all they did was exposed to the voting public things Democrats were saying to each other when they thought no one else was listening. That’s bad, that’s illegal, but that’s not fake.

Exactly how you control what is shared on the Internet will remain a mystery. The people who demand illegal aliens are imbued with Constitutional protections the second they sneak across the border will have difficulty arguing to control what actual Americans protected by that same document can read and share online.

In the end, this will likely amount to nothing. There are show trials and show indictments. What happened Friday appears to be the latter, especially since there will never be a trial. But there sure will be a lot of campaign commercials…

Funny how that works.

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Election Therapy Guide for Leftists

From Kevin Dowd:

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine.

The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.

The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.

Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.

The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.

Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.

If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving. Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.

Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”

The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.

Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.

As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here for 1,461 days. Merry Christmas.

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Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots!

Apropos to today, here is Calgary Sun columnist Ian Robinson from November 2004:

Anyway, the day after the U.S. election, 115,628 Americans checked out the [Canadian immigration] site and those numbers haven’t fallen off very much.

Before the election, some U.S. celebrities and numerous other Democrats vowed that they’d move to Canada if Bush were re-elected.

I hope I’m not alone in gently suggesting to those considering coming to Canada: Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots.

Particularly celebrities. Canada has suffered enough without having to put up with any of the Baldwin brothers or — heaven forfend! — Barbra Streisand.

And frankly, I don’t know if we can afford to feed Michael Moore.

Trump Wins!

From David French:

I have never been more wrong about anything in my life than I’ve been in my assessment of Donald Trump’s political prospects. I discounted him in the primary, and I was discounting him in the general election all the way until about 9:30 p.m. on election night. He is now my president-elect and the future commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever seen. I pray earnestly and unambiguously that God may bless him, grant him wisdom, and open his ears to wise counsel. I pray earnestly and unambiguously that I end up being just as wrong about his character and capabilities as I was about his political prospects. I want him to be good, to be wise, and to be worthy of the Oval Office.

At the same time that I’ve been Never Trump, I have also been Never Hillary. There is a measure of real justice in the America’s rejection of Hillary Clinton. The electorate has directly and intentionally rebuked her corruption, her double standards, and her arrogance. This election was less about the love of Trump (though many millions do certainly love him) than it was about rejecting the colossal hubris of the progressive establishment. This is a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

Moreover, with the GOP retaining the House and Senate, there are many, many good and principled conservatives returning to Washington. They have the opportunity to right an enormous number of statutory and regulatory wrongs. This victory was not just about Trump. From top to bottom, the GOP had a far, far better night than it did in its presidential landslides of 1972, 1980, or 1984. The Republican Party now runs the United States of America.

Finally, the role of conservatives – whether they were Never Trump or supporting Trump out of a belief that he represented the “lesser of two evils” – is clear. Trump is not naturally or intellectually conservative. He is self-interested. It is vital that we unite to strongly and clearly declare that life, liberty, and constitutional governance must prevail. I’m under no illusion that conservatism won the White House tonight, but conservatism has a voice. We must use it without fear.

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