Author: Poetrooper

Unable to stop the phenomenon that has become the Trump movement by attacking its leader, the pretentious princes of the Grand Old Party are now resorting to attacking their own rebellious base, and it is clear that some conservative journalists are too willing to help them do it. The most disturbing of these attacks comes from what has become Trump’s most determined journalistic antagonist, National Review. That NR has now turned its guns on Middle America saddens me, for I have long been a reader and admirer of their many fine writers. I was truly dismayed recently when that conservative publication devoted an entire issue to destroying Trump with almost two dozen leading establishment editors and journalists writing opinion pieces against him. That effort to terminate Trump failed so miserably it is almost laughingly ironic, for not only did it get NR dropped from the next Republican debate, it further established Donald as the anti-establishment leader and broadened his attraction.

Perturbed by their failure to truncate the Trump campaign, National Review is now doubling down in a coming issue with a truly toxic article (behind a pay wall) by roving editor, Kevin D. Williamson. Toxic is the nicest way I can think of to characterize the malevolent tirade that Williamson has produced for a publication apparently hell-bent on reducing its readership to a tiny core of conservative purists. Williamson, who frequently likes to drop into his pieces the downhome bona fide that he’s from West Texas, has probably doomed his chances of ever leading any parades back home with his virulent attack on the blue-collar class, the workers who populate the two largest industries in that region, farming/ranching and the oilfield, in particular, the latter because of the recent collapse of oil prices.

Williamson apparently thinks blue-collar workers whose lives get turned upside down when their jobs disappear due to economic downturns or their manufacturing jobs getting shipped offshore or their mines closing due to new more restrictive government regulation, are all a bunch of worthless bums and crybabies who should just load up the pickup and become the new Okies. What with the absolute collapse of the energy industry in West Texas in the past year and unemployment through the roof, I think Kevin might find it somewhat difficult selling that concept to any of his fellow West Texans any time soon. I’d give up Mexican food for a year to see him stand on one of the dozens of idle drilling platforms and try to read that piece to a crowd of long-unemployed oilfield workers. Here are a few of Kevin’s insulting words (excerpted –and defended– here):

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap, theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Did you folks out there in Odessa and all the other oil patch communities get that? This conservative elitist says your town deserves to die. And that’s just a sample of the toxic rot in the lengthy article. Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is shocked, like many other conservative authors who have read Williamson’s diatribe:

This is truly stunning. A broadside attack on America’s middle class is apparently the last recourse of truly lost and desperate souls. Worst of all, it’s a denial of reality. I don’t know how things are in hardscrabble, white West Texas, but I happen to live in one of those hardscrabble, white Upstate New York burgs and Kevin is living in some sort of dream world. Garbutt serves as a useful metaphor in his tale, but it bears little to no relevance to the reality these communities have dealt with nor the government policy failures which let them down.

Well I do know how things are in hardscrabble, white West Texas, and they’re not good at all. Like me, Shaw has lived in stricken areas among the people that Williamson and National Review think just need to load up a U-Haul and move on to better prospects. I wonder if Kevin intends those emigrants to include members of my wife’s pioneering family of cowboys, ranchers, buffalo hunters and Indian fighters who have been on West Texas land for more than 150 years? Or members of my own family who have been working in that oil patch for sixty years? Most of them are suffering in varying degrees from the regional depression caused by the steep drop in oil prices. Those crybabies should simply abandon their homes, their schools, their churches, their old and debilitated, just pick up and go, huh, Kevin?

It is becoming increasingly clear to the American middle class that Donald Trump is exposing the pretension of urban Eastern conservatism and the Republican Party leadership, who think they, and only they, know what’s best for all of us out here in flyover country. But what all those who fancy themselves our betters can’t process is that it is the very fact that they are so out of touch with ordinary folks that is Trump’s greatest attraction. The more the conservative aristocracy attacks Trump the more the people listening to him, those middle class working folks, are inclined to support him.

Many Americans born into Democrat households have said, as Reagan did, that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left them. One has to wonder how many millions of those Americans are beginning to think the same of the Republican Party. I’m not even a Trump follower, having voted for Cruz in my state primary, but I can tell you that with these attacks on the middle class and the blue-collar working class, these GOP elites and their conservative oracles are alienating me. Attack Trump all you want; he’s fair game, but don’t turn your frustrations from that back on mainstream America. You establishment Republicans loved flyover America when its denizens believed all your lies and forgave your endless broken promises to fix their broken country; but now you want to treat these same folks with contempt and disdain since they’ve found a candidate whom you say lies and promises even more convincingly than you.

National Review, how about putting more effort into understanding the reasons for Trump’s appeal and less into bashing his followers, a move guaranteed to make you Trump’s main recruiting office?

Crossposted at American Thinker

Recently we were subjected to endless speculation from the media as to why Donald Trump wouldn’t denounce the Ku Klux Klan because a former leader of that white supremacist group, David Duke, had supposedly endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy. Well, Duke said he didn’t, and Donald denounced until I was about ready to denounce Donald if he didn’t quit groveling to the yapping media with more denunciations – truly uncharacteristic for him.

Now we’ve had a mob of a few hundred self-described Bernie Sanders supporters stop a Trump rally in Chicago with an unruly demonstration that had fistfights breaking out in the streets. It was impossible not to notice that liberally distributed throughout that crowd were numerous Mexican national flags, with a very large one being center focus of Fox News’s favored street shot of the mob. In spite of that flag being center screen for much of Greta Van Susteren’s coverage of the event, she apparently couldn’t see those broad white, green, and red bands waving in front of her because she kept asking the street reporters if they could identify the makeup of the crowd. And apparently the reporters were just as afflicted with colorblindness as Greta, for they never appeared to notice the half-dozen or so Mexican flags I counted in that small pack. And the color perception problem must be endemic at Fox, because Megyn Kelly couldn’t see those foreign banners, either, even as she was asking a reporter on the ground to identify the affiliation of the protesters.

Since this protest was taking place in Chicago and appeared to be well organized, it would seem unlikely that a few Hispanics carrying Mexican flags just happened to wander onto the scene. I’m more inclined to believe that an inquiring Fox reporter might have discovered that they were professional protesters from a militant Hispanic organization, perhaps La Raza Unida or, considering the protesters’ youth, MEChA, both movements that advocate Hispanic racial superiority and separation and are entrenched in Chicago’s large Hispanic minority. Of course, the leadership of these organizations, and certainly the protesters, will deny that they are racist, but consider one of their oft-repeated mantras: “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada,” which translates to “For the Race, everything, outside the Race, nothing.”

Does that sound a bit racist to you? Memo to Democrat protest planning headquarters: Multiple Mexican flags carried by angry protesters denying Trump the right to address an audience might be counterproductive, reinforcing in voters’ minds the validity of his call for a border wall.

To put it all a bit more into perspective, do you suppose, had there been some pro-Trump counter-protesters out on those same streets waving Confederate Stars and Bars, that Fox might not have had so much difficulty spotting them? Think the terms racist, racism, and KKK might have been flying back and forth between Greta and Megyn and the street reporters in their outraged discussions of Trump supporters carrying that hateful symbol?

So, Bernie, since that mob boasted that they’re yours, we’re all out here awaiting your vigorous public denunciation of those racist and separatist Hispanic demonstrators – uh…college students, who were a highly visible (except to Fox News) part of it. Or, as Trump was asked ad nauseam, do you embrace their racist and separatist views?

Crossposted at American Thinker

Thomas Lifson posted a recent blog piece pointing to some voting statistics reported by the Huffington Post. The gist of the H.P. piece was that Democrat voter turnout was down hugely in those states where voter ID legislation has been enacted – a decline some 285% greater than in states with no voter ID laws, in fact. While it is of course impossible to attribute direct cause and effect with no more proof than that available to us through our own lying eyes, we conservatives who have long advocated for voter identification are entitled to share a few smug eye rolls and some muttered told-you-sos.

But the larger question is that should the statistics Lifson cites prove out through the remainder of this election year, will we then be looking at a nationwide turndown in Democrat voting in these states that have enacted voter identification laws? And will that then provide further evidence that many past campaigns in this country have most likely been determined by fraudulent voting?

If the Democrat voter turnout trend continues through the general election to be significantly lower only in those states where voter ID laws have been recently enacted, you can bet the farm the Democrat leadership will be tap-dancing all over the place to find whatever other possible explanation they can. That may be easier for them if their presidential candidate loses, for they can then blame lack of voter interest due to poor candidate performance. However, that still won’t explain away the differential in voter turnout between states with no voter ID laws, where turnout remains relatively unchanged, and those states where voter ID was recently enacted and the vote declined significantly.

What will then become evident is that the Democratic Party has been engaged in voter fraud on a broad, nationwide scale. An even more disturbing revelation that is sure to arise from all this is that the Democratic Party has most likely encouraged voter fraud in minority communities, where criminal evidence of such fraud is most commonly found. While I’m not about to contend that all voter fraud takes place in minority precincts, news stories of criminal voter fraud and the results will almost always be in those communities.

Not only do I believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread voter fraud, but I believe they are playing the minority communities, black and Hispanic, to do the heavy lifting for them in this criminal enterprise. And to my way of thinking, that constitutes a vast criminal conspiracy on the part of the Democratic Party to undermine the electoral process with millions of fraudulent votes through a callous manipulation of their controlled minorities.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Against the long-ago given advice of the editors over at American Thinker, I always read carefully the comments on my writings for the simple reason that I occasionally find a pearl of wisdom that can serve as the premise for a subsequent article. Such was the case when commenter RMThoughts, posited the idea that the pundits and critics of Donald Trump have it exactly backwards when they accuse Trump of using Republican voters as tools to build his own political movement. Rather, Trump himself is the tool that has fallen into the hands of those long-ignored constituents, a tool to be used by the citizens to remake their party into an organization that truly represents their beliefs and values, led by leaders who truly share those beliefs and values and lead accordingly.

I would recast that premise somewhat and suggest that Trump is more a weapon that has been taken up by those Republican voters as well as independents and Reagan Democrats, a stout, unyielding club with which to fight back against the elitist Republican leadership in Washington, D.C. and the elitist, coastal, mainstream media. Being from the South, I would prefer an axe handle to a club, an axe handle made of durable, resilient hickory which brings to mind Old Hickory, a comparison that can be drawn with Trump.

Whatever weapon or tool we use to characterize Trump, the driving force behind the voters’ anger is clear: they are fed up with not being listened to by a national government that is supposed to operate constitutionally according to the people’s bidding, not as a federal ruling class that governs the people one way and themselves another. If anything, the conservative citizenry is even angrier at the liberal mainstream media that has served to enable the dissembling, disloyal, and dishonest leaders of both political parties. Had they done their jobs as political watchdogs, this country would not be in the mess it is. For certain, we wouldn’t have an affirmative action president hell-bent on dismantling this constitutional republic and remaking it into another Third World hellhole.

But now millions of Americans have a weapon in our hands. That the weapon we’ve been handed is not perfect is clearly true, but when you’ve never had any weapon up till now, even an imperfect weapon will do.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Once again, much of the mainstream media that is too lazy and self-serving to investigate the very dubious associations of a Democrat presidential candidate like Barack Obama is hauling out its Roto-Rooters to go after the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump. But the media operatives are still very lazy, or they could have saved themselves the embarrassment of trying to prove that Trump has KKK and far right militia sympathies with a simple bit of Googling.

For several days now, since CNN’s Jake Tapper started this silly business of Trump not disavowing an endorsement from David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, the mainstream media, Trump’s presidential opponents, and even GOP congressional leaders have all made fools of themselves over this non-issue issue. Marco Rubio made an absolute, bobble-head fool of himself on Super Tuesday night endlessly attempting to link Trump with the KKK. And that, folks, is the opinion of a voter who was in the Rubio camp until recently.

Trump could have put this foolishness to bed early and quite easily had he chosen to involve his family, which he most graciously didn’t. You see, Trump’s beautiful daughter, Ivanka, married an Orthodox Jew, Jared Kushner, in 2009 and in preparation for that event converted to Judaism. Jared’s and Ivanka’s two children are being raised in an Orthodox household, where Ivanka keeps kosher and the family observes the Jewish Sabbath. At least one mainstream network, ABC News, seems to have picked up on this.

So all Donald had to do was cite that fact of his personal and family life and ask, “Now, do you really believe I would associate myself with the views of an organization that is so rabidly anti-Semitic as the Ku Klux Klan?” If Trump were really the heartless exploiter his enemies try to make him out to be, he would have paraded his daughter and her family across the stage as he was pointing out their religious affiliation and thus how ridiculous this whole KKK business is. Instead, those denouncing Trump look like fools and have paradoxically made their political nemesis look all the more a statesman and a family man.

Crossposted at American Thinker

A look at the news analysis and punditry on heavy voter turnout thus far in the 2016 Republican campaign finds the word “anger” cropping up in many such discussions. That refers mostly to voter anger broadly directed toward the federal behemoth in general, but more specifically to the custodian of that government for the past seven years, the Obama administration, and the entrenched liberal bureaucracy that responds all too eagerly to Obama’s whim. That same term, anger, is also referenced in almost every analysis of the Trump phenomenon, noting voter outrage against the “Washington Establishment,” which, in addition to the Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy, includes the Republican-controlled Congress and ever more frequently to those Obamist Pentagonian princes.

There’s insufficient space here to list all the grievances of today’s voters, but one issue sure to push their ballistic launch buttons is reminding them that they are being governed by an elite political class who exempt themselves from all the burdensome and oppressive laws and regulations they impose on the rest of us. While the truth of this belief may be more pronounced in the perception than broadly grounded in reality, it just may be the one anger issue that has the most impact on the upcoming presidential election for the simple reason that a current contender and her husband have, for the past three decades, been the chief contributors to this perception of politicians being above the laws.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have flouted the law since their earliest political days in Arkansas, after which their contempt for morality and the law continued to grow throughout their years of ascension to and through the White House. To make it worse, their “no corner left uncut” policy toward the intersection of presidential politics and profit has made these two moral jaywalkers immensely wealthy. Millions of Americans would quickly cite the Clintons as living proof that if not crime, then most certainly unethical behavior does indeed pay and pay handsomely. Rubbing salt into our wounds, the Clintons deflect all charges of their corruption with countercharges of national conspiracies by their enemies to discredit them. That kind of chutzpah is guaranteed to generate some serious surliness within us folks looked upon by the Clintons as a sullen political underclass in Flyovia, pitchfork provincials who should be grateful for the generous privilege of looking up and marveling at their vapor trails.

That liberal Democrats perceive themselves as being far smarter than the rest of us is a given, as is their oft-demonstrated tendency to turn a blind eye to corruption and criminality in their favored politicians. But before the Democrat queen-makers decide that they can sweep Hillary’s obvious violations of multiple federal intelligence laws under a mainstream media carpet and then sweep her majesty on to coronation, it would behoove them to take a very careful measure of this anger issue driving these record Republican voter turnouts. Then they should further consider that Hillary is not that popular even among Democrats, many of whom have come to recognize the woman’s serial dishonesty, the likely reason for low Democrat voter turnout in 2016 as well as Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing thus far.

Think about this situation: not only do the Democratic Party insist on running a candidate who is hands down the most reviled woman in America, but they insist on doing so in the face of revelations that would already have required any other candidate to step down and retire from all politics. But those Democrat power brokers are so hell-bent on their party electing the first female president that they’ll even support a candidate who, were she Jane Doe, would be facing multiple federal felony charges and likely serious prison time. Hillary has had a lot of time since Bill left office to make lucrative promises to a lot of powerful people, so that those folks have a clear interest in seeing her made president, criminal or no – in fact, probably even better if she is, because she’ll be easier to manipulate.

And that, folks, is who the Democrats think should be our next president. That sort of blatant corruption really angers a lot of honest and patriotic citizens, and as we are seeing in these primaries, angry citizens vote.

Does anyone doubt that should Hillary escape prosecution and continue her campaign, the likely Republican candidate, Donald Trump, will flagrantly fan those flames of voter outrage into a campaign prairie fire out here in Flyovia, as well as in more traditional Democrat strongholds? That could instigate a Republican and Reagan Democrat turnout that could sweep over the Democratic Party and incinerate it into a blackened husk all the way down ballot. Not only will Trump exploit the voters’ anger, but he’ll provide it with an already despised focus point that demonstrates perfectly how Washington and the Establishment are corrupt and require his intervention.

Call the resulting blowback the H-Factor. Adding to its effect, excusing Hillary’s recent law-breaking likely will revive a rehashing of all the other Clinton scandals that this time around may fall on more acutely tuned Democrat ears now that so many in that party, such as youthful Sanders supporters, openly distrust her and revile her serial sexual predator husband. Democrat power brokers should consider that if Republican voters are turning out now, if they nominate Hillary, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Just wait until that H-Factor kicks into high gear…

Crossposted at American Thinker

Washington Post columnist and Fox News pundit Marc Thiessen, speaking with Megan Kelly last night, raised an excellent point regarding the nomination of a Supreme Court justice. Noting that the Republicans appear to be taking a firm stand against allowing the lame-duck president to appoint a replacement for recently deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, Thiessen asked the very cogent question, “Who could possibly want to be that nominee?” He noted that whoever it might be has already been put on notice that it is, in effect, a judicial suicide mission and likened that person to a kamikaze pilot. As soon as Thiessen spoke, I realized he had neatly and accurately encapsulated the situation facing the White House right now into two words: kamikaze mission.

Where are they ever going to find a prominent, accomplished jurist dumb enough to fly into all that waiting senatorial flak, knowing that the mission is a fruitless career-ender? Sure, Obama may fancy himself imperial, but the emperor is clearly bare-butt behind the bench on this one. No eminent jurists who have spent their professional lives preparing themselves for the High Command of the judicial profession want to step forward and volunteer to have that lifetime of preparation blown to smithereens in a clearly unwinnable battle, merely to uphold the imperial legacy for the history books.

On the other hand, if Obama puts forward a sacrificial and minimally qualified candidate who might be willing to don the silk headscarf of sacrifice and volunteer to go down in flames for fifteen minutes of footnote fame, then the Republicans can point self-righteously to those absent qualifications as sufficient reason for grimly blowing the ambitious aspirant from the skies of fleeting legal glory.

From a political history perspective, Thiessen nailed it; it’s a kamikaze mission, and Barry will have to find a fool to fly it.

Crossposted at American Thinker