Author: Poetrooper

Heard the one about the old Texas cowboy visiting the big city who strays into a lesbian bar? He sits down on a bar stool next to a tough-looking woman in biker leathers; tips his hat politely; and says, “Howdy, ma’am.” She looks at him hard and says, “Don’t ma’am me, cowpoke. I’m a lesbian. All I think about is young, beautiful women and their soft, lovely bodies, and all the things I can do to them. That’s all I think about, day in, day out, at night, all night and all day when I’m at work.” Thinking she’d shocked him, she challenged him with, “So whaddaya think about that?” The old fellow looks at her for a long thoughtful moment and responds, “Well, when I walked in here I thought for sure I was a cowboy, but dang if you ain’t got me wonderin’ if mebbe I ain’t a lesbian.”

Well, that’s the way I feel after wandering in to the-american-interest.com and reading Charles C.W. Cooke’s “Andrew Jackson, Revenant.” I was in there only a few paragraphs before I said to myself, “Dang, I think I’m a Jacksonian.” By the end of the piece, I knew I was.

For starters, Cooke says Jacksonians see the 2nd Amendment as the foundation of our freedom and security. That’s me for sure. Here’s more:

It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.

Cooke notes that Jacksonians have been the slowest segment of American society to come around on racial advancements but says this regarding that:

Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.

Cooke explains that Jacksonians have difficulty in organizing politically and exerting their influence:

Jacksonians are neither liberal nor conservative in the ways that political elites use those terms; they are radically egalitarian, radically pro-middle class, radically patriotic, radically pro-Social Security. They are not, under normal circumstances, joiners in politics; they are individualists who organize in response to threats, and their individualism goes to their stands on what outsiders sometimes think are the social issues that unite them.

With regard to Jacksonian morality and religious beliefs, Cooke says this:

Many Jacksonians, for example, are not evangelicals and not even Christian at all. While some are strongly anti-abortion, others believe that individual freedom makes abortion nobody’s business but their own. Some stand strongly behind the drug war; many indulge in recreational drugs and some Jacksonians grow or manufacture them, much like the moonshiners who have been evading ‘revenuers’ since the Washington administration.

While he lays out a number of difficulties facing any sort of immediate Jacksonian movement, Cooke says:

What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. It is not yet a revolution on the scale of Old Hickory’s movement that transformed American politics for a generation. Such a revolution may not be possible in today’s America, and in any case the current wave of Jacksonian activism and consciousness is still in an early and somewhat incoherent phase.

And then he gets to the possibility of Jacksonian influences in the current presidential contest:

Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who ‘gets’ America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership. … Indeed, one of the reasons that Trump hasn’t been hurt by attacks that highlight his lack of long term commitment to the boilerplate conservative agenda (either in the social or economic conservative variant) is that Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge.

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack.

Several months ago I expressed my belief that Donald Trump’s appeal was Jacksonian, but this is the first time I’ve seen the premise spelled out so coherently. Thank you, Charles C.W. Cooke. What I’m wondering now is how many folks out there reading this are saying to themselves, much like that old cowboy in the lesbian bar, “Dang, I think I’m a Jacksonian!”

Crossposted at American Thinker

A commenter on my recent piece regarding Hillary Clinton’s calling the Benghazi families liars raised a very valid point when he asked whether or not the mothers of the fallen warriors at Benghazi had the same absolute moral authority the media bestowed on Cindy Sheehan.

Remember that woman’s fifteen minutes of fame a decade ago? Shrieking Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother, whom I accused at the time of using her fallen soldier son’s coffin as a podium from which she attacked George W. Bush and his administration, was the darling of the mainstream media. Cindy was a California housewife whose son, Casey, was killed in combat in Iraq in 2004. His death drove his distraught mother into such a state that she left behind and eventually divorced her husband of almost three decades to take to the barricades of peace activism. The leftist antiwar movement quickly elevated her to celebrity spokesperson status because her son’s death, conferring on her a special cachet to speak with moral authority to the government conducting the war in which her son died.

It was Maureen Dowd, writing about Sheehan’s campaign against Bush in the New York Times on August 10th, 2005, who enhanced Sheehan’s already elevated moral authority (emphasis mine):

Selectively humane, Mr. Bush justified his Iraq war by stressing the 9/11 losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire freedom when his W.M.D. rationale vaporized.

But his humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.

The rest of the Bush-bashing media immediately seized upon Dowd’s framing of this unquestioned right to speak and be believed without challenge bestowed upon parents of fallen sons. The antiwar movement quickly molded this moral authority into a club with which they and a compliant mainstream media beat down any Bush supporters who dared question Sheehan’s ear-piercing screeches. Bush himself was to dutifully accept Sheehan’s shrieking protests without objection, giving total deference to her absolute moral authority.

That was then…this is now. Can we rightfully expect the media to accord this same absolute moral authority to the Benghazi families who claim that Hillary Clinton lied to them at the ceremony where their son’s coffins were being unloaded from the military aircraft that brought their bodies home? Now that the boot of moral authority is on the right foot rather than the left, will the media be professionally consistent and march in lockstep with the Benghazi parents, as they did a decade ago with Sheehan and her movement? And, most importantly, will the mainstream media insist that their much-favored choice for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton, conduct herself in the same manner as they expected of the Bush administration, and allow the assertions of these Benghazi parents to go unchallenged? Will they ask her to renounce her charge that these aggrieved parents are liars?

I believe we all know the answers to those questions.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Hillary Clinton and her allies furiously and famously defended her husband’s sexual predations by targeting the women Bill victimized with media campaigns designed to portray Bill’s victims as lying, conniving bimbos. The best example of such targeting was the memorable television interview with James Carville, a longtime Clinton hatchet man, where he made this statement in regard to the sexual harassment from Bill reported by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee: “Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

That dismissive, condescending statement epitomized the theme of the Hillary-directed media response to the Bimbo Eruption, as it came to be known. Quite simply, these working-class, ordinary American women had no credibility due to their station in life. They were nothing more than low-class hustlers, looking for their fifteen minutes of fame by making accusations against a charismatic Democrat politician.

The operative term there is “Democrat.” Had these women come forth with their charges against a Republican presidential candidate, he would have been immediate toast in the mainstream media. But Bill and Hillary were Democrats, so the media went along with the bimbo portrayals even though Bill ultimately paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle her lawsuit, in the process perjuring himself and losing his law license. And of course there was then the spectacle of Monica Lewinsky.

So why rehash all that? Well, it appears that Hillary is embarked on a new campaign to portray some ordinary Americans as deliberate liars regarding conversations she held with them on the tarmac at Andrews AFB, as the military was returning the bodies of the men killed in the Benghazi assault to their families.

At least three of those families have publicly stated that Hillary told them, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.”

That was in reference to the bogus story the Obama administration had floated following the Benghazi massacre that the Islamic attackers were merely ordinary citizens incited by an anti-Islamic video produced by some Muslim character in California – in spite of the fact that Obama, Hillary, and the other top players all knew that the attack was a planned, deliberate military operation conducted by fully armed jihadist forces. Because such an attack would refute Obama’s claims that his administration had the Middle East terror situation under control in the critical run-up to his second-term election, the bogus video scenario was adopted, dutifully promoted, and vigorously defended by all key players. Sadly, that included Hillary at the casket arrival service at Andrews AFB, where she took the deception to a truly evil level by cold-bloodedly repeating the lie multiple times to the attending families of the fallen warriors.

Now that the video lie has been long debunked and Hillary is running for president, she knows that there is only one way to counter the families’ truthful revelations: by branding them liars, a modern resurrection of the tactics employed to counter her predatory husband’s accusers. We’ll see how that plays out this time around.

It was fairly simple to label a group of politically unsophisticated women, primarily from the South, as trailer-trash bimbos and get the media elites to go along. But this time it is families that have lost their sons in their nation’s service, families that have no reason to tell anything other than truth, that Hillary is attempting to paint as conniving liars. Somehow, I think she’s going to find it much more difficult to sell that garbage now, even to her lapdog media pals. Even those Democrat butt-kissers can see that the only lying bimbo associated with Benghazi is this woman, a hardened political operative lacking the common decency to refrain from such reptilian cruelty as lying to crying mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers even when she had no compelling reason to do so other than preserving a political lie.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Country music is the music for much of working-class America, and for many of those who make up that great mass of humanity, 83-year-old Loretta Lynn is the reigning Queen of Country Music now that the great Kitty Wells is no longer with us. Last week, Lynn publicly announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for the presidency in 2016. In fact, she says she has been passing on that message of support to her audiences at the closing of her concerts for some time now, and it is being very well-received. What’s more, the Coal Miner’s Daughter, so named for her huge 1970 hit of the same name, has publicly invited Donald to give her a call if he wants her support for his campaign.

Now if Donald is smart – like a fox comes to mind – he ought to jump on that offer like the proverbial chicken on a June bug. A very large segment of working-class Americans, including many of those affiliated with politically corrupt, Democrat-controlled unions, are Reagan Democrats, especially in blue or purple states. Those are folks for whom a folksy message from a coal miner’s daughter might have a populist attraction that a New York City billionaire’s overtures might lack. Some political analysts are already hinting at possible defections from this blue-collar Democrat cohort, so quite possibly Ms. Lynn can seal the deal with her country appeal.

Donald, if you read American Thinker, as surely you do, take out your phone this very minute and call Loretta to take her up on that offer. Then pay some lyricist in Nashville to rewrite some lyrics so that throughout your 2016 campaign against Hillary, we can hear Ms. Loretta singing your campaign anthem:

You ain’t woman enough to beat my man.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Most folks who have at one time or another seen their name on an honor roll know the puff of pride that experience engenders. That pride is nothing compared to that to be claimed by those American citizens whose names should be inscribed on a monument on the National Mall for bearing the proud distinction of having been called a liar by Bill or Hillary Clinton, or more likely both, for relating the truth about their personal interactions with this truth-challenged pair. Had I not heard that cynical old adage about knowing how a politician is lying – his lips are moving – long before I had heard of the Clintons, I would swear it had been specifically created and first used to describe that perfidious pair. Ditto the far older truism: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

The Clinton Honor Roll has been in existence at least since 1969, when Eileen Wellstone, a student at Oxford, raised the charge of rape against Slick Willie, who of course claimed she was lying. Not long after her accusation was made, Clinton was asked to forgo his Rhodes scholarship by school authorities, his only apparent punishment. His willingness to give up such a prestigious honor due to a supposedly spurious charge, like so many other questions about the Clintons, simply doesn’t pass the smell test. Most folks believe that that moniker, Slick Willie, was appended to Bill in recognition of his political skills; after reviewing his history of sexual assaults, many would agree that it most likely alludes to his ability to avoid felony prosecution for criminal assaults that would long ago have jailed a lesser figure.

Hillary’s early entry to the honor roll must remain nameless for the reason that the victim, like so many other Honor Roll members, fears retaliation from the Clinton Mafia – that and the fact that she was a 12-year-old rape victim whom Hillary accused of lying, who now wishes to maintain her anonymous normality. In this first of many such allegations to follow, Hillary was defending the 46-year-old rapist, who she later (and privately laughingly) admitted was probably guilty even though she did get him off. At least Hillary didn’t label the 12-year-old a bimbo, as she came to do later against others who claimed to be victims of sexual assault by her spouse/defendant.

So the Clinton Honor Roll, long in development, continues right to the present, as Hillary has just this week labeled as liars several additional American citizens – members of Gold Star families, in fact. In an interview with the Conway, N.H. Daily Sun, Hillary must have been stunned when a conservative member of the editorial board confronted her with a stark question that surely escaped pre-screening by her campaign staff:

Sun Columnist Tom McLaughlin said she told an Egyptian diplomat the Benghazi attack was planned and not a protest but that she told family members of the deceased that the attack was the result of a demonstration. He said she then told George Stephanopoulos that she didn’t tell the families the attack was a demonstration about a film.

“Somebody is lying,” said McLaughlin. “Who is it?

Clinton replied, “Not me, that’s all I can tell you.”

With that terse denial, Hillary blanket-labeled as liars all those family members of the Benghazi victims who had previously told the press on repeated occasions that Hillary had consoled them with assurances that the Obama administration would punish the producer of the infamous video that had supposedly incited the Benghazi attackers.

It’s rather simple: they say she said it. She says, “Not me, that’s all I can tell you.” It can’t be both ways, so Hillary is clearly saying these folks are liars. We all now can say to those family members: welcome to the Clinton Honor Roll.

Crossposted at American Thinker

The single factor driving Donald Trump’s popularity more than any other is his willingness to proclaim publicly those politically incorrect truths the public yearns to hear, yet which few other Republican candidates will utter for fear of media backlash. Those self-censoring candidates should have taken closer note of the wave of favorable public response when some of those candidates pushed back against liberal debate moderators. But instead of riding that wave of popular sentiment, for the most part, they have let their old fears of politically correct blowback force them back into their narrow campaign kennels, meekly muzzled by the mainstream media. In a way, it’s hard to condemn them; they’re like old dogs fearing to bark because they’ve been beaten for doing so by the liberal media since they were political puppies. Sure, Cruz and Christie tend to have a low tolerance for media arrogance, but even they appear meek compared to the indomitable Donald, the big dog who won’t stop barking and very frequently biting.

That tendency to bite has to have the Clintons worried because if Donald ends up dog on dog against Hillary, there’s not going to be any pussyfooting around the Clintons’ sordid history, folks. Nope, it’s going to be a full-on, cold-nosed sniff-out of every skeleton in that closet that the Clintons and their loyalists have managed through deceit and deception to keep jammed closed to the American public. Where any other Republican opponent might make oblique references to the Clinton scandals of the past, you can bet that the Big Dog will be digging in those closets and dragging those malodorous political and moral skeletons out and chewing them to pieces, bone by fetid bone.

Like millions of Americans, I’m put off by Trump’s clownery, much of which I suspect is an act, a persona adapted for the campaign which permits him to carry off the role of the non-politician attack dog. But I also suspect I’m like millions of Americans in being delighted at seeing a candidate who is demonstrating that in a campaign dogfight, he’ll not only be chasing Hillary all over the pen nipping at her more than ample hindquarters, but that he’ll also go roaring straight into that doghouse mansion where she’s been hiding Ol’ Bill and drag that greying old hound (wink-wink) out by the scruff of his neck, puttin’ a whuppin’ on his legacy that’s been needed for a long, long time.

I’d pay to see that dogfight, even if the price of admission is a vote for Donald Trump.

Crossposted at American Thinker