The impossible has happened and Donald Trump is now the Republican presidential nominee.

Technically he still has to officially accept the nomination on Thursday night, but the convention has voted to select Trump as the Republican nominee.

It’s an amazing story. When Trump announced that he was running for president, most people didn’t know what to think. Some people thought it was a publicity stunt, others predicted he would drop out after a couple of weeks. I don’t think a single political pundit predicted that a little over a year later he would be accepting the Republican nomination.

When he announced, he might have been the only one in the country who thought he could win the nomination, or maybe it was just him and his wife and kids. Even a few weeks ago, when Trump had already won more than enough delegates, people still seemed to expect someone to figure out how to deny him the nomination. But all efforts to thwart him failed.

His campaign has proved quite a few things. One is that the political class isn’t anything to write home about. Trump, with no political experience, took on the best the Republican Party had to offer and beat them early and often.

By winning he has also proven what small-minded wimps a number of Republican politicians are. Gov. John Kasich and Jeb Bush come to mind. Those two have demonstrated their true nature, and number one on the list is that you can’t believe anything they say, or put another way, they will say whatever they are told they have to say to win and don’t mean a word of it.

Both men said they would support the Republican nominee and signed pledges stating that they would. The pledges were considered necessary because they were scared that Trump would launch a third-party campaign. Their pledges didn’t say they would support any candidate who hadn’t made mean but accurate statements about them, or even that they would support any candidate other than Trump. Now that Trump is the nominee, they have a chance to honor their pledges. But it looks like both will end up supporting Hillary Clinton for president because, as Speaker Paul Ryan has said, if you don’t support Trump, you do support Hillary Clinton.

Trump has proven that you don’t have to be politically correct to win. Time after time the political correctness police have announced Trump’s demise because of statements they deemed politically incorrect, and every time they were wrong. These are the same folks that now say he can’t win in November.

Trump has also proven that you don’t have to make long, boring policy statements to win. Politicians and political pundits love these things, and people outside the professional political class don’t give a hoot about them. The American people have learned that these policy statements don’t mean anything. Situations constantly change, and once a politician is elected, the policy statements go on the shelf, never to be seen again.

Trump proved the nomination could be won by going around the media filters and connecting directly with the voters. The pundits panned just about every speech he gave, but the people who flocked by the tens of thousands to see him in person, and the millions more who watched him on television, loved his speeches. Those watching on television either turned to another channel when the pundits came on to tell them everything that was wrong with Trump’s speech or paid no attention to what they heard.

Trump did this pretty much alone. The Republican Party establishment fought him at every turn, and Republican elected officials were slow to come to his support.

Despite being a billionaire, he also did it on the cheap. Trump didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising. The pundits once again said that this strategy was doomed to failure because, they said, candidates had to have huge campaign staffs and spend big on advertising to win.

Trump convinced the majority of Republican voters that they should ignore the media, ignore the Republican Party establishment, ignore the Republican elected officials and believe him.

Now he has the daunting task of convincing the majority of American voters that they really should try something new and elect a president who is not beholden to the special interests, the big money and the established politicians. Electing Trump is taking a big chance, but we know what happens when mainstream Democrats and Republicans are elected – we get the same old big-government-knows-best routine we have been getting for decades.

America is going to have a clear choice in November: continue down the same road we are on or take a new path. I think the American people are going to choose a new path.

*****

The media had a lot of fun promoting the disagreements at the Republican National Convention. Modern political conventions are about as exciting as watching the election returns for an unopposed candidate. So it is not a surprise that the mainstream media took what is fairly normal behavior at a convention and made it sound like more than it was.

It is not at all unusual to have a bunch of delegates at the convention who don’t support the nominee, the party platform, the vice presidential pick or the color of the curtains. They make a big fuss and try to convince people that the rules need to be changed so the minority, not the majority, rules the convention.

It doesn’t work. Conventions are run by the majority. The man with the gavel has a lot of power to declare the winner in voice votes. The idea that the Republican Party would tell all the Republicans who voted in the primaries that their votes didn’t count – which is what the anti-Trump group wanted – would be a disaster for the Republican Party. Fortunately, some folks at the top know this. But creating controversy is good for television ratings and that is what conventions are all about.

A party doesn’t have to have primaries. Those who battled to throw out the rules of the convention and let delegates votes for whoever they wanted, if they are true to their beliefs, will start a movement to do away with presidential primaries all together. But don’t expect that to happen. The truth is that they only said that the primaries should be ignored because their candidate lost.

*****

I’ve written a few speeches, never for a national political convention, but I know the process. No doubt when Melania Trump’s speechwriters sat down to write her speech, they gathered up a stack of speeches made by candidates’ wives at national conventions to see what she was expected to say. Evidently the writers really liked Michelle Obama’s speech. A good speechwriter would have used that speech as a model, but in such a way that no one could say they copied it.

It’s no surprise that Trump doesn’t have good speechwriters – what a thankless job it must be. His writers work for weeks on a speech for Donald Trump, who reads two sentences of it and then goes off on some tangent that isn’t in the speech anywhere, and then never gets back to what’s on the paper in front of him. So I can understand the speechwriters getting to the point where they aren’t as careful about what they put on paper as they should be, since they know no one will ever hear the words anyway.

However, the writers should have realized that Melania Trump was going to read her speech and should have made certain that it wouldn’t be obvious that they did what everybody knows they did, which is copy parts of a bunch of other speeches and coble it all together into a new speech.

The pundits talk about how Trump has run his campaign on the cheap and imply that he didn’t spend the money to hire good speechwriters. Trump has run his campaign on the cheap, but it was by not hiring vast numbers of people or spending several fortunes on advertising. The people who he has hired to work for his campaign he has paid well. So unless he has a different policy for hiring speechwriters, somebody may be really upset about making a dumb mistake and losing a really well paying job.

But Trump, unlike most politicians, has hired thousands of employees in his life and paid them out of his own pocket. People who hire a lot of employees are often successful because they have learned that even good employees make stupid mistakes, and sometimes the best way to prevent a stupid mistake from happening again is to keep the employee who made it.

*****

I absolutely love the fact checking scam by the mainstream media. It’s brilliant. I wish I had thought of it. The extremely liberal mainstream media claim to check facts, but they do it the same way they do everything else, with a far left slant.

Because fact checkers claim they are simply checking facts and not giving their opinion, people are more inclined to believe what they read or hear is true, and there is always some truth in what they write.  But there is so much leeway that they can make a speech by a candidate seem to be full of falsehoods or full of truths, based on the candidate’s political stance, not based on facts.

The number of variables is countless, but a couple are worth noting.  One is in choosing the facts that are checked.  For nearly any candidate they could decide to check facts that they know are absolutely true and ignore the iffy ones, making the candidate look good. Then there is what sources they use for their own facts. Another variable is in how they rate the results.

It’s why the whole scam is so brilliant – it appears objective. “We checked the facts and this is what we found.” In truth it is as subjective as the reporting. Sometimes what they actually check are opinions, and they find a bunch of differing opinions and so they rate what is actually an opinion as false.

But there is so much leeway they can make almost anything seem true or false depending on who said it. Let’s say they decide to check and see if when Donald Trump said his name was Donald Trump if he was telling the truth. Through their extensive research they discover that it is not. His name is Donald John Trump. Why would he not use his full name? What is trying to hide from the American people? So he says his name is Donald Trump, but that isn’t the name on his birth certificate, his baptismal certificate or any of his three marriage licenses. It isn’t even the name on his driver’s license or the name he files taxes under. So since Donald Trump was not on any of the public documents they found, they rate the statement as mostly false.

Hillary Clinton in her speech said her name was Hillary Clinton. So her name is also checked.  Early in the campaign she used Hillary Rodham Clinton, and early in her political career she used Hillary Rodham, but she decided to use the name Hillary Clinton to help her husband get elected governor because the people of Arkansas didn’t like the idea of the governor’s wife using her maiden name. But the fact checkers ignore those facts. The fact checkers decide that she is called Hillary Clinton. When she was a senator she was known as Hillary Clinton and when she was secretary of state she was Hillary Clinton, so calling herself Hillary Clinton was accurate.

They actually do a variation of that same procedure with every fact they check.  The idea that everyone else at the news organization is a strident leftist and the fact checker is somehow completely without any political beliefs is absurd.  The fact checking is simply a clever way to bring more people over to the liberal side.

There was some brilliant fact checking done on the cost of building a wall on the Mexican border. I heard Trump make this statement numerous times and I never heard him say he was going to build a continuous wall ignoring all geographical features from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, but that is what the fact checkers decided he meant by “build a wall.” What I heard him say was that it was going to be really big, but he didn’t give an exact height. The fact checkers gave it a height, and based on their height and length, they ruled it too expensive to build. But it wasn’t based on what Trump said but what the fact checkers decided he meant when he said build a wall.

Check the fact checkers and see how many times they rule statements by Republicans as mostly false and statements by Democrats mostly true.

I commend the left and salute them for this propaganda technique.

I have checked the facts in the above paragraph and rate it mostly true.

*****

Polls are all supposed to be completely unbiased, but we know they aren’t. Even some of the more liberal polls are now showing Hillary Clinton and Trump within the margin of error.

Rasmussen, which in my opinion is one of the more accurate polls, perhaps because it does trend conservative, shows Trump with 44 percent and Hillary Clinton with 37 percent.

During the Republican primary, Trump did a good job of outperforming the polls. The pollsters said it was because people didn’t want to admit they were voting for Trump. I think it could have been the way the pollsters asked the question: “You’re not voting for Trump, are you?” But for whatever reason, according to the pollsters, more people vote for Trump than say they are going to vote for Trump.

*****

One thing Trump hasn’t done so far is completely change his campaign, which so many candidates do after the primaries. He doesn’t spend as much on advertising as other candidates because he gets on the news all the time by being Donald Trump. A good businessman doesn’t spend money just because other people are spending money.   If Trump can win without spending hundreds of millions on advertising, why should he? It’s like telling a football coach he needs to throw the ball more when he’s running the ball every play and is ahead by a touchdown. If what you’re doing is winning, why change?

*****

Maybe it’s old fashioned, but I like the idea that Trump had his children vet his vice presidential contenders. Who knows Trump better than his children? And who could better pick someone to compliment him on the ticket than his own family?

I also think it says a lot about Trump as a person. He didn’t depend on highly paid campaign consultants, which as a group is a bizarre collection of people. They sell themselves to the highest bidder, and while the rank-and-file campaign workers care passionately about the candidate, the top campaign consultants are just hired guns.

There are a few extremely good campaign consultants and then there are a bunch who are so bad they could take Miss America to a beauty contest and lose to a barnyard pig. The vast majority are in the second category and it appears Trump, unlike other recent Republican presidential candidates, has not fallen into the clutches of the dimwits that charge an incredible amount of money and deliver consistently bad advice.

The advice Sen. John McCain received from his campaign consultants was so bad, I’ve always believed that some of them wanted President Barack Hussein Obama to win. If they didn’t want Obama to win they certainly wanted McCain to lose. Nobody can be that bad by accident.

It would be interesting, for instance, to know how much Jeb Bush paid for the “Jeb Can Fix It” slogan and ad campaign. It sent voters the exact message that Bush was trying to avoid. He had been tagged with the “low energy candidate” moniker by Trump, which was a killer blow because it was so apt, and the Jeb Can Fix It campaign added fuel to that already blazing fire.

Trump was promising to tear the place down and attracting huge crowds. The Bush campaign was saying exactly what the voters didn’t want to hear: Bush doesn’t want to change anything. Bush will fix the wobbly handrails, make the steps stop squeaking, keep the toilets from running and continue on down the same path the country has been on.

Bush blames Trump for losing, but he should look at his own campaign if he has any interest in figuring out why he did so poorly. It’s also worth noting that it wasn’t just Trump that beat Bush.

*****

When terrorists use guns, Obama blames the attacks on a lack of gun control. Now that a terrorist has used a truck to kill over 80 people in France, will Obama give a speech on truck control?

What the attack in Nice proves is that the problem is not guns and it isn’t trucks, the problem is that countries, including France and the US, have allowed terrorists free reign in our countries. Some come in from the outside and some are natives who the government allows to be indoctrinated.

In the case of Omar Mateen, who killed 50 people in Orlando, the FBI investigated him three times and knew that he had lied to them but, for some reason, did not notice, care or understand that two trips to the Middle East in two years were not for prayer, but for terrorism. The FBI can’t catch everybody, but in this case they let a violent terrorist slip right through their fingers.

*****

Why is it when Trump gets a Bible quote wrong or calls Second Corinthians Two Corinthians, it is huge news, but when Obama says he is quoting the Gospel of John, when what he is really quoting is the First Epistle of John, it rates hardly a mention by the mainstream media.

Actually, it’s a far more serious mistake for Obama because he has an entire team of speechwriters, and it means he doesn’t have a single one who is familiar with the Bible.

I can hear the speechwriters: “This is memorial service. We need something from the Bible. Does anybody know any Bible verses?”

“Anybody got anything?”

“Hey, here’s something from John, it’ll work.”

“Great. We’ll slip it in right here.”

Obama says he is a Christian, but he wasn’t raised one and the only church he ever attended with any regularity, if he did in fact attend it with any regularity, was Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago. And Obama said he never listened to Rev. Wright, so he was shocked to find that Wright was such a blatant racist and so anti-American.

Let’s take Obama at his word that he didn’t listen. Add to that the fact that he barely donated any money to the church that he said he was an active member of for years. So he was an active member who regularly attended services but had no idea what the pastor talked about or believed, and he didn’t donate money to the church. The fact checkers might want to fact check that one because that doesn’t seem to meet the definition of an active member.

If Obama were put on trial for being a Christian, there doesn’t appear to be enough evidence to convict him. It appears there wouldn’t even be enough evidence to arrest him or get a warrant to search his house for Bibles.

The rest of his speech was not much better. The quote from Ezekiel also wasn’t used correctly, although he did get the book of the Bible right, so we’ll give him points for that.

But as Obama gets closer and closer to leaving the White House, he is more inclined to say what he thinks. And it was clear from the speech that he thinks the police officers were somewhat at fault because of the police shootings in Minnesota and Baton Rouge. Whether those shootings were justified police actions has not been determined, but it sounded like Obama had made up his mind about them.

It was inappropriate to compare those shootings to the shootings of five police officers who were just doing their jobs and were shot down because they were police officers.

*****

The White House response to the Pulse club shooting in Orlando has a familiar feel. Unfortunately for this nation it is much like the White House response to the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The White House promoted the story that the club was targeted because it was a gay club and that Omar Mateen killed 50 people because he was gay, or was tortured by his attraction to men, or anything other than the truth, which is that he was a radical Islamic terrorist who had been to the Middle East twice, not to pray but for indoctrination and training.

Now that the FBI is reporting that the fact that it was a gay club had nothing to do with reason for the attack except that it was a crowded club that Mateen picked because he evidently cased the club and figured out how to kill a lot of Americans.

Now the White House will claim that no one associated with the White House ever implied that the shooting may have had to do with the sexual orientation of the people in the club and the mainstream media will agree.

*****

Who could possibly be responsible for the terrorist attack in Nice that killed 84 people? Obama after the attack said that the US will do everything in its power to help investigate and find out who was responsible. It was an incredible statement.

It seems everyone else in the world knew that ISIS was behind the attack except the president of the US.

Here’s an idea: Every time there is a terrorist attack anywhere in the world connected to ISIS, the bombing of ISIS should be doubled or tripled. If we don’t know where the ISIS leaders are by now then our intelligence is even worse than has been reported. Bomb every place that our intelligence says that they might be and a few more possible military installations just for good measure. Destroy every oil well they have, every oil truck and every vehicle in areas ISIS controls. Fill the skies over ISIS with jets and tell them not to come back until they have used all of their ordinance.

At least two Americans were killed in Nice; that is two too many. The radical Islamic terrorists need to know that if they kill Americans that America will retaliate.

The way things stand under Obama, the radical Islamic terrorists can kill as many Americans as they want and there is no downside. Nothing happens to them, so why shouldn’t they continue to order terrorist attacks against America and her allies?

If Obama had been president on Dec. 7, 1941, he would have launched an extensive investigation to find out who bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that the planes flew off Japanese aircraft carriers and had Japanese markings on them would not have been enough proof for him to retaliate. Maybe after a couple of years the investigation would have been complete and the report would be that there was an 90 percent chance that the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor were of Japanese origin, but they couldn’t prove that the government of Japan ordered the attack. It could have been a rogue admiral acting outside his orders, so no retaliation against Japan would be appropriate.

It would be a different world today.

*****

We’ve learned a few important facts about Jeb Bush since he dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in February: He is a poor loser and you can’t trust his word.

When Trump got in the race, the Republican establishment knew that there was no way Trump could win because not only was he not a member of the ruling class in the GOP, he didn’t bow down to the GOP establishment and show them the respect they think they deserve. They knew Trump couldn’t win but they were terrified that he would run a third-party race that would guarantee a Democratic victory in the presidential race. So the GOP party bosses had all the candidates sign a pledge to support the winner of the primary. Jeb Bush signed right up because he had the most money and he knew he was going to win. Trump hesitated but he agreed to sign and everyone at GOP party headquarters breathed a sigh of relief.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the convention – Trump won and Jeb Bush dropped out when the race was just getting started. It was hugely embarrassing for him. Not only was Bush not the top candidate, he wasn’t even one of the top candidates. The Republican primary voters rejected him in droves.

Bush lost big time and Trump hurt his feelings by calling him the low-energy candidate and not treating Jeb Bush with the deference that he expects because he is, after all, a Bush. His grandfather was a senator. His father was president as well as his brother. Jeb Bush was, in his mind, supposed to be treated with kid gloves because of the achievements of his family.

So now Jeb Bush is going back on his pledge. Not only will he not support Trump, he says he’s not going to vote for him. Evidently, with all that family political training, they left out a key factor in politics: You don’t win by raising the most money and you don’t win because you come from a famous family, you win by getting the most votes.

Also, his brother or his father should have sat Jeb down and explained to him that in politics sometimes people say mean things.

I’ve never been a fan of Jeb Bush, but I had no idea what a huge self-important baby he is.

Trump beat Jeb Bush because Trump was listening to the American people and Bush was listening to his campaign advisors, who did a horrible job.