The whole thing about people associated with President Donald John Trump working with Russians reminds me of the political candidate who said his opponent should be disqualified because it was a well-kept secret that the man was a sexagenarian. It’s not what you say but how you say it.
There is nothing wrong with working with Russians. At one time in this country it was considered a plus to have good relations with Russians.
Democratic Party saint John Kennedy sat down in the same room with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev and it was considered at the time to be good for the US.
Hillary Clinton had the famous fiasco where she tried to “reset” relations with the Russians. (If someone on her staff had looked up the Russian word for “reset,” it might have worked a little better.)
Even the man the mainstream media hate nearly as much as Trump, Ronald Reagan, met with Mikhail Gorbachev and that was considered good for the country.
Really, the way the mainstream media write about Trump supporters meeting with Russians, you would think it was illegal or at least immoral. It’s astounding that the mainstream media have gotten away with it for so long.
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It seems the world has gone mad, or at least the mainstream media’s hate for Trump has turned them into lunatics.
In the Kansas election to replace former Congressman Mike Pompeo, who is now director of the CIA, the Republican candidate won by seven points and the mainstream media declared a Democratic victory because the Democrat didn’t lose by 20 points.
Losing is not winning. In a political race, seven points is not close. It’s not a landslide, but it’s not a nail biter either. Seven points is a pretty comfortable margin.
Politics is a lot like sports. If you win by one vote or one point, it’s still a win. But if a team wins a basketball game by 12 or 14 points, it’s not close.
So the Republicans won a comfortable, but not an overwhelming, race in Kansas and somehow this was a victory for the Democrats.
What it proves, if it proves anything, is that the country is fairly evenly divided. But fairly evenly doesn’t mean evenly, and there are more people out there voting Republican than are voting Democratic.
The mainstream media are obsessed with Trump.
On Nov. 8, the mainstream media were completely convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win. The question that they had was whether she would win in a huge landslide with coattails long enough for the Democrats to win both houses of Congress, or whether the Democrats would just win the Senate and the White House, while the Republicans would maintain narrow control of the House.
Nov. 8 didn’t happen like that. The Republicans won big all across the board, not only maintaining control of both houses of Congress and winning the White House, but winning in races for state legislatures and governors across the country.
Five months later the mainstream media haven’t figured it out yet. They can’t imagine why anyone would vote for Trump, or most Republicans for that matter.
Some enterprising reporter from The New York Times or The Washington Post needs to go back and do some analysis on the presidential campaign.
They need to put their own personal opinions, an unhealthy love of Hillary Clinton and a virulent hatred of Trump in a box and look at the facts.
They need to go back and look at the campaign rallies. Trump was filling large venues with enthusiastic crowds of supporters everywhere he went while Hillary Clinton was sitting at home doing whatever she does when she remains hidden for days at a time. If she were a Republican, the press would have found out what she was doing, but the mainstream media showed little interest in why a candidate running for president would be spending so much time at home and not campaigning.
Hillary Clinton didn’t campaign much. Her rallies, when she did hold them, were often in small venues and for Democratic insiders only.
Trump was shouting out that he was going to build a wall, abolish Obamacare and bring jobs back from overseas.
Hillary Clinton was talking about the fact that she was Hillary Clinton, the ultimate Washington insider.
She was such a poor candidate that it took her right up until the end to vanquish Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, and Sanders isn’t even a Democrat.
The Democrats put up a lousy presidential candidate, much like the Republicans did when they ran Bob Dole against Bill Clinton. Dole got the nomination because it was his turn. The American people don’t care about whose turn it is.
This time around on the Republican side it was Jeb Bush’s turn, and he may have gotten the nomination if it hadn’t been for Trump taking all the air out of the race.
The Democrats went with Hillary Clinton because it was her turn, not because she had anything to say, not because the people were behind her and not because she was a good candidate.
The Republicans let the rank-and-file Republican Party members decide who the nominee was going to be, something the Democrats might want to try next time.
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Here’s a fun fact: The first vice president to live in the vice president’s house at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, DC, was President Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in 1977.
The house technically became the vice president’s house in 1974. Before that, the vice president lived in his own home.
Gerald Ford – the first vice president eligible to live in the vice president’s house – became president before he could move in.
His vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, used the house for entertaining but never lived there, probably because, being a Rockefeller, his house was much nicer than the vice presidential mansion.
Since Mondale, all the vice presidents have technically lived in the house, although Vice President Joe Biden, who lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and when in the Senate commuted by train to Washington, also spent a lot of time at home in Delaware while vice president.
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Haiti is a great reason for the US to reduce its funding of the United Nations. The so-called peacekeeping troops in Haiti are finally being pulled out and the people of Haiti are delighted.
The peacekeeping troops have caused more problems then they have solved. The peacekeeping troops brought cholera to Haiti, which has killed close to 10,000 people and caused thousands more to be deathly ill. The UN troops have also forced young Haitian girls and boys into prostitution rings.
Of course, the UN being the UN, the peacekeeping forces that were running child prostitution rings were not prosecuted; they were merely sent home at the end of their tours.
Why should the US fund an organization that brings deadly disease and child prostitution to a country already ravaged by political unrest, a massive earthquake and hurricanes?
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“Republicans avoid big loss by forcing runoff in Georgia House race,” was the headline in The Washington Post after the Tuesday special congressional election in Georgia went to a runoff, as it almost certainly would.
The headlines in the mainstream media are beginning to look like that old joke about the headline in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, when a Soviet horse raced against an American horse and the American horse won. The Pravda headline read, “Soviet horse finishes second, American horse next to last.”
What about this for a headline: “Democrats lose another, forced into runoff.”
The mainstream media in their absolute unfettered hatred of Trump are becoming ridiculous.
First it was the race in Kansas, which was going to prove that the country no longer supported Trump. Next was the race in Georgia, where once again regardless of who was on the ballot Trump was going to lose.
It’s a replay of the primary election last year where, in state after state, the mainstream media were hoping, praying and predicting that this would be the state that Trump would lose and were continually wrong. Then the mainstream media gave the general election to Hillary Clinton. The only question in their minds was how big a landslide Hillary Clinton would win by.
The mainstream media have allowed their personal views to cloud their judgment. They should return to reporting facts and not opinions.
But eventually a Republican is going to lose. It may be a candidate for sheriff in Alabama or dogcatcher in Idaho, but it’s going to happen, and when it does the mainstream media are going to declare that the era of Trump is over.
These folks are really grasping at straws. But it’s like an economist who predicts a recession every year; eventually that economist is going to be right.
The mainstream media predict that the people are going to the polls and vote against Trump in every election; eventually they have to get one right.
The mainstream media will cheer, but it won’t make any difference because, in the election that mattered, Trump won, and he did have coattails and is working with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
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It appears that Trump is going to pull out of the Paris climate treaty.
If the US could get rid of all the impediments to industrial growth based on the strange but popular theory that if the US produces less carbon gases that is somehow going to change the climate, it would be a huge plus.
We may be the most powerful nation in the world, but that doesn’t mean that we control the climate. Earth has been warming for at least the last 10,000 years. If all Americans drive electric cars and only use electricity when the sun is shining or the wind blowing, that is not going to change the fact that Earth is gradually warming.
It would put a big crimp on the American lifestyle if we could only use solar and wind power. Imagine being in the middle of watching an episode of House of Cards on Netflix and having the wind die down. Not only would your computer shut down, but Netflix would quit broadcasting and you’d have to sit there staring at a blank screen praying that the wind would pick back up. You might even have to resort to reading a book by flashlight because you wouldn’t want to run your iPhone batteries down, since you couldn’t recharge them until morning when the sun came up. I don’t see America doing well with only so-called renewable energy.
The whole global warming scam seems to be based on the belief by baby boomers that the climate of Earth when they were growing up is the proper climate for eternity. Has there ever been a generation before that thought it could control the climate?
If Al Gore, the inventor of global warming as a political movement, believed what he was saying, he wouldn’t fly around in a private jet.
Climate change is really an attack on the industrialized world; everything we do is bad. But the idea of the US going back to a nation of subsistence farmers isn’t going to happen.
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It’s a sign that Trump is doing a good job as president that the loudest protestors out there are still complaining about Trump not releasing his tax returns.
Trump supporters voted for him without seeing his tax returns and he had enough supporters to get elected president. So it’s hard to see where the incentive is for him to release his returns at this stage of the game.
It seems like an odd issue to be bringing up. Trump is a multi-billionaire. Whether he’s worth $5 billion or $10 billion is a matter of how you value the real estate he owns. I would imagine that Trump’s tax returns would show that, like most Americans, Trump takes every legal deduction available and his accountants work long hours to figure out how he can pay as little in federal income tax as possible.
I would also be willing to bet that, unlike the Clintons, Trump did not take a deduction for used underwear he donated to charity.
If this is all the Trump haters can find to protest about, Trump must be doing a great job.
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The reason that the world is so concerned about the activities of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s insane dictator, is that he has nuclear weapons. Without nuclear weapons he wouldn’t be much of a threat to anyone. With nuclear weapons he is a threat to everyone.
How did North Korea acquire nuclear weapons? It was courtesy of then President Bill Clinton and his special envoy to North Korea, former President Jimmy Carter.
When it appeared that North Korea was on the verge of creating nuclear weapons, President Clinton sent Carter to North Korea to negotiate a treaty. North Korea got $5 billion and two nuclear reactors in exchange for promising to halt its nuclear bomb development program.
But North Korea lied. It took the money and the reactors and kept developing nuclear weapons. No doubt Carter was shocked that anyone would not tell the truth, but it happens. So North Korea continued on its merry way, richer and with two new nuclear reactors.
Today the question is has North Korea miniaturized its nuclear capability to the point that it can make a bomb small enough to be delivered by a missile.
But even if it has managed to make a bomb small enough to fit on a missile, North Korea has been having problems with its missile program. No doubt Kim doesn’t want put a nuclear warhead on a missile that is going to fizzle at launch like his latest one did.
But North Korea should be a lesson to the US that Iran has probably not halted its nuclear weapons program either. The Iranians may have been slowed by having to hide the program better, but the idea that Iran would for some strange reason uphold an agreement with the US after the US has given them billions of dollars and paid a ransom for hostages is naive. No doubt, Carter believes that the Iranians are upholding their end of the bargain.
But it doesn’t appear that Trump is nearly as naive as Clinton, Carter or former President Barack Obama.
But then maybe Obama wasn’t naive. Obama desperately wanted an agreement with Iran and was willing to stoop to almost anything to get one. Obama knew he was leaving office. It doesn’t appear he had a lot of concern about Iran keeping its end of the bargain. If he were concerned he wouldn’t have allowed the Iranians to inspect themselves.
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The first report I read on how little Trump had gotten done in his first 100 days surprised me, because it didn’t seem like 100 days yet – and it wasn’t. I think it was about 40 days.
But there seem to be daily reports on Trump’s 100 days. One of my favorites is that Trump hasn’t built the wall on the southern border yet.
Considering how slowly the federal government moves, it seems incredible to me that they have companies building prototype walls. No reasonable person could have possibly expected Trump to start building the wall his first week in office.
What Trump has done is change the policy on illegal immigrants that is making the wall less necessary. When people know that there is a good chance they will be sent back home, there is much less of an incentive to make a long, dangerous and expensive journey.
Congress needs to develop a guest worker policy that will work, but with the federal government enforcing immigration laws, a big part of the problem is going away on its own.
