I really didn’t think that anything the liberal mainstream media did would shock me, but I am shocked that at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, the Democrats handed out signs in the press area and the reporters took the signs and dutifully waved them when ordered to do so.
For those who have never been in a press box this may not be shocking, but as someone who has spent far too much of my life in press areas it is simply astounding that the mainstream media have given up even the pretense of being unbiased.
If you attend a rally under normal conditions nobody has to tell you were the press area is. The rest of the auditorium or meeting hall will be filled with people shouting, cheering and waving signs, and all you have to do to find the press area is look for a group of people sitting quietly but manically banging away on laptops. They don’t cheer, they don’t stand, sometimes even for the national anthem. If they do stand they don’t sing and they often don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance.
It is an area of calm in a sea of emotional outbursts. Reporters are supposed to be observers, not participants. But since nearly every reporter is a diehard liberal, whether they are registered Democrats or unaffiliated, they evidently didn’t see anything wrong with waving signs for Democrats.
*****
Along those same lines, anyone who listened to even a few minutes of the National Public Radio (NPR) coverage of the Democratic National Convention has to question why in the world the Republicans continue to fund this left-wing propaganda organization. There wasn’t even a pretense of unbiased coverage and they talked about the Republican National Convention as if they had been observing the rituals of a previously unknown tribe found in the Amazon jungles.
NPR clearly wants to be the voice of the Democratic Party. Let it, and let the Democratic Party fund it. If the Republicans in Congress are going to fund NPR, they might as well cut to the chase and start funding the Democratic Party. And while they are at it, why not have Congress make a big donation to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
*****
You would think that when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee speaks to a national organization and receives only polite applause that it would be news, but evidently it isn’t.
Hillary Clinton spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ national convention in Charlotte on Monday, and although the veterans were mostly polite, they were decidedly not supportive. When a speaker pauses for applause and there isn’t even a single clap from the audience, you know they are not connecting. In speaking in Charlotte, Hillary Clinton kept pausing and then would continue on with her speech while the audience sat on their hands.
Isn’t that news when a presidential candidate gets not even a lukewarm response from a large organization of veterans? Evidently not. The reports I’ve read were about her speech and neglected to note the lack of applause.
Donald Trump, however, did mention it, which is one reason he is going to be such a tough candidate for Hillary Clinton to beat. Hillary Clinton has the press in her back pocket and it will report what she wants reported. Trump had a huge bullhorn and it has gotten even larger, and he is not going to sit back and allow the media to call all the shots.
*****
If Sen. Bernie Sanders believes even half of what he said at the Democratic National Convention about a revolution, he should be supporting Trump.
One thing we know for certain is that Hillary Clinton is not going to foment anything like a revolution if she is elected. She is going to do what she did in the US Senate and as secretary of state, which is not much. She has no political beliefs other than it is her turn to be elected president. She will follow the liberal agenda as much as possible, but, if, like her husband Bill Clinton, she finds herself facing a conservative House and Senate, she will modify those stands in order to pass legislation, any legislation.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close personal friend of the Clintons, slipped up and told the truth in an interview at the Democratic National Convention. He said that Hillary Clinton, once elected, planned to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Hillary Clinton did support it as secretary of state, but when Sanders made it an issue she reversed herself and came out against it. According to McAuliffe, once in office she plans to make some minor tweaks and then declare it fixed and support it again. If she did it would be a typical Clinton move.
*****
It just goes to show you that you can’t believe what you read in the mainstream media. The Republican convention was supposed to be a raucous affair with so many protestors in Cleveland they were going to shut the city down.
Inside the convention all the delegates who were not elected to support Trump were going to take over and try to nominate someone else, since Sen. Ted Cruz did a good job of getting his people elected as delegates regardless of who they were pledged to on the first vote. The chaos inside the convention would mirror the chaos outside.
The Republican convention turned out to be pretty boring. As much as they tried, the mainstream media couldn’t find the mass of protestors outside the convention, and inside the Never Trump movement fizzled. After two failed voice votes, you hardly heard a peep out of them again. The delegates got behind Trump, who gave a good speech. One surprise turned out to be Trump’s children, who are an impressive lot.
At the Democratic convention there are more Hillary Clinton delegates than Sanders’ delegates. You would expect the Hillary Clinton delegates to be able to drown out the folks shouting, “Bernie, Bernie.” But on Monday night, the only ones drowning out the Sanders supporters were the other Sanders supporters shouting out a different chant.
If someone doesn’t get the convention under control by Thursday night, it’s not going to be pretty when Hillary Clinton gives her acceptance speech. It doesn’t appear that Sanders helped things with his speech on Monday night. His followers refused to quit cheering for him for several minutes. He tried to start his speech several times and had to start over. His speech was mostly about what he stood for and the concessions that Hillary Clinton had made in the Democratic Party platform. Since Hillary Clinton has no problem taking different positions on the same issue, sometimes in the same speech, the idea that she would stick to the Democratic Party platform while running against Trump is pure fantasy.
Hillary Clinton is in fact the exact type of politician that the Sanders supporters hate – one who will say whatever it takes to get elected. It is the Clinton way. The Clinton political philosophy has always been to say and do whatever is necessary to get elected. In their minds the end of getting elected always justifies the means. If Hillary Clinton has to change her position on issues a couple of times a day, that is just the price that has to be paid to get elected.
*****
Speaking of that, why isn’t Trump allowed to revise his stands on issues? The mainstream media constantly report that he is against allowing any Muslims to enter the country. Trump did say that, but since then he has revised his stand and now clearly states that he doesn’t want to allow immigrants who can’t be properly vetted to enter the country because we don’t know who they are.
Banning Muslims doesn’t make any sense, but banning people until they can be properly vetted makes a lot of sense considering the state of terrorism in the world.
In Europe right now, where no vetting is done, they are having a terrorist attack every day. Tuesday, radical Islamic terrorists killed an 84-year-old Catholic priest on the altar by cutting his throat. In Germany there have been knife attacks, ax attacks, machete attacks and bombs. In France, 84 people were killed with a truck.
Hillary Clinton’s plan for more gun control would have had no effect on any of those attacks. Maybe it’s not the guns doing the attacking but the people, which is Trump’s point.
Hillary Clinton is allowed to constantly revise her statements.
Go back and take a look at her press conference on her email server. She has revised those statements countless times because when she said them she knew they weren’t true, but we didn’t know. Now we know at least some of the truth. There was classified information sent and received on her private email server. Furthermore some of the documents were marked classified.
*****
President Barack Hussein Obama said that he doesn’t use the term radical Islamic terrorism because Islam is a religion of peace and it would upset some of our allies in the Middle East to use that term.
So under the Obama administration not only are you not allowed to use any term that might somehow offend someone in the US, but you can’t use any word that might offend anybody anywhere in the world.
It’s getting harder and harder to believe that all these acts of violence are random and that it is merely a coincidence that the acts of violence are committed by Muslims against people they consider infidels, which is everyone else. The fact that two Muslims went in a Catholic church in France and killed a priest on the altar evidently, according to the spin being pushed by the White House, was not a crime related to religious beliefs, and just because one of the killers had twice been caught trying to get to Syria to join ISIS doesn’t mean that ISIS had anything to do with the killing.
Obama has to twist the English language into knots to even talk about these events. The US will survive another six months of his lack of leadership, but it won’t be pretty.
*****
The two presidential campaigns couldn’t be more different.
Trump is the ultimate outsider, having never run for or held office, and his primary campaign threw all the rulebooks out the window.
Hillary Clinton plodded along, dependent on old friends and the National Democratic Party undermining her opponent to get her through the primaries. In the primaries she, as is the longstanding tradition, ran left. She was pulled even further left by Sen. Bernie Sanders, so she now finds herself way out past left field. But it is also the longstanding tradition for Democratic candidates to run right in the general election. So she is now running right as fast as her little legs can carry her. And to make sure everybody knows she is running right, she picked a vice presidential candidate who is about as far right as an elected Democrat can be. Sen. Tim Kaine has actually supported limits on abortion.
The Democratic mantra is: all abortions, all the time for every woman old enough to get pregnant. To give a young girl an aspirin at school it seems you have to have written permission from parents, stepparents, grandparents, grand-stepparents, the baby sitter, her pastor and any doctor who has ever seen her for any reason at any time. But the same girl, according to the Democratic platform, should be able to walk into a clinic after school without even telling her best friend, get an abortion and be on time for basketball practice.
Republicans oppose abortion. The two parties could not be further apart on this defining issue.
*****
I find some of the complaints about Trump pretty amusing. People who say that all politicians are crooks and we need to clean them all out of Washington in the next breath say they can’t vote for Trump because he has no experience.
If you actually want to clear some politicians out of Washington then we have to start electing people who aren’t politicians.
In this race you have the classic politician who will do and say anything to get elected, Hillary Clinton, versus someone who says whatever is on his mind at the moment, whether it is going to win him votes or lose him votes. Trump says what he thinks. Clinton says what the polls and focus groups tell her to say that day to win votes.
Those are the only two choices for president. I can’t count the times I have held my nose and voted for candidates I didn’t like because I liked the other candidate less. That’s what you get with a two party system. People can vote for one of the other candidates on the ballot or write in Jeb! Bush, the Republican establishment’s choice, or for that matter write in Mickey Mouse, he’s always popular with people who choose to write in a candidate. But if you want to take part in the election you have to vote for one of the two candidates.
*****
I love the misdirection of the mainstream media. Just like a magician gets you to look at his left hand while he is stuffing a bunny into his hat with his right hand, the mainstream media, in their quest to spare no effort to get Hillary Clinton elected, are focusing, not on the extremely damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee, but on how the emails came to be released.
What difference does it make if the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans or some middle school student with time on his hands hacked into the DNC computer system and stole its emails? The emails are the story, not how they came to be released.
The only evidence I have been able to find that the Russians may be behind the hack is that the Hillary Clinton campaign says it may be true. But they have no evidence that it is true. The story was floated out there and gobbled up by the press because it distracted the press, but not the Sanders supporters, from the reality of the emails.
Sure the emails cost Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but imagine what might happen if Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to leak the 30,000 emails that Clinton’s lawyers deleted from her server before turning it over to the FBI. Considering the emails that they left on the server – including emails marked classified and top-secret emails – imagine how bad an email had to be in order for Hillary Clinton’s attorneys to delete it.
It would actually be surprising if the Russians didn’t have every single email that Hillary Clinton sent or received from her private email server. It didn’t even have basic safeguards and had no encryption, according to reports.
The Hillary Clinton campaign might be right and what Putin is doing is sending a wakeup call to Hillary Clinton about what happens to her campaign if she doesn’t play ball with him.
*****
The book Clinton Cash makes a good argument that the Clintons engaged in a long, extremely lucrative process of selling State Department favors when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, but all they have is a long list of Hillary Clinton completely changing long-held policies after large donations were made to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton was paid outrageous sums for speeches. Bill Clinton is a good speaker, but is he really worth $750,000 a speech? Nobody thought he was before his wife was appointed secretary of state. And it appears, from the evidence compiled in Clinton Cash, the only people in the world who thought Bill Clinton was worth over $500,000 for a speech were people who needed a big favor from the State Department.
There’s a lot of evidence of quid pro quo, but no smoking gun; Hillary Clinton’d deleted emails may include a whole bunch of smoking guns. Putin could be letting her know that he controls the presidential election. He can assure Hillary Clinton’s defeat, or sit on the emails and see how things work out.
You would expect Putin to want Hillary Clinton to be elected president. She is campaigning on the principle that if the voters elect her they get four more years of the Obama policies, which means Putin can invade any country he likes and only suffer a few sanctions. But, reportedly, Putin doesn’t like Hillary Clinton and he does like Donald Trump. So who knows what Putin is up to. So far he has played Obama like a chump and he knows what he gets if Hillary Clinton is elected, but he may be hedging his bets.
*****
I love this story and I don’t even care whether it’s true or not: President Obama’s half brother Malik Obama, who was the best man at his wedding, is supporting Donald Trump for president. He lives in Kenya but says he is registered to vote in Maryland.
Malik Obama believes in traditional marriage, thinks that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted and wants to make America great again, which are all good reasons to vote for Trump.
*****
OK, so nobody expects the Democrats to be consistent or rational, but sometimes their so-serious actions are just plain old funny.
The Democrats insist that there is no reason to build a wall on the Mexican border because it won’t keep illegal immigrants out and barricades like that are just too expensive. So not only did the Democrats build a four-mile-long wall around the convention center where they are meeting, when the Sanders supporters refused to sit down and shut up they built a wall around the podium.
Really now. Everyone inside is either a delegate, press or some incredible bigwig, and they all made it through security. This is supposed to be a meeting of like-minded people, so why do the speakers need a wall between them and their followers?
*****
Paul Begala is a long time Clinton operative who was James Carville’s partner in running Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but that was an incredible political feat. The practically unknown governor of Arkansas took on the sitting president of the United States and won.
Begala has been working in some capacity for the Clintons ever since and he knows where the bodies are buried and how the Clintons operate.
He said in an interview that it would be a mistake to personally attack Bill Clinton. He is quoted by McClatchyDC as saying: “The political graveyards are littered with corpses of people who thought personal attacks on Bill Clinton would work. They never have; never will. If they want to continue to do it, I can guarantee you it will fail. Ask Ken Starr. Ask Henry Hyde.”
It is an extremely enlightening statement about the way the Clintons have always operated.
Hyde was the chair of the House Judiciary Committee that voted to move forward and impeach Bill Clinton, which the House did. Then Hyde was the chief prosecutor during President Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate where 50 senators voted for Bill Clinton’s removal from office – far short of the 60 votes needed.
During all of that it was revealed that Hyde had an affair from 1965 to 1969 with a married woman; Hyde was also married at the time. It was always suspected that Clinton was the source of this information being made public, and Begala has now all but confirmed it.
It should give you some idea of why Bill Clinton went out of his way to have a private meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch before the results of the yearlong FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server were announced.
It’s a given that these two extremely busy people didn’t spend a half hour in private – protected from prying eyes by the Secret Service and the FBI – discussing their grandchildren and golf.
My guess would be that Bill Clinton handed Lynch a file to read that contained highly personal embarrassing information that could easily be leaked to the press, or not, as the case may be. Since Lynch played ball we may never find out what was in that file.
*****
Two things about the Democratic National Convention that are noteworthy: One is that people booed during the prayer on Monday night; however you feel about your candidate getting mistreated by the Democratic National Committee, you don’t boo during the prayer. Two, this is the Democratic National Convention to nominate the candidate for president of the United States; on Monday night, where were the American flags? Doesn’t it seem like you’d want a few American flags around? If Hillary Clinton is elected president does she plan to abolish the American flag as representing a nation that supported injustice?
*****
I don’t know how I missed this earlier, but when Hillary Clinton was in Raleigh on June 22 she read “sigh” off the teleprompter. If Melania Trump had read “sigh” off the teleprompter it would have been front-page news.
The Clinton campaign said that she didn’t read “sigh” off the teleprompter, which is interesting because she was reading everything else. But it doesn’t matter. Even if you had a video shot of “sigh” appearing on the teleprompter, the campaign would first claim it was doctored, and when that claim was debunked her people would say that Hillary Clinton didn’t read it. It just happened that she adlibbed “sigh” at the same moment that “sigh” appeared on the teleprompter.
*****
I question how accurate the state-by-state polling is because they continually list North Carolina as a purple state, meaning it could go either way.
North Carolina was very narrowly won by Obama in 2008, which is the only time since 1980 that the state has been won by a Democrat. But Obama was the first black man to run for president and the black voter turnout for Obama in 2008 was huge. In 2012, Mitt Romney won North Carolina narrowly. Obama was no longer the first black man running for president. He was the first black man running for reelection as president, which doesn’t have the same cache.
Hillary Clinton is the first woman running for president, but then again she is just another Clinton running for president. I don’t see any way that she is going to win North Carolina, which has a Republican governor, two Republican senators, 10 of 13 Republican US representatives and large Republican majorities in the state House and state Senate.
Hillary Clinton is also a candidate with a lot of baggage, and there is no reason for a huge Democratic turnout for Hillary Clinton. Black voters will vote for her in overwhelming proportions, and it was the black voter turnout that won the state for Obama, but I don’t see black voters who don’t ordinarily vote making a special effort to elect a rich white woman president.
I think the national pollsters are dead wrong about North Carolina and wonder what other states they are missing.
Trump draws large enthusiastic crowds in North Carolina; Hillary Clinton has not. People in North Carolina remember NAFTA, and many former textile workers blame the loss of their jobs on NAFTA. That isn’t going to endear Hillary Clinton, whose husband instituted NAFTA, to them.
I think the cards are lined up heavily against Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and Trump will win it by a considerable margin.