The Patriot Post Digest 12-12-2016

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 12-12-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Mid-Day Digest

Dec. 12, 2016

IN TODAY’S EDITION

The Russia-Trump story highlights amazing Democrat hypocrisy. Naturally.
Will ExxonMobil’s CEO be the face of American diplomacy? If so, he faces challenges.
The Leftmedia’s fake news machine has been in high gear for a long time.
And more news, policy and opinion.

THE FOUNDATION

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.” —George Washington (1796)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Democrats Hypocritically Play the Victim1

Self-reflection, self-criticism and self-correction are foreign concepts to Democrat leaders. They continue to throw out every possible excuse for why they lost the election — except the primary reason that many Americans just didn’t buy their rhetoric or prescription of continuing failed policies. The latest blame-game play for Democrats is to self-identify as the victims of a masterful Russian hacking plot designed to swing the election to Donald Trump. While there is no solid evidence to support this claim, the Leftmedia fakery machine quickly rushed to bolster the narrative with reports that unnamed U.S. intelligence sources have concluded that the Russians intervened and helped Trump’s campaign.

What is so disingenuous about this current charge is that those responsible for creating the climate for Russia’s aggression are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was Obama who chided Mitt Romney in 2012 for his “1980s” foreign policy concerns regarding the threat of Russia’s growing geopolitical power. And there was Secretary of State Clinton’s infamous “reset” with Russia, providing it with greater opportunity to continue exploiting the administration’s feckless foreign policy. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of all is Clinton deciding to break the law in using an unsecured personal server2 that undoubtedly was hacked, probably by the Russians. In other words, it is Democrat leaders, not Republicans or Trump, who are responsible for creating the mess in which they now find themselves.

But, again, the concerns over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system seem a rather hypocritical charge for the Democrats to make given their history. In the early 1990s, it was discovered through the release of Soviet-era documents that Sen. Ted Kennedy had secretly asked the Russians to interfere on behalf of the Democrat Party in the 1984 elections. And now after losing, Democrats are wringing their hands over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system? While they clearly are seeking to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and even the whole American electoral process, they are playing right into Putin’s hands.

Being frustrated over losing is understandable. Seeking to destroy the legitimacy of your opponent’s victory is vindictive.

Tillerson’s Challenge3

It’s not official yet, but multiple “sources” in Donald Trump’s transition team say he’s going to nominate ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state. Tillerson was a dark horse candidate while most of the media speculation centered on Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, with whom Trump would have had to bury a “yuge” hatchet. If it’s true that Trump went with the dark horse, what are the takeaways?

Basically, two things. Tillerson’s business acumen, like Trump’s, is an asset. Thanks to his being the chief of the world’s largest energy company, he’s clearly a proven negotiator and will have connections around the world to go with his understanding of geopolitics. As Trump put it, “He’s in charge of an oil company that’s pretty much double the size of his next nearest competitor. It’s been a company that’s been unbelievably managed — and to me a great advantage is he knows many of the players, and he knows them well. He does massive deals in Russia — for the company, not for himself.”

According to The Wall Street Journal4, Tillerson has “close ties to Vladimir Putin.”

Which leads to Tillerson’s biggest negative, and the story of Russia allegedly influencing the election is just an example of it. Close ties to Putin aren’t exactly an asset right now, given the Leftmedia’s incessant work to paint Trump as Putin’s stooge. Key Senate Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio have voiced concerns. And as they have done with Trump, Democrats and their Leftmedia super PAC are going to turn everything Tillerson says or does into some sort of corporate conspiracy to enrich Big Oil. Like it or not, that isn’t going to help American foreign policy.

At the same time, one of our major national interests is energy, and if anybody knows how to protect that it might just be Tillerson.

Top Headlines5

Sens. Durbin and Graham propose permanent legal status for Obama’s DREAMers. (Roll Call6)

ICE spends $100 million ferrying illegal immigrant children around U.S. (The Washington Times7)

Republican Kennedy wins Senate runoff in Louisiana, bringing GOP majority to 52. (The Hill8.)

House Republicans form Second Amendment Caucus. (Washington Free Beacon9)

North Carolina Rep. preps concealed carry reciprocity bill. (Washington Free Beacon10)

Heroin overdoses killed more people in the U.S. than firearms in 2015. Maybe we should outlaw drugs… (ABC News11)

Senate approves spending bill minutes before deadline, averting government shutdown. (The Washington Post12)

Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign cost a record $1.2B. That wasn’t exactly money well spent. (New York Post13)

Media spreads fake story that Trump protesters will be barred from public lands at inauguration. (National Review14)

U.S. judge rejects Green Party’s Pennsylvania recount case. Stein and Clinton still lose. (Associated Press15)

All about Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Trump’s pick for interior secretary. (The Daily Signal16)

The latest fruit of the Iran nuclear deal: Boeing seals deal with Iran for nearly $17B. (The Wall Street Journal17)

Policy: The economics of NATO expansion (National Center for Policy Analysis18.)

Policy: U.S. missile defense must be top priority (Washington Examiner19)

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Fake News Exposes Real Hypocrisy20

By Arnold Ahlert

The American Left’s determination to blame virtually anything other than their alienation of millions of working-class Americans for the defeat of Hillary Clinton is finally coalescing around a prevailing idea: “stupid” voters were conned by “fake news21.”

If one likes a good fake news story, the high-profile Washington Post screed22 about the Russian-generated fake news propaganda campaign that ostensibly put Trump in the White House goes right to the top of the list. How fake? After its publication, the paper’s editor added a “clarifier” at the top of the story, disavowing a group of anonymous “experts” calling themselves PropOrNot, who had named several fake news sources in the original article. The Post’s editor subsequently decided the paper could no longer “vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings.”

Why? The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen reveals23 PropOrNot’s methodology for determining fake news was so flawed it “could include … nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself.”

In short the Post’s story about fake news … was fake news.

Yet the leftist beat goes on, even as they remain immune to the breathtaking hypocrisy that animates it. Hillary Clinton led the way during an appearance at an event celebrating retiring Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) career. She spoke24 about the “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year,” and the “real world consequences” that attended it. “This isn’t about politics or partisanship,” she insisted. “Lives are at risk.”

At risk? Lives were lost in Benghazi. And to maintain Obama administration credibility toward the end of the 2012 presidential campaign, Clinton and Barack Obama perpetrated25 the most despicable fake news story26 of the decade, blaming the deaths of four Americans on an offensive video. Perhaps the hand wringers at the Times and the Post might ask themselves which is more egregious: an unproven fake news campaign disseminated by the Russians, or a thoroughly documented one disseminated by the Obama administration.

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 12-12-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

And then there’s Reid himself who penned27 a New York Times piece insisting “the responsibility for separating what is real and what is fake will fall on Democrats.” One is left to wonder if such Democrats include Reid himself, who not only used the floor of the Senate to make an unsubstantiated claim28 about Mitt Romney’s failure to pay taxes for 10 years, but subsequently bragged that his lying helped to defeat Romney.

As for Democrats tasked with separating “what is real and what is fake,” what could be phonier than celebrating the career of perhaps the most ethically challenged person to ever sit in the Senate?

Former NBC anchor Brian Williams gets in on the action as well, declaring that “fake news played a role in the election and continues to find a wide audience.” That’s the same Brian Williams given a six month suspension by NBC for perpetrating fake news stories, especially the whopper29 about being nearly shot down during a helicopter flight over Iraq. Ironically, Williams won the 2009 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism and was praised30 by Cronkite, who called Williams a “fastidious newsman.” That’s the same “Uncle Walter” Cronkite never held sufficiently accountable for his lie31 about America losing the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A lie that prolonged a conflict ultimately costing 54,000 Americans their lives.

“Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon,” Greta Von Susteren aptly asserts32. “For decades, Americans have had an appetite for fringe stories, from grassy knoll conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination to the alien secrets of Area 51 and the baseless notion that 9/11 was an inside job.”

Von Susteren lays the blame for fake news squarely where it belongs. “Part of the reason fake news is so easy to believe is that fringe stories no longer read or sound all that different from too many of the real stories. Too often, both have little or no sourcing; they lack context and they get disseminated with almost no fact-checking.”

Maybe that’s because the Left’s determination to embrace the moral and cultural relativism that appeals to emotion in lieu of objectivity — makes fact-checking subservient.

Subservient to what? The Narrative, in all its “hands up don’t shoot” reality-twisting, divisiveness-inducing and ratings-generating glory.

Add calculated errors of omission to the mix, along with the fact these major media players have a reach that dwarfs that of the fake news purveyors they rail about, and it becomes clear who the most egregious disseminators of fake news are — and whose agenda they are determined to serve, at the price of journalistic integrity.

“Recall that the Times and its co-conspirators created a fictional Trump held aloft by goose-stepping brownshirts and toothless bigots rising from the swamps,” columnist Michael Goodwin explains33. “They aimed to scare the country into supporting Clinton by turning their front pages into editorial pages, where ‘straight news’ became an oxymoron.”

Turning straight news into an oxymoron is an integral part of a progressive ideology and their “never let a crisis go to waste,” “win by any means necessary” worldview. The worldview animated by the disciples of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” who include our current president and Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, their Alinsky-advocated34 vision to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” just got steamrolled by a trash-talking, Twitter-posting political neophyte whose own bona fides — or lack thereof — have yet to be established.

Regardless, Donald Trump has already done the nation an enormous favor: In the course of winning the election, he exposed millions of self-professed “tolerant” leftists as the hateful hysterics they truly are. Better still, it is an “emperor has no clothes” revelation that cannot be walked back in the foreseeable future — all the fake news in the world notwithstanding.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Compromise on ObamaCare Isn’t Really Possible35 — The philosophical divide on health care is likely unbridgeable.
The Rainbow Mafia Claims Another Victim36 — Bed and breakfast owner fined for refusing to host same-sex wedding.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

John Goodman: When Pro-Business Is Pro-Labor37
Peggy Noonan: What Trump Got That Romney Didn’t38
Hans von Spakovsky: Taming the Bureaucratic Beast39

For more, visit Right Opinion40.

OPINION IN BRIEF

John Goodman: “The idea that management and labor are invariably at odds is a Marxist idea. … Labor market regulations that help some workers often do so at the expense of other workers. More often than not, intervention makes all workers worse off. This issue takes on new relevance with Donald Trump’s choice of Andrew Puzder to be the new Secretary of Labor. … Puzder has the unconventional idea that government intervention in the labor market usually prevents labor and management from doing things that would be good for both. Most economists would agree. The gig economy, of which Uber is the epitome, is a perfect example of an unregulated labor market. … I travel a lot and I use Uber a lot and I am in the habit of asking Uber drivers what they think. The results of my informal survey: out of every 15 or so drivers questioned, roughly 14 tell me that they prefer to be independent contractors rather than employees. Those answers are remarkable when you stop to think about all the ways in which the tax law favors employment. … In an ideal world, buyers and sellers of labor services would be able to engage in mutually beneficial exchange without asking permission from government. Let’s hope President Trump and Secretary Puzder can help us move in that direction.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

For the record: “If … progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages to the Soviets in the midst of the cold war, he also begged them to intervene in a U.S. presidential election in order to unseat President Ronald Reagan. That’s no exaggeration. According to Soviet documents unearthed in the early 1990’s, Kennedy literally asked the Soviets, avowed enemies of the U.S., to intervene on behalf of the Democratic party in the 1984 elections.” —Sean Davis, March 2015

Upright: “When President Obama accuses President-elect Trump of not taking the Russian threat or our democratic allies seriously, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a very clever man, but he wasn’t internationally powerful until the United States gave him what he wanted during the Obama administration.” —Anne Pierce in the Washington Examiner

Alpha Jackass: “I think [FBI Director James Comey] should be investigated by the Senate. I think he should be investigated by other agencies of the government, including the security agencies. … You look at the accounts [regarding Russia] we have just in the press the last few days, its stunning — stunning — the conclusions reached by the press. Thank goodness we’ve got them still around… This is not fake news, okay?” —Harry Reid

Non Compos Mentis: “Chicago has a great deal of Dreamers — DACA students. … These are kids who are literally, in my view, honoring their parents' sacrifice and struggle to come and embrace the American dream.” —Mayor Rahm Emanuel

And last… “The Russians didn’t tell Hillary Clinton to ignore Wisconsin and Michigan. … She ignored states that she shouldn’t have, and Donald Trump was the change agent.” —Reince Priebus

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.