The Patriot Post Digest 6-6-2016

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 6-6-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Mid-Day Digest

Jun. 6, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” —Benjamin Franklin (1735)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Fact-Challenged Obama Touts Economic Record1

Despite a dismal May jobs report2 that showed only 38,000 jobs were added to the economy last month, Barack Obama stubbornly stayed on message to say in his weekly address over the weekend that he brought back the American economy. Earlier in the week, before the report dropped, Obama visited Elkhart, Indiana, to tout his economic “legacy”3 and despite facts to the contrary, Obama claimed the city’s recovery was due to his policies. “It’s also because we made a series of smart decisions early in my presidency,” Obama said, pointing to such policies as bailing out the auto industry and pouring subsidies into the otherwise not-yet-viable alternative energy sector.

Ignoring the recent headlines, Obama turned political with his fact-free speech when he mentioned the presidential election. “We’ve got to come together, around our common economic goals,” Obama said. “We’ve got to push back against policies that protect powerful special interests, and push for a better deal for all working Americans. That’s the choice you’ll get to make this year.”

But if you want to see a frozen economy, only look at what Obama hath wrought. At least one economist — from the left-leaning Brookings Institution no less — says4 the economy may have actually lost 4,000 jobs in May. Add that to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' downward revision that said 59,000 jobs were not actually added in March and April. And while the Federal Reserve was going to decide whether to raise interest rates again in a few days, that’s now off the table5 again because the jobs report indicates the nation is still mired in anemic growth. A few weeks ago, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said6 she may consider imposing negative interest rates in an effort to get the economy growing again. While Obama’s regulation has choked out industries such as coal, he had the gall to blame “Republicans in Congress” for blocking his job-creating “investments.” Reality, however, is more telling than Obama’s words.

Clinton’s Constitutional Contempt7

Hillary Clinton is no fan of guns or of the Second Amendment. That’s not news to anyone reading these pages, or anyone who’s been paying attention since she advocated banning “assault weapons” in the early 1990s. As for this campaign, back in October, she discussed her plan for more gun control8. Beyond the leftist platitude of “universal background checks,” which we already essentially have, she declared that gun manufacturers should be liable for how their products are used. She has also praised Australian gun confiscation9 as something worth looking into.

So questions about her interpretation of the Second Amendment are justified. And former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos actually asked her a tough one: “Do you believe that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right — that it’s not linked to service in a militia?”

Clinton did her best to evade the question beyond blaming “the late Justice Scalia” for his ruling in the Heller case. Before that ruling, she argued, “there was a nuanced reading of the Second Amendment.” She proceeded to regurgitate her policy preferences, before insisting, “If it is a constitutional right, then it, like every other constitutional right, is subject to reasonable regulation” (emphasis added). Clinton is only grudgingly conceding that the Supreme Court has ruled bearing arms an individual right, not that the Constitution clearly enumerates it. She’s also strongly implying that she would both regulate it further and nominate judges who would work to limit it. Democrats have nothing but contempt for the Constitution, though they cloak it in rhetoric of feigned respect.

Islamic State, Not Climate Change, Is Greatest Security Threat10

When John Kerry was registering his objection to the United States going into Iraq, he said of George W. Bush, he “took his eye off the ball,” by which Kerry meant going into Afghanistan was okay but not into Iraq. Obama used the same phrase five years later just before he entered the White House to describe Bush’s decision to invade the country. At that time, he was already making plans to order U.S. troops out of Iraq.

We know what happened next. The pullout left a vacuum11 in which the Islamic State festered and grew. Meanwhile the Obama administration shifted its focus to global warming. In September 2014, Kerry declared12 that climate change was the biggest threat this nation faced. And in preparation for the UN climate treaty, the administration said13 climate change was “an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water.”

Now, the State Department has issued a report14 on terrorism across the globe that named the Islamic State as the greatest global threat. The State Department reported, “Toward the end of 2015, ISIL fighters conducted a series of external attacks in France, Lebanon, and Turkey, demonstrating the organization’s capabilities to carry out deadly plots beyond Iraq and Syria and also exposing weakness in international border security measures and systems. These attacks may also have been staged in an effort to assert a narrative of victory in the face of steady losses of territory in Iraq and Syria.” The fight against the Islamic State might be making gains, but it does not mean the group is contained nor the world safe from attack. Someone took his eye off the ball, and it wasn’t George W. Bush.

Oh, and one more thing — the State Department identified the number one state sponsor of terrorism: Iran. Clearly, Obama’s $150 billion gift to the mullahs through the nuclear deal will work out just fine.

D-Day and Ronald Reagan15

Today is the anniversary of D-Day. More than 160,000 troops landed on a 50-mile stretch of heavily fortified beaches along the Normandy coast of France in what was the largest invasion force in history, involving more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft. Some 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded that day. We owe these Patriots and generations of others an enormous debt of gratitude, and we owe them our steadfast devotion to Liberty over tyranny in our own day, so that the gift of Liberty may be extended to the next generation.

Read Ronald Reagan’s speech on the 40th anniversary16.

Speaking of Reagan, Saturday marked 12 years since his passing. Don’t miss our 2004 tribute to the Gipper17.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Todd Starnes: School Sends Sheriff to Order Child to Stop Sharing Bible Verses18
Jeff Jacoby: Should You Need the Government’s Permission to Work?19
George Will: Britain, Too, Is Infected With Political Silliness20

For more, visit Right Opinion21.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Left’s Culture War ‘Victory’22

By Arnold Ahlert

If one is conservative, a recent Washington Post article23 by Barton Swaim should raise one’s hackles on two counts. First, Swaim asserts the Left has won the culture war. Second, while some conservatives will resist that assertion, Swaim contends “many do not.” He argues, “Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.” Perhaps the surrenderists should reconsider for the simplest of reasons: If the Left has won the culture war, it is the epitome of a Pyrrhic victory.

Or to paraphrase a familiar quote from the Vietnam War era, the Left had to destroy the nation in order to save it.

The signs are everywhere. “In 2014, 28% of young men were living with a spouse or partner in their own home, while 35% were living in the home of their parent(s),” a Pew study reveals24. Pew further notes this particular change in status for adults between the ages of 18 and 34 is occurring “for the first time in more than 130 years.” The remaining 22% are living with another relative, a non-relative, or in group quarters such as college dormitories. The primary reason? A “postponement of, if not retreat from, marriage,” Pew explains. “In addition, a growing share of young adults may be eschewing marriage altogether.”

In other words, we are seeing the postponement of a critical component of adulthood for as long as possible by the same cohort of Americans who have heartily embraced “safe spaces” — the foremost of which is apparently mom and dad’s house.

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 6-6-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Nevertheless life, as it were, goes on. And it goes on courtesy of another leftist culture war “victory,” as in the reality that by 2012, more than 50% of women under the age of 30 were having babies out of wedlock. “It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal,” the New York Times informs us25. The paper also says that statistic is class-based: College graduates “overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.”

And since single parenthood is one of the surest roads to economic deprivation — as in single-parent families are six times26 more likely to live in poverty than married-parent families — perhaps the victorious leftist culture warriors who champion the “diversity” of family arrangements should also take responsibility for the lion’s share of the “income gap” they routinely attribute to other factors. Even more so for the greater27 instances of emotional and behavioral problems that attend single parenthood.

The destruction28 of the nuclear family was made possible by the leftist triumph known as the “Great Society29,” an initiative spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson and a Democrat-controlled Congress. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan rightly predicted30 in 1966, “A community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families … asks for and gets chaos.”

How conservatives are supposed to live as amiably and productively as they can amid chaos, such as the deadliest31 May shooting spree in Chicago in 21 years, is anyone’s guess. And Chicago is not alone. Black Lives Matter32, another group of leftist “winners,” has demonized police forces to the point where many officers are reluctant to do their jobs. As a result, murder and other violent crimes are soaring33 in a number of American cities.

Swaim is hopeful the Left’s victory “may bring about a more peaceable public sphere.” But, he says, “that will depend on others — especially the adherents of an ascendant social progressivism — declining to take full advantage of their newfound cultural dominance.” He cites “principled pluralism,”34 a concept advocating the idea that those who disagree on fundamental principles can still find equitable compromises, as the best path to that peace.

Leftists are many things. Proponents of equitable compromise, a.k.a. live and let live, is not one of them.

Nothing epitomizes this better than the ongoing attempts35 to completely silence dissent on college campuses across the nation. Even some leftists have noticed. “Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason?” asks36 the New Yorker’s Nathan Heller. “Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear.”

Generations of professors and students haves turned college campuses into de facto leftist indoctrination camps.

The Left is also determined to force-feed their agenda to a recalcitrant public. Thus the attempt to suspend biological and chromosomal reality by force of law37 continues apace, along with the attempt to prosecute38 those who deny the Left’s “settled science” with regard to climate change.

Yet the most critical point missed by Swaim is the most obvious: A cultural victory requires a culture. And nothing brings to mind the aforementioned Vietnam-era mindset of “destructive salvation” better than the ongoing invasion39 of illegal aliens the Left champions. For these power-hungry victors, better the “fundamental transformation of the United States” into a Third World banana republic where they maintain a vice-like grip on power40 than a First World nation where they’re forced to compete in the arena of ideas. Better the “borderless world” advocated by a clueless John Kerry, even as the Constitution would be rendered meaningless as a result.

A genuine culture war victory requires no coercion, censorship or, as evidenced last Thursday, mob violence41 to sustain it. Yet with each passing day, it becomes ever clearer leftist victors conflate crushing hearts and minds with winning them. It doesn’t get any hollower — or less sustainable — than that.

As for Swaim’s “pliable” conservatives, they would do well to remember the words often attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even worse? Collaborating with evil to live as amiably and productively as possible amidst it. If that’s not the essence of political correctness — and consummate surrender — one is hard-pressed to imagine what is.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

Ramadan Is Here and Obama Sees Political Opportunity42
Vet’s Patriotic Gesture Earns Him a Job Termination43
The U-2 Jobs Numbers Are In44

TOP HEADLINES

Couric’s ‘Under the Gun’ Producers May Have Broken the Law45
Gov. McAuliffe Restored Killers' Voting Rights46
David French Won’t Run as Independent Candidate47

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report48

OPINION IN BRIEF

Todd Starnes: “A public school in California ordered a seven-year-old boy to stop handing out Bible verses during lunch — and it dispatched a deputy sheriff to the child’s home to enforce the directive. … [Christina] Zavala made it a practice of including a Bible verse and an encouraging note in her son’s lunch bag. … On April 18, a teacher called Mrs. Zavala and said her son would no longer be able to share the Bible verses because he was ‘not allowed to share such things while at school.’ Liberty Counsel said the school would only allow the child to distribute the Bible verses outside the school gate — after the bell rang. … But on May 9, the school’s principal decided to implement a complete ban on the Bible verse sharing. … The principal told the boy and his father to move to a public sidewalk. … It would be just a few hours later when the Zavala family heard a knock at their front door. ‘The deputy sheriff said he had been sent by the school,’ Liberty Counsel attorney Richard Mast told me. ‘The deputy went on to tell the parents that the school was worried that someone might be offended by the Bible verses.’ … Liberty Counsel is demanding the school stop its policy of suppressing and censoring student religious speech. If it fails to comply, the school could face a federal lawsuit. And for good measure, we can only hope that Liberty Counsel will use a deputy sheriff to hand deliver the lawsuit to the school’s principal.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper, who died 12 years ago Saturday: “When the Lord calls me home … I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future.”

Upright: “After days of prayer, reflection, and serious study of the possibilities, I am not going to run as an independent candidate for president of the United States. … It would be tempting to say that when it comes to confronting this national moment, ‘somebody’ stepping up is better than nobody. But somebody is not always better than nobody. … Nations are built on virtue — and courage is indispensable. But there is also prudence, and it was simply not prudent for me to take on this task. I remain against Trump and against Hillary, but I will do all I can where I am.” —David French

Friendly fire: “If you ask me about the Clinton Foundation, do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships? … Yeah I do.” —Bernie Sanders (Where was this criticism earlier in the campaign?)

Braying Jenny: “She has said she made a mistake, and nobody is going to die as a result of anything that happened on emails.” —Madeleine Albright defending Hillary Clinton (Perhaps, but four Americans DID die because of Clinton’s dereliction in Benghazi.)

Braying Jackass: “We don’t get too disappointed when jobs numbers one month are lower than expected.” —Josh Earnest

Will the real Donald Trump please stand up? “Muhammad Ali is dead at 74! A truly great champion and a wonderful guy. He will be missed by all!” —Trump on Saturday (“Obama said in his speech that Muslims are our sports heroes. What sport is he talking about, and who? Is Obama profiling?” —Trump on Dec. 7)

And last… “The only things Hillary and Trump say the truth about are each other.” —Frank Fleming

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.