The Patriot Post Digest 5-15-2017

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The Patriot Post Digest 5-15-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

May 15, 2017

IN TODAY’S EDITION

The president is finding his agenda behind the eight ball for failure to make nominations.
A conservative sitcom just got canceled, and it’s almost surely about politics.
Leftists have long used guilt as a weapon in the culture wars, but it’s getting less useful.
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“The pyramid of government — and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form — should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep.” —James Wilson (1804)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Trump’s Agenda Blocked by Distractions1

Donald Trump is way behind on naming government appointments and, no surprise, Democrats aren’t helping. Thus far in his presidency, Trump has made only 85 nominations, which is lagging significantly behind the numbers posted by his three predecessors; Barack Obama had nominated 212, George W. Bush 161 and Bill Clinton 182. Even George H. W. Bush had made 135 by this point in his presidency, which is interesting given the fact that he was following Ronald Reagan.

“Leadership matters a lot, as does having the right people in place,” said Mallory Barg Bulman vice president of research and evaluation at the Partnership for Public Service. “You can’t start the game until the whole team is on the field.”

According to the White House, the slow walking is intentional. Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, “We’re actually going through the Office of Government Ethics and FBI clearances before announcing most of these individuals. And so, there’s a little bit of a difference in how we’re doing this. But we are well on pace with respect to many of these [appointments] to get the government up and running.” However, it’s interesting to note that Trump has yet to nominate anyone for director of the Office of Personnel Management, the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce. One would think that would be a priority nomination.

But with Democrats pledging to throw up road blocks to any and all of Trump’s nominees, all while demanding that a special prosecutor be named to investigate the phony Russia-Trump collusion allegations, it would seem counterintuitive to be moving this slowly.

There’s another seemingly growing problem — Republicans, holding a slim majority, are showing some signs of splitting from supporting Trump, especially since the firing of James Comey2. The lack of consistently disciplined and cohesive communications coming from Trump and his administration, which is an intentional strategy to keep his opponents guessing, is proving to sow an increasing amount of confusion and frustration on Trump’s own side — particularly with congressional Republicans. Often they’re left scrambling to both understand and answer for statements from Trump’s White House with little to no warning. Instead of being on the offensive, the GOP is seemingly playing from behind, as if they were the minority party.

Robert Moffit, a former assistant OPM director during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and current senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said, “The bottom line is that the president can’t run the federal government out of the White House and secretaries can’t run giant agencies huddled in an executive suite. Unilateral disarmament is a victory for the swamp. The swamp creatures have won the fight. Unless you control the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy controls you.”

Trump needs to ramp up his nomination rate, encourage Republicans to stand firmly united and call out Democrats for being the party of obstructionists, if he hopes to get more of his swamp-draining agenda enacted. Americans are on Trump’s side when it comes to reforming the bureaucracy of DC, but he needs to end his distraction campaign and focus on getting his total team in place.

Last Conservative No Longer Standing3

In March, conservative comedian Tim Allen stirred trouble4 when he told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that it’s tough being conservative in Hollywood. “You’ve got to be real careful around here,” Allen said. “You get beat up if [you] don’t believe what everybody believes. This is like ‘30s Germany. I don’t know what happened. If you’re not part of the group — [They say,] 'You know, what we believe is right’ — I go, ‘Well, I might have a problem with that.’” Allen has also been vocally supportive of Donald Trump from time to time.

Lo and behold, the next contract renewals come up for his hit sitcom, “Last Man Standing,” and ABC axes its third highest-rated scripted show.

ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey just said in December that the network wanted to make a concerted effort to reach Trump voters. “With our dramas, we have a lot of shows that feature very well-to-do, well-educated people, who are driving very nice cars and living in extremely nice places,” Dungey said. “But in recent history we haven’t paid enough attention to some of the true realities of what life is like for everyday Americans in our dramas.”

So much for that.

Deadline Hollywood reports5 the cancellation was due to contract haggling between ABC and Fox’s production studios: “The Tim Allen-starring multi-camera sitcom often had gone down to the wire on renewals, with ABC and producing studio 20th Century Fox TV wrangling over the series' license fee. ABC is supposed to cover the cost of the show at this point in its run, and LMS is on the higher end for a multi-camera sitcom because of the marquee salary Allen commands, but 20th TV had agreed to license fee reductions in the past and reportedly were open to another one. This time, there was no negotiating or bargaining, with ABC simply deciding against another season.”

Come on, we’re supposed to believe that it’s licensing fees and not politics? This can’t be coincidence, can it?

Top Headlines6

Trump weighs shake-up of press team, including replacing Spicer. (The Wall Street Journal7)

Why GOP senators are pushing Merrick Garland for FBI director. (PoliZette8.)

James Clapper: U.S. democracy “under assault” by Trump — hyperbole much? (Washington Examiner9)

Bradley Manning to remain on active duty, receive health care after prison release. (USA Today10)

Trump urges Liberty graduates to find courage to challenge critics, assails Washington leaders as “failed voices.” (Fox News11)

Majority of businesses say ObamaCare mandate, minimum wage hikes, regulations threaten expansion. (The Washington Free Beacon12)

Scott Pruitt signals new post-Obama era at EPA with Alaska’s Pebble Mine decision. (Washington Examiner13)

Pence says Christians are the most victimized religion, Leftists go nuts. He’s right. (The Daily Wire14)

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards stumps for abortion rights … on Mother’s Day. (The Washington Times15)

High school takes back yearbooks with “Build that wall,” other inappropriate quotes. (Charlotte Observer16)

Policy: Big wind gets spanked in Michigan. (National Review17)

Policy: A modern framework for Internet freedom. (U.S. News & World Report18.)

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report19.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Leftist Ideology’s Greatest Threat: Guilt-Free Americans20

By Arnold Ahlert

“In the last 50 years of culture wars in America, there has been no stronger weapon than guilt. It is the Left’s great hammer of progress.” —Mark Bauerlein21, Professor of English at Emory University

In an insightful column for American Greatness, Bauerlein nails the Left’s fundamental reason for despising Donald Trump. “He has no white guilt. He doesn’t feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt,” Bauerlein explains. “He talks about the United States with uncritical approval — ‘America First’ — and that’s a thought crime in the eyes of liberals.”

That particular thought crime roils leftists most, because it is the antithesis of Barack Obama’s eight-year effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into a nation where collective guilt would supplant American exceptionalism as society’s prevailing ethos. “Donald Trump would never refer to America as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did frequently, and that makes him worse than a conservative,” Bauerlein writes. “President Trump is a bigot.”

Is there a drum the Left beats louder than the assertion America is an inherently racist nation? For leftist demagogues, history is more about the failure of “dead white Europeans,” a.k.a. the Founding Fathers, to eliminate slavery when it was impossible to do so, than it is about America being one of the first nations to end the worldwide-accepted practice, enduring a bloody war that cost 600,000 lives.

Moreover, more than 150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, Americans must remain guilty. Thus Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who accused Trump of having a “vast ignorance of black life,” advocates22 the establishment of Individual Reparations Accounts, whereby white Americans who never practiced slavery compensate black Americans who never experienced it. In New Orleans, history itself is being eliminated, as workers remove23 Confederate monuments that “offend” progressive sensibilities.

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The Patriot Post Digest 5-15-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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All while black students demand24 — and receive — segregated housing accommodations on campuses across the nation.

Trump buys none of it. “When during the course of the campaign Mr. Trump refused to accept any guilt, the frustration and disbelief among the Democrats and the media were obvious,” Bauerlein notes.

That’s hardly surprising. Guilt — brilliantly sold as “political correctness” to make it more palatable for an unsuspecting public — has enjoyed a long and prosperous run. One that allowed leftists to dismiss every challenge to their agenda with epithets designed to simultaneously induce guilt and end debate. Americans opposed to open borders, or sanctuary cities? Xenophobes. Americans who eschew the LGBT agenda? Trans- and homophobic. Americans who question “refugees” from terror-torn nations being granted asylum? Islamophobic. And so on and so forth.

“If you can persuade an opponent that he’s wrong about a political issue, you can win the day’s debate,” Bauerlein explains. “But if you can make him feel guilty about his opinion, you’ve got him on the defensive forever.”

In two sentences the professor has described an eternally defensive GOP that controls Congress, the White House, and a plethora of legislative seats nationwide, yet still allows the Left to frame the agenda.

This dynamic of leftist guilt-mongering and GOP acquiescence to it set the stage for a man who “was going to shake things up, drain the swamp, expose that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the parties, and if he offended his adversaries along the way, well, so be it,” writes25 Washington Beacon columnist Matthew Continetti, who nonetheless believes Trump “doesn’t face crises so much as manufacture them.”

No doubt. But for millions of Americans those crises, and the character flaws that engender them, pale in comparison to Trump’s ability to put the American Left on the defensive.

Instead of “bitter clinging” Americans in “flyover country” being forced to defend themselves, the focus shifted to bi-coastal progressive elitists with flimsy explanations regarding why “net” gains for the nation as a whole were more important than economically devastated Americans left behind by an emerging New World Order — one that disproportionately benefited the globalist-minded “progressive” elitists who championed it.

“Progressives” who couldn’t imagine their systematic contempt for “deplorable” Americans would ultimately cost them the election.

“Progressives” who still don’t get it. According to a PPRI-Atlantic survey, Trump voters were motivated26 by fears of “cultural displacement,” a rationalization rightly dismissed27 by National Review columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty as “one of the latest attempts to assure liberals and leftists that Trump supporters are unsympathetic.”

What’s really wearing out millions of Americans is $20 trillion of national debt, out-of-control agencies like the NSA, DOJ, FBI, EPA and IRS, a de facto invasion by millions of illegal aliens, public schools and universities that resemble indoctrination centers, and a mainstream media virtually indistinguishable from George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

And maybe, just maybe, the real reason Trump prevailed was an electorate faced with a binary choice decided to go with a highly problematic candidate instead of a thoroughly corrupt one — or the great unknown rather than an utterly untenable status quo.

“Donald Trump’s success, then, amounts to a calamitous disarmament of the Left,” Bauerlein concludes. “Not his occupation of the White House, but his termination of the game of guilt — for now, at least. Since the election, progressives have only amplified the charges. More and more, the protests look less like political speech and more like tantrums.”

That’s because they are tantrums, thrown by people who never imagined their “immutable truths” would be unmasked as the self-serving, guilt-inducing opinions they truly are. Moreover, leftists may be digging a much deeper hole than they realize: Trump’s dismissal of leftist guilt games is hugely problematic for them. Millions of Americans dismissing a burden they never should have carried around in the first place?

For America’s “social justice warriors,” that’s a calamitous disarmament of potentially catastrophic proportions.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Will President Trump Always Have Paris?28 — There is a lot of internal debate about whether to keep his campaign promise to leave the Paris climate deal.
Trump Fulfills Promise to Investigate Voter Fraud29 — He commissions a bipartisan team to look into the alleged problems of both voter fraud and vote suppression.
Poll Shows Americans Becoming Socially Liberal30 — Americans have moved to the left on social issues, especially in their views on sexuality and marriage.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

David Limbaugh: Past Time to End This Democratic Witch Hunt31
George Will: Culture Thrives When It’s All Shook Up32
Joe D'Aleo: Global Warming Claims and the So-Called Consensus Are Betrayals of the Scientific Method33

For more, visit Right Opinion34.

OPINION IN BRIEF

David Limbaugh: “The real scandal is not Trump’s firing Comey — even if Trump’s supporters are unhappy with the timing and the way it was handled and communicated. The scandal is the liberal establishment’s coordinated conspiracy to falsely allege that Trump stole the presidency by colluding with Russia. Liberals absolutely know that it’s not true, but they will not quit bearing false witness. How dare they posture indignantly about Trump’s supposed dishonesty? The Democrats know they are fabricating this whole thing, but they figure this is the best way they can thwart Trump’s efforts to move the country forward and out of the multiple quagmires Obama landed this country in. … The way this firing transpired is unfortunate, but we wouldn’t be talking about tåhis if Democrats and the media weren’t lying every hour of every day about a nonexistent scandal. This bogus investigation should end forthwith, no matter who is heading it, because it is based on nothing but innuendo and partisanship. You conduct an investigation not because you want something to be true but because you have some evidence suggesting it may be. There is no such evidence here, and they’ve admitted it. Let’s move on.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom. What brought America back? The American people brought us back — with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.”

For the record: “It is interesting that the Left has decided to call itself ‘the Resistance.’ The phrase was popularized in the 1940s by the men and women who fought against the Nazis in occupied Europe. Get it? We are now living in ‘occupied America’ and conservatives who support Trump are akin to Nazis. What did the resistance do? It blew things up and that is what the Left is trying to do now — blow up the election and, in the process, the country.” —Gary Bauer

Non Compos Mentis: “I think in many ways our institutions are under assault. Both externally — and that’s the big news here, is Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.” —former DNI James Clapper on Trump firing FBI Director James Comey2

Braying Jackass: “I called for [Jeff Sessions] to step down when he didn’t tell the truth about the Russians, because it’s the highest law enforcement officer in the land. The actions of the last week make all the more reason that he should not be attorney general.” —Chuck Schumer

Braying Jenny: “You have to stop and think, why don’t you want our kids to have good food at school? What is wrong with you?” —Michelle Obama on Trump rolling back her school lunch mandates

Evil Village Idiot: “Nothing says ‘I love you, Mom!’ like standing up for the right of mothers everywhere to get the care [read: abortion] they need.” —Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards

And last… “When Americans are used to showing photo IDs for a hundred minor things, it’s a tough sell to say you shouldn’t have to do that for voting.” —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.