The Patriot Post Digest 6-29-2017

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-29-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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Mid-Day Digest

Jun. 29, 2017

IN TODAY’S EDITION

Leon Panetta has an epiphany about how long we should be in Iraq.
Trump’s EPA is rolling back another major Obama regulatory power grab.
Democrats are demanding ideological purity at their own peril.
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquillity would be to calculate on the weaker springs of human character.” —Alexander Hamilton (1788.)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Obama’s SecDef Panetta Now: We Need to Be in Iraq Long-Term?1

By Mark Alexander

This week, Barack Obama’s2 former secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, offered a rare and candid reassessment of Obama’s disastrous 2012 election charade — declaring “victory in Iraq3” and withdrawing our forces, all in order to keep a 2008 campaign promise.

In 2008, as we have noted, Obama skewered his opponent, John McCain4, for asserting we needed to maintain a presence in Iraq “for 100 years.” McCain was implying that our presence in the region, establishing forward operating bases, would ensure stability and be in the best interest of our national security. McCain was correct.

This week, five years too late, Panetta, who quietly expressed his concerns about Obama’s 2012 election-motivated declaration of victory in Iraq, offered this 20/20 hindsight: “I think the United States is going to have to have a long-term presence both in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we are to maintain stability there.”

To paraphrase, we need to be in the region “for 100 years.”

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump5 asserted that Obama and Hillary Clinton6 were responsible for the rise of the Islamic State7. When prompted to backtrack that statement, Trump reaffirmed, “I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. … I give him the Most Valuable Player award. I give it [to Hillary] too.” Trump was absolutely correct. (Recall Obama’s 2015 claim regarding ISIL8 — “We’ve contained them8.”)

Obama and Clinton, in effect, did create the Islamic State9. Between 2009 and 2012, the Obama/Clinton policies in the Middle East, ending Operation Iraqi Freedom10 and retreating, indisputably gave rise to the Islamic Caliphate11, which resulted in the Middle East meltdown12. They unleashed an epic humanitarian crisis13 across the region, and an epidemic of terrorism14 metastasizing west. That blood and suffering is on the hands of Obama and Clinton — and Panetta for not resigning in protest over the 2012 withdrawal from Iraq.

EPA Rolling Back Obama’s ‘Clean Water Act’15

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency began acting on Donald Trump’s campaign promise to repeal the 2015 “Waters of the United States” regulation. The controversial and onerous regulation created by Barack Obama’s EPA commissars essentially stretched the definition of “water way” to encompass almost any and every source of surface water, no matter how small. The draconian regulation enacted one of the largest governmental power grabs in the nation’s history, severely infringing the private property rights of Americans all across the country.

The first step in what the EPA says will be a two-step process will be a rollback of the Obama regulations and a return to 2008 standards. The second step will be to create new waterway regulations designed to preserve the property rights of Americans, as well as protect business interests and the environment. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt stated, “We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses.” He continued, “This is the first step in the two-step process to redefine ‘waters of the U.S.’ and we are committed to moving through this re-evaluation to quickly provide regulatory certainty, in a way that is thoughtful, transparent and collaborative with other agencies and the public.”

Predictably, ecofascist groups shouted their outrage at the EPA’s announcement, suggesting that Trump was primarily interested in promoting business at the expense of the environment. “It goes without saying that the Trump administration doesn’t care about the environment, public health, or its duty to protect our most precious natural resources — and that is why it’s up to us, the American people, to hold them accountable,” pontificated Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “We will fight this and every other attempt by polluters and the Trump administration to destroy our water resources.”

Supporters, however, praised the news. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said, “Today marks the beginning of restoring private property rights while protecting our environment. Out-of-state DC bureaucrats shouldn’t impose regulations that hurt Montana farmers, ranchers and landowners.” The EPA plans to publish the new regulation proposals within days. Finally, a government agency is concerned primarily about preserving Americans’ rights, not simply engaging in its own acquisition of power.

Top Headlines16

First-quarter economic growth revised up to 1.4 percent. (Washington Examiner17)

Study: TV news is obsessed with Trump-Russia probe. (MRC NewsBusters18.)

More fake news19. Vice retracts articles about Donald Trump’s animatronic robot at Disney World. (Variety20)

Facebook adding 3,000 “hate speech” experts for policing attacks on “protected characteristics.” (The Washington Times21)

Twitter attempts to silence pro-life group. (National Review22)

Vatican cardinal hit with sex assault offenses takes leave, will fight charges. (Fox News23)

White House backs two bills targeting illegal immigration. (The Daily Signal24)

Sec. State testifies: “Criminal cartels exporting drugs and violence” across border into U.S. (CNS News25)

Report: Area in Mexico dedicated to poppy cultivation bigger than DC; U.S. heroin fatalities set record. (CNS News26)

Mental health problems rising among college students — and not just intolerant leftism. (NBC News27)

Policy: EPA poised to undo Obama’s federal power grab. (The Daily Signal28.) 

Policy: Justice Neil Gorsuch’s good start. (City Journal29)

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report30.
Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read Democrat/MSM Collusion v the First Amendment and Liberty19. Countering the most perilous domestic threat to American Liberty: the Demo/MSM Propaganda Machine.

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here31.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Democrats Demand Ideological Purity32

By Arnold Ahlert

“While engaging in marches, meetings, and frenzied propagandizing, Red Guard units attacked and persecuted local party leaders as well as schoolteachers and school officials, other intellectuals, and persons of traditional views. Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions. … These units soon began fighting among themselves, however, as various factions vied for power amidst each one’s claims that it was the true representative of Maoist thought.” —Encyclopedia Britannica33

“I don’t think people in the Beltway are realizing just how toxic the Democratic Party brand is in so many parts of the country.” —Rep. Tim Ryan34 (D-OH)

Ryan is on to something. But like many of his fellow Democrats, he can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. What ails Democrats is the same thing that ultimately animated the Communist Chinese government to force its most ardent supporters into exile: an increasingly fanatical demand for ideological “purity” that ultimately eats its own.

Last weekend, Chicago held35 an LGBT parade called the Dyke March, described by organizers as a “more inclusive, more social justice-oriented” march than the city’s main Gay Pride parade.

How inclusive? Organizers banned the Jewish Star of David flag and removed several people who were carrying it, because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” and the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian” — rejected marcher and Wider Bridge manager Laurel Grauer told36 the Windy City Times.

Parade organizers insisted Grauer’s organization, Wider Bridge, was responsible for “provocative actions at other LGBTQ events [and] for using Israel’s supposed ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to pinkwash the violent occupation of Palestine.”

March participant Ruthie Steiner was perplexed. “With all the people that so hate the LGBTQ community, for it to tear itself apart in self-hatred makes no sense at all,” she said.

The LGBT community is hardly an anti-Semitic outlier. “The Black Lives Matter movement blindsided its Jewish supporters with the recent unveiling of its social and political policy agenda, a far-left manifesto that strays well beyond police brutality and accuses Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’” the Washington Times reported37 last August.

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-29-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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Perhaps progressive Jewish Americans can take heart in the fact they’re not the only group of leftists who lack sufficient purity. “Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state,” declared38 DNC chief Tom Perez in April. Pro-life Democrat and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards criticized the assertion, insisting, “It’s hard to remain a big-tent party if you have a very small platform.”

It’s even harder when a party’s instincts are inclined toward tyranny. In New York City, the Commission on Human Rights declared the “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” Or, as UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh aptly explains39, “People can basically force us — on pain of massive legal liability — to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it’s a lie.”

Thus in the Big Apple, those who fail to employ pronouns such as “ze” or “hir” can be fined40 as much as $250,000.

Snopes assures41 us that assertion is an effort by conservative news organizations to “mislead” the public, because only one “who intentionally and repeatedly refuses to use an individual’s preferred pronoun would be subject to fines.”

In other words, as long as one eventually gets one’s “mind right,” all will be well.

Or will it? On June 15, the Canadian Senate passed42 Bill C-16 by a vote of 67-11, making the refusal to use transgender pronouns a prosecutable hate crime. No doubt many American leftists who target Christian bakeries refusing to embrace same-sex marriage would like similar legislation passed in America.

Nor are such demands for purity confined to transgenderism. In Britain, Nigel Pelham was sentenced43 to 20 months in prison, forced to pay a £100 “victim surcharge,” and had two hard drives and a computer confiscated for making disparaging comments about Muslims. Sussex Police Hate Crime Sergeant Peter Allan praised the decision, and encouraged his fellow citizens to turn in anyone else using social media “to spread messages of fear and hate.”

Thus, Britain has criminalized anything government defines as “Islamophobic.”

America? “Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric — or, as we saw after 9/11, violence directed at individuals who may not even be Muslims but perceived to be Muslims, and they will suffer just as much — when we see that we will take action,” declared44 former Attorney General Loretta Lynch —the day after 14 people were slaughtered by Islamists in San Bernardino.

In 1949, a prescient George Orwell foresaw45 the ethos far too many Democrats currently embrace. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” he wrote.

It’s not working on everyone. Millions of decent Americans reject a progressive movement determined to use government, academia, popular culture and the media to “re-shape” their thinking.

That is the essence of toxicity, courtesy of those also determined to make Donald Trump the second coming of Emmanuel Goldstein, with the requisite “Two Minutes Hate” that passes for news at media outlets “setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president,” according46 to a Harvard study.

As historian Victor Davis Hanson explains47, “Bill Clinton’s formerly competitive Democratic party aged and then evaporated. It was replaced by a hard-left coastal coalition, a pyramidal party — ethnic-identity groups at the base and wealthy elites on top, all united by a mutual disdain for the half of the population that covers 85 percent of the geography.”

That’s exactly what unreasonable demands for ideological purity ultimately engender. And how a party of warring tribes united only by contempt for “the other” survives is anyone’s guess.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Who’s Choosing Your School?48 — Choice empowers parents and students, and applies the market principles of competition and innovation to education.
Media Hide the Fact That the Murderer of Muslim Girl Is an Illegal Alien49 — Seeking to hold their narrative of America being awash in “Islamophobia,” the Leftmedia avoids the story.
People Will Die!50 — Reason’s humorous take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proclamation that the GOP health care bill will kill gazillions of Americans.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Larry Elder: Urban America’s Underclass: More Money Won’t Solve the Problems51
Tony Perkins: Libs Take Issue With SPLC52
Gary S. Smith: The Founders and the Presidents: A July Fourth Reflection53

For more, visit Right Opinion54.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Larry Elder: “In the 50 years following President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the ‘war on poverty’ in 1964, government spent over $22 trillion on welfare and various anti-poverty programs. The problem in our nation’s inner cities is not a lack of money — it is a moral and spiritual problem largely created by our welfare state. The welfare system encourages women to marry the government and allows men to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities. The problem is fatherlessness. … As long as blacks feel and act oppressed, as if they are under siege and behind enemy lines, little will change. The formula is simple, but it requires effort: Hard work wins; you get out of life what you put into it; you cannot control the outcome, but you are 100 percent in control of the effort. Go to school, study, work hard, arrive early, stay late, pay attention to detail and be honest. That is the best ‘anti-poverty program’ ever conceived.”
SHORT CUTS

Insight: “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” —Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Upright: “I think Republicans are focused solely on the people who are hurting right now, who recognize that the [health care] system is collapsing. People in the near future are not going to have any choice in the marketplace. … It’s unfortunate that Democrats have no interest in solving a problem that they created.” —RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel

Demo-gogues: “This is God’s creation. We have a real responsibility to it. To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us. … It is very important that our colleagues not only read the [health care] bill, but examine their consciences and look into their hearts, and maybe look into the eyes of these families, and maybe make a decision in favor of what is right.” —Nancy Pelosi

Delusional and dishonest: “President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. Now it’s time for the next step. And the next step is single payer.” —Elizabeth Warren

Because socialists don’t lie! “It is a sad state of affairs in America, not only when we have politicians being destroyed, when there are attacks against elected officials, but when you go after your wife — people’s wives. That is pretty pathetic.” —Bernie Sanders on the investigation into his wife’s tenure as president of Burlington College, the wife he says “is about the most honest person I know”

And last… “In an inadvertent hot-mic request in 2012, Obama asked outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to give me space’ during Obama’s re-election campaign, so that after his assumed success, Obama could reciprocate with ‘more flexibility’ on Russian issues. In the present highly charged climate, would that be seen as a form of Russian collusion?” —Victor Davis Hanson

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

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