The Patriot Post Digest 9-6-2018

[nChrist]

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-6-2018
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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The Patriot Post® · Mid-Day Digest

Sep. 6, 2018 · https://patriotpost.us/digests/58093-mid-day-digest

THE FOUNDATION

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” —James Madison (1788)

https://patriotpost.us/fqd/58090-founders-quote-daily

IN TODAY’S EDITION

An NYT op-ed purports to reveal electoral sabotage inside the administration.
A Kavanaugh photo was staged to do maximum damage.
The Catholic Church’s problem isn’t with pedophilia but with pederasty.
Levi’s is the latest corporation to turn against the Second Amendment.
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Memes, Cartoons, Columnists, and Short Cuts.

IN BRIEF
The Cowardly, Anonymous White House ‘Resistance’ Insider1

Nate Jackson

Voters elected Donald Trump to drop a metaphorical bomb on Washington. He’s done just that, and members of the professional political class — the establishments of both parties and the bureaucrats lurking in what has become known as the “deep state” — have no idea what to do about it. So these folks resort to dropping bombs on Trump, as if that will matter to his supporters. Such is the case with Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book2, and that in turn was perfectly set up by a quickly infamous and anonymous New York Times op-ed3 yesterday by “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.”

Profiles in courage right there. Or at least profiles in good marketing. Consider The Washington Post’s leaks of Woodward book excerpts and this NYT op-ed as the Leftmedia’s one-two punch on Trump, which just happened to come during the week of Senate confirmation hearings4 for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Frankly, this op-ed utterly lacks credibility until we know who wrote it. If it’s a Cabinet-level secretary, that’s one thing — and a very big problem. If it’s some third-tier staffer who doesn’t even interact with Trump but does have a Napoleon complex, well, that’s something else. We don’t doubt this person’s identity will be revealed (and we’ll bet Woodward knows who it is), but there’s at least one thing already known beyond the shadow of a doubt: Whoever this is clearly thinks a lot of himself.

The author reveals three overarching and important things. First, Trump has accomplished an awful lot. “Many of [the administration’s] policies have already made America safer and more prosperous,” he writes. Those accomplishments include “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more” — all things important to Trump’s base and all conservatives.

So why the complaints? Well, that’s the second thing. Trump is, the author alleges, driven by “misguided impulses,” “amorality,” and “not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” We in our humble shop have written these very criticisms, but voters chose him knowing it all full well because he was precisely the man to send to drain the swamp. Again, that’s a job he’s capably doing, too.

Yet that brings about the third thing. The author confesses to working with other “adults in the room” to save Trump from himself. They allegedly remove papers from his desk, hear him give instruction and then do something else, and are secretly working “to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” The author even speaks of “early whispers … invoking the 25th Amendment,” the process for removing a president mentally or physically unfit for office.

“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state,” the author insists. Wrong. That’s precisely the definition of the deep state — a cabal of unelected bureaucrats, officials, and career staffers who are working to undermine the president of the United States. It’s what David Harsanyi calls “electoral sabotage5.” And this pathetic op-ed is not so much “Never Trump” as “Never America.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58089-the-cowardly-anonymous-white-house-resistance-insider

Kavanaugh Handshake Snub Was a Dem-Created Setup6

Thomas Gallatin

In their ongoing campaign to obstruct President Donald Trump at every turn, Democrats have been digging deep into their bag of tricks. This week’s objective is to derail the confirmation4 of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a man who by all measures has proven himself to be a fair judge with a brilliant judicial mind. In other words, he’s just the type of person all Americans who hold the Constitution in high esteem should want sitting on the nation’s highest court. But clearly, Democrats and their increasingly hard-left base want little to do with constitutionally consistent jurisprudence. No, if a justice doesn’t commit to standing in support of leftist causes, then that person must be declared “unfit” for the job.

But it’s difficult to label a man as evil7 if nothing in his history supports such a conclusion, so Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts must manufacture a smear with the hope that it will taint a good man’s reputation enough to promote their own agenda.

A classic example of this smear campaign was demonstrated at Kavanaugh’s first day of hearings on Tuesday. After being delayed by numerous leftist protesters, the hearing was interrupted numerous times by protesters randomly shouting statements against Kavanaugh and Trump. As we previously noted, it was a circus. So, within this clearly hostile environment, a designed moment was staged to rattle Kavanaugh. As the hearing broke for lunch, a man suddenly jumped up to shake Kavanaugh’s hand, but Kavanaugh, clearly unfamiliar with who the individual was, did not return the shake in part because he was turned around by security and escorted out.

The scene was captured by a press photographer (just as intended), and it went viral on social media. The stunt man wrote, “Just walked up to Judge Kavanaugh as morning session ended. Put my hand to introduce myself as [Parkland victim] Jaime Guttenberg’s dad. He pulled his hand back, turned his back to me and walked away. I guess he did not want to deal with the reality of gun violence.” So Kavanaugh is really not a nice guy, you see, and he doesn’t care about “gun violence.”

Once again there is much more to the story that reveals both motive and who was behind this whole smear. Fred Guttenberg, the father of a victim of the Parkland attack, was invited to the hearing by none other than Demo gun-grabber extraordinaire Dianne Feinstein. After the hearing, she bragged, “I invited Fred Guttenberg to sit in the audience at today’s hearing because the Supreme Court affects the lives of real people. He knows firsthand how Brett Kavanaugh’s extreme views on guns could lead to more massacres. Thank you Fred, for honoring your daughter.”

And Guttenberg himself was no mere gullible pawn of the Democrats. On Monday, Guttenberg wrote, “I will be at Kavanaugh hearings and I hope to play a role in ensuring that this man does not become the next Supreme Court Justice.” Play a role, indeed. This whole event was a classic Democrat setup, orchestrated to smear Kavanaugh.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58091-kavanaugh-handshake-snub-was-a-dem-created-setup

[nChrist]

________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 9-6-2018
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Top Headlines8

How Bob Woodward went from journalistic goat to hero overnight (Investor’s Business Daily9)
Five takeaways from Day 2 of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing (The Daily Signal10)
Nike’s distasteful Colin Kaepernick “Just Do It” ad11 just dropped early (CBS News12)
Sanders introduces bill taxing big corporations for employees’ welfare benefits (National Review13)
Six key moments from social media hearings (The Daily Signal14)
Sessions getting serious about tech company crackdown, will meet with state attorneys general (CNBC15)
The media continue to report the fake news that Trump’s tax cuts blew a big hole in the budget (American Thinker16)
Parkland father shreds Dianne Feinstein for “radical” anti-gun agenda (The Washington Times17)
Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber blamed for spiking home construction prices (Reason18)
Humor: Senate Democrats vow to impotently shake fists while Kavanaugh is confirmed (The Babylon Bee19)
Policy: National security must shift to focus on the slow-burning threats of nation-states, not the flash of a terrorist attack (Washington Examiner20)
Policy: Bernie Sanders is wrong about workers on welfare (Bloomberg Opinion21)
For more of today’s news, visit Patriot Headline Report22.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58092-thursday-top-headlines

GOOD NEWS

Nurse Discovers New Coworker to Be Preemie She Helped Save23
Vilma has been working in the NICU at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California, for 32 years. When new doctor Brandon Seminatore started working there, she had a feeling she knew him.

For more, visit Sunny Skyz24.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58087-nurse-discovers-new-coworker-to-be-preemie-she-helped-save

Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column
Read Obstruction of Justice: The Demo Kavanaugh Blockade4. Dick Durbin (D-IL): “Why [are these protests] happening for the first time in the history of this committee? … You are the nominee of President Donald John Trump.”

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here27.

FEATURED ANALYSIS
The Catholic Church’s Continuing Cover-up29

Arnold Ahlert

Hillsdale College history professor Paul A. Rahe has written30 an extremely important analysis of the Catholic Church’s current — and self-inflicted — dilemma. His conclusion? One of the world’s foremost religious institutions is headed for civil war.

Rahe begins by clarifying what he considers a media-orchestrated cover-up of the crisis, explaining that sexual abuse of minors by priests has been erroneously referred to as “pedophilia.” Not exactly. As a 2004 report31 commissioned and issued by the National Review Board of the American Catholic bishops revealed, “something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few of them were, in the strictest sense, children,” he writes. “They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults. They were male adolescents on the younger side — at the age when boys as they mature can briefly be downright pretty.”

Hence, he asserts, what has really been going on is “pederasty,” as in a “sexual relationship between a grown man who serves as a mentor and a boy who is under his care or simply admires or stands in awe of him.”

The difference is critical. While there may be near unanimity in condemning pedophilia, pederasty is another story. The website32 of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) insists that such a relationship “is not what you view on television or read in newspapers. It’s not what you hear on Oprah or Geraldo, nor is it the propaganda put out by police and politicians. It’s the love of a man for a boy, and of a boy for a man. Enjoyable, consensual, beautiful.” Furthermore, the website adds, “Our society is beginning to recognize the value and richness of human diversity.”

Rahe notes the Catholic Church has provided a home for pederasts for quite some time. He cites a priest named Gerald Fitzgerald, who began counseling priests for their problems with alcoholism, substance abuse, and celibacy in 1947. Fitzgerald also spent a decade trying to alert American bishops and officials in the Vatican that pederasty was a growing problem.

He was ignored. So was a 1984 report33 compiled by Dominican priest Thomas P. O'Doyle, Louisiana attorney F. Ray Mouton Jr., and priest/psychiatrist Michael Peterson, who sent their troubling findings to “every bishop in the country in 1985.” Rahe surmised that the Church’s failure to act was only possible if there were some complicity on the part of the Vatican.

He believes the intervening years have proven that to be the case, noting there “have been scandals identical to the American scandal in Canada, Australia, Belgium, Bavaria, Ireland, Honduras, Chile, and elsewhere,” that a “host of high-level figures in the Curia were being blackmailed by their male lovers,” and that a Parkinson’s-afflicted Pope Benedict XVI resigned rather than deal with a secret 300-page Vatican dossier revealing34 the Church was afflicted with a “high-ranking gay clergy,” as Yahoo News put it. Moreover, in the interim between Benedict and the Church’s current Pope Francis, the years-long pederastic proclivities of Keith Michael Patrick O'Brien, a cardinal and archbishop who was the Primate of Scotland, had also been ignored until the Vatican exiled35 him in 2013.

Pope Francis, formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is now at the center of the storm. On Monday he called36 for “silence and prayer” as a response to those seeking “scandal and division,” following assertions he ignored allegations levied at U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned37 in July after being accused of sexually abusing a minor 47 years ago.

Rahe offers a plausible but highly troubling explanation for the pope’s seeming indifference. “Bergoglio’s candidacy was promoted by the St. Gallen Group, a part of what Catholics call ‘the Lavender Mafia,’” he writes. Moreover, he believes this faction of high-powered clerics enabled not only Pittsburgh bishop Donald Wuerl’s cover-up of a pederasty ring but his promotion to archbishop of Washington, DC, and being made a cardinal.

Wuerl’s predecessor in DC? McCarrick.

On Aug. 25, the scandal reached metastatic proportions. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who served as apostolic nuncio (ecclesiastical diplomat) in DC from 2011 to 2016, released an 11-page written testament declaring38 that several prelates were involved in covering up McCarrick’s sexual abuse, and that Pope Francis repealed sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict XVI on McCarrick when he was a cardinal. Archbishop Viganò ultimately asserted that “the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” and he urged Pope Francis to resign.

[nChrist]

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-6-2018
From The Federalist Patriot
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Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, former first counsellor at the apostolic nunciature in DC, has confirmed39 Viganò’s account, which included the names of those Vatican higher-ups who obstructed an investigation of McCarrick. Since then, Viganò has come forward40 with additional accusations.

Pope Francis’ response to Viganò? “I will not say a single word about this,” he told41 reporters while returning from his trip to Ireland. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions. It’s an act of faith. When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak.”

That’s a remarkable non-statement from a man who has seen fit to make any number of statements with regard to a host42 of political topics, including wealth redistribution, global warming, and immigration, all of which align themselves with progressive dogma. As such, it is hardly surprising that many mainstream media outlets are reticent to cover this burgeoning scandal. Irish writer John Waters describes43 Francis’ aforementioned exchange with reporters as “one of the strangest episodes of mutual avoidance in the history of journalism.”

Waters further notes that “Viganò’s intervention is being treated by the Irish media as some kind of outrageous exercise in party-pooping, revealing — if anyone was in any doubt — that the abuse scandals have chiefly been regarded by media people as an opportunity to prosecute an agenda rooted in other matters.”

Powerline’s John Hinderaker illuminates media malfeasance even better44: “Why was Viganò not portrayed as a heroic whistleblower? Because he blew the whistle on a leftist pope, whose views on homosexuality, and many other issues, are shared by pretty much all reporters.”

So is it time for Francis to resign? As columnist Robert P. George asserts45, there are a number of documents and letters, including a 2000 report by Nuncio Gabriel Montalvo’s and Archbishop Viganò’s 2006 and 2008 memos, both pertaining to Cardinal McCarrick’s misdeeds, Pope Benedict’s sanction instructions, and letters regarding same exchanged between the Vatican and papal ambassadors.

All Pope Francis has to do is order their release.

Rahe remains pessimistic. “The Lavender Mafia controls the Papacy and the Vatican overall, and Pope Francis is packing the College of Cardinals, who will elect the next Pope, with sympathizers,” he warns. Unless they are purged from the hierarchy, the Church will remain an institution run by those “who for decades have sheltered and promoted the pederasts and those who regard their abuse of minors as a matter indifferent.”

On its 50th anniversary in 2012, religious columnist Andrew Brown asserted46 that Vatican II was undertaken to “reinvent the church for the modern age.” Who could have imagined the Church’s hierarchy would do such a disturbingly masterful job of it?

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58086-the-catholic-churchs-continuing-cover-up

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

CEO of Levi Strauss Jumps on Board Anti-Gun Agenda47 — The company famous for jeans will partner with the anti-gun lobby in promoting gun control.
Video: Nike Just Blew It48 — Does jumping on the social justice warrior bandwagon lead to corporate suicide?
OPINION IN BRIEF
Ed Feulner: “A justice is like a baseball umpire. His or her own personal likes or dislikes can’t be permitted to influence a ruling. A justice is there to rule on whether or not a particular law or action is constitutional, regardless of bias. By the same token, an umpire has to call a runner out if he’s tagged before he touches home plate, even if his call goes against the team he likes. It all boils down to whether or not we have a proper understanding of how the judiciary functions in our system of government. Those seeking to rig the game, so to speak, to assure a certain outcome clearly don’t get it. Or they do, and they don’t care. After all, for many politicians, the name of the game is political power, even if you have to bend a few rules to the breaking point.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” —Leonard Schapiro (1908-1983)

Political futures: “If you’re part of a secret cabal to contain the president’s erratic behavior, it seems counterproductive to notify the erratic president about it. What better way to fuel his paranoia and his persecution complex?” —Jonah Goldberg on a White House official’s “resistance” op-ed in The New York Times

Broken clock: “I don’t see people migrating from the capitalist system to socialist systems. … I vote for capitalism.” —Warren Buffet (“Maybe he’s voting for capitalism, but will Warren Buffett end up funding Democratic Socialism?” —Ed Morrissey)

Nancy Pelosi seen nodding in agreement: “Pass [single-payer health care] and then figure out how to fund it.” —actress and New York governor aspirant Cynthia Nixon

Braying Jenny: “If Brett Kavanaugh becomes a Supreme Court justice, will he help gut or overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in America? Yes, of course he will.” —Hillary Clinton

Belly laugh of the week: “The Iran nuclear deal, I say this straightforwardly, is the strongest, most intrusive, most accountable nuclear agreement that we have anywhere on the planet.” —John Kerry

Non Compos Mentis: “It has become clear … that for decades, the president led a vast criminal enterprise that went on to engage in criminal activity during the 2016 campaign for the White House and has engaged in criminal activity since the president took office.” —Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL)

And last… “The best thing about the Internet is that it connects us to so many other people! The worst thing about the Internet is that it connects us to so many other people.” —Jim Geraghty

https://patriotpost.us/articles/58088-thursday-short-cuts

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Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Nate Jackson, Managing Editor
Mark Alexander, Publisher