The Patriot Post Digest 10-8-2019

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-8-2019
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Patriot Post® · Mid-Day Digest

Oct. 8, 2019

https://patriotpost.us/digests/65969-mid-day-digest-2019-10-08

THE FOUNDATION

“But if we are to be told by a foreign Power … what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.” —George Washington (1796)

https://patriotpost.us/fqd/65968-founders-quote-daily-2019-10-08

IN TODAY’S EDITION

Trump’s move in Syria is meaningful but not earth-shattering.1
Warren tells another bogus tale of victimitis.2
Daily Features: More Analysis3, Columnists4, Headlines5, Opinion in Brief6, Short Cuts7, Memes8, and Cartoons9.

IN BRIEF

Trump’s Turkish Test on Syria10

President Donald Trump was elected to drop a figurative bomb on the Beltway Establishment — of both parties. Dropping bombs is an ugly business, but there’s no question some good has come of it. However, Trump’s announcement regarding U.S. troops in Syria is one of those things that’s difficult to put in a “good” or “bad” box. So here are some key analysis points.

“I campaigned on the fact that I was going to bring our soldiers home and bring them home as rapidly as possible,” Trump said. That may be true, but commitments made by political neophytes in the heat of a campaign are not always wise to keep. It’s certainly not sufficient justification. Trump also reportedly “completely blindsided” the Pentagon with the announcement.

The U.S. is not withdrawing from Syria entirely. The shift of a relative handful of U.S. troops from one part of northeastern Syria is nowhere near as significant a move as Barack Obama’s total abandonment of Iraq (also a campaign promise), which led directly to the creation of the Islamic State11. Yet the U.S. has vital interests in containing the ISIS threat, and it is possible that Trump’s move will have an undesirable effect on this front. On the other hand, U.S. troops were in Syria for the sole objective of defeating ISIS. The caliphate is now destroyed, and Trump argues that means it’s time to come home.

Abandoning allies — in this case, the Kurds — is never a good look for America, and it will have foreign-policy ramifications elsewhere. For many years, the Kurds fought and died alongside U.S. troops in the fight against ISIS, while Turkish President Recep Erdogan has threatened to attack the Kurds in northeast Syria. Were U.S. troops the only thing holding him back? “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so,” Trump said. Yet that’s a crass transactional view of foreign policy.

Turkey, which seemingly has the green light for incursions into Syria, is being tested. Trump has taken on the NATO establishment, and Turkey’s membership in that defensive alliance as well as its efforts to join the European Union are now on full display. Either its increasingly authoritarian president will pass the test, or he will fail before the whole world. Trump promised major consequences for Turkey’s economy if it “does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” That’s ridiculously overwrought Bronx bluster at the wrong time, though Trump (probably) doesn’t actually think that; he’s just being Trump and, again, he’s testing Erdogan.

All of that said, it’s interesting to note an overall dynamic with this news. The Beltway Establishment is almost uniform in harshly criticizing Trump’s move. Sen. Lindsey Graham called it “shortsighted and irresponsible.” Rep. Liz Cheney decried it as “a catastrophic mistake.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it’s a “dangerous decision” that is both “reckless” and “misguided.” Of course, she didn’t seem to mind Obama’s Iraq withdrawal, and she’s too busy running the impeachment charade now to be taken seriously.

But we suspect the average American isn’t so keen on keeping our sons and daughters in harm’s way for a murky objective in Syria — as Trump put it, “to the benefit of people who don’t even like the USA.” After all, it’s less likely to be the loved ones of members of Congress spilling blood for their country than it is grassroots American Patriots.

In any case, Trump’s Syria decision isn’t black and white; it’s various shades of unappealing gray.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65966-trumps-turkish-test-on-syria

Another Warren ‘Victim Status’ Lie12

Elizabeth Warren has difficulty telling the truth, be it her continued refusal to acknowledge that her Medicare for All plan would require tax increases upon all Americans (something Bernie Sanders freely admits) or her long-running false claim that she is part Cherokee — a claim Warren used to tout herself as a “minority” while she worked at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania. Only after a DNA test revealed her claim to be fraudulent13 did she partially acknowledge the truth, while still insisting she was merely the victim of a false family ancestry she grew up believing.

Now Warren has come under scrutiny for another autobiographical tall tale that contradicts the record and even her own past statements. To paint herself as a victim of sexism under the “patriarchy,” Warren has repeatedly relayed a story of being fired from her first teaching job after it became apparent that she was pregnant. Warren claims, “By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days — wish me luck and hire someone else for the job.”

However, back in 2007, Warren told a different story. She stated, “I was married at 19 and then graduated from college after I’d married. My first year post-graduation, I worked — it was a public-school system but I worked with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ‘emergency certificate,’ it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me.’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Furthermore, The Washington Free Beacon obtained14 “minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting,” which “show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a ‘2nd year’ contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was ‘accepted with regret.’”

So, was Warren a victim of sexism? Not even remotely. Yet for today’s Democrats, creating a fraudulent and politically expedient victim narrative is more important than speaking the truth. The question for the country is, if Warren can’t be trusted to be honest about her past or even who she is, how can she be trusted to govern the nation? The simple answer is, she can’t.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65967-another-warren-victim-status-lie