Conservatives had a great week as the Democrats told the nation their plans to spend $130 trillion if elected to build their utopia.
Racism! Became the new Russia! Moreover, Baltimore’s Elijah Cummings misplaced $13 billion. Oops!
We have been waiting for recess. Let the recess appointments begin!
Let’s talk a little about MMT, the financial theory behind the new left.
A true American hero, great champion of freedom, known to TTPers for his many articles over the years, and one of my dearest friends for 37 years, Alex Alexiev, suffered a sudden massive heart attack on Sunday morning, July 28, and passed from this Earth.
It is hard to cope with the loss of such a friend, such an extraordinary man. Let me tell you about him.
[Note: We are running Alex’s final article, written a few days ago, as a companion piece: Trade War with China? No, It’s Worse! He had no idea it would be his last.]
For the past several months now, the US media is obsessed with dire predictions of a calamitous trade war between China and the US, following numerous statements by President Trump that the Chinese trade surplus is intolerable.
Indeed, at $506 billion of Chinese exports against only $130 billion of US ones, it does look very unfair. However, things look a bit different if looked at from a different angle.
For the problem with China is, thus, not its surplus per se, but rather the economic system that produces it and here it is the Communist system and not free trade that are clearly to blame.
Trade is just a way of increasing the power of the Chinese Communist Party. Everything that contributes to its aggrandizing is fair and widely practiced – technology theft, discrimination against foreign companies, preferential loans/subsidies to state-owned enterprises, currency manipulation etc.
It is a fool’s paradise though with China’s economy beset with problems that defy easy solutions.
Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.
The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.
For example, the new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.
They have all taken Joseph Goebbels’ advice.
As Brit Hume pointed out recently, “People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.”
Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.).
Beyond the elements of political calculation and polemical style, however, Donald Trump’s recent tweet fests suggest that he may be on the threshold of shifting the Overton Window on race.
Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities. The President is trying to liberate us from it.
Ronald Reagan famously said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me."
Now it's left the rest of us.
If every candidate on stage raising their hands for free healthcare for illegal aliens during the first MSNBC debate wasn't enough to brand the party and its faithful as a collection of virtue-signaling lemmings, the subsequent CNN debates should have finished the job.
Or should I say debates or game shows? They were basically contests for who could go the furthest left.
Night Two of the second round of Democratic presidential primary debates was expected to be a fireworks display between former Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and CNN did its best to light the fuses early on. Sadly -- for the viewers who didn't want to be bored, anyway -- all of those fuses were duds.
The following is my assessment of the painful display, using some of my live tweets from the evening rather than having to type more. Thank you in advance for indulging me, dear readers.
You read Michael Goodwin yesterday (7/25) describe how Mueller Disaster Dooms Dems’ Impeachment Hopes, and can read today (7/25) Jack Kelly musing on the weirdness of Mueller Puzzles.
Yes, it’s fun to gloat over a defeat of bad guys trying to do you harm so enjoy the moment – but the President made it clear just how serious the moment is on Hannity last night (7/25).
“This should never happen to another president of the United States again. This is an absolute catastrophe for our country… This was treason. This was high crimes. This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”
Here we go……
What’s it like to be this close to a leopard in the African bush? I took this picture (and more below) last week.
Back home, it’s hard to go to sleep now without being serenaded by hippos snorting in the lagoon below your thatched bungalow or hyenas whooping out in the bush. Memories of a Dream Safari like this will remain vivid for the rest of your life.
“Safari” is the Swahili word for “journey.” We associate it with exploring Africa, but the world is full of other places where you can have a life-memorable Dream Safari adventure. And you don’t have to reach remotest Africa or Asia to find them. Let’s talk about one in particular.
Leftists who tuned in Wednesday (7/24) to watch their hero nail the evil Drumpf were as shocked and dismayed as Dorothy, Scarecrow and Tin Man were when they discovered the great and powerful Wizard of Oz was just a little old man behind a curtain.
Two burning questions emerge from the Dems’ dumpster fire that was Robert Mueller’s testimony to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
Why did Democrats think this was a good idea? Dems negotiated with the former Special Counsel for weeks to arrange for his testimony. Didn’t any of them notice that Mueller’s capacities had, ah, diminished?
Which leads to the second question: Why did Mueller agree to testify? He just destroyed himself. How come?
Bumblin’ Bob was a train wreck of epic proportions. The fallout is immediate, starting with this: impeachment is no longer an option.
It had a slim chance before Wednesday’s painful slog and no chance after it.
Mueller was that bad, seemingly hard of hearing, often confused and contradicted himself several times.
Although Mueller’s general demeanor was disturbing – he was a stammering, stuttering mess – it was also instructive. He did not project the mental and physical vigor of someone capable of leading the complex two-year probe into Russian meddling, possible Trump collusion and obstruction of justice.
More likely, the 74-year old former FBI director was something of a figure-head for an investigation that was carried out by the team of zealots he assembled.
I'm tired of hearing conservative friends apologize for President Trump's "go back to where you came from" tweets about the likes of Ilhan Omar.
The president has the moral high ground, and the weasel war dance of the mainstream media shouldn't distract us from this fact.
Even his worst enemies (e.g. ex-conservative David Frum) concede that Trump's attacks on the anti-American extremists in the Democrat Party are smart politics.
But this isn't about trolling the Democrats. It's about principle.
President Trump has a gift for asking the obvious questions that the elites avoid, for example: What idiot let Omar into the United States in the first place? Come to think of it, why should we admit immigrants who hate us and hate everything we stand for?
When Tom and I started our careers, it was considered an honor to be a member of professional societies that helped practitioners keep up with the latest developments in their fields through relevant meetings and publications. I had the privilege of leading one of these societies long ago.
But things are different now. Whether it be chemistry, physics, geology or engineering, many of the world’s primary professional societies have changed from being paragons of technical virtue to opportunistic groups focused on maximizing their members' financial gains in support of the climate scare, the world’s greatest science fraud.
In particular, they continue to promote the groundless hypothesis that carbon dioxide emitted as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. Why?
Today (7/24), Boris Johnson became Britain’s prime minister. But who is he, what’s he like and what can we expect?
By weird coincidence, he happens to be the second prime minister with whom I was friends at Oxford University. And the first reassuring news I can bring is that he is going to be a considerable improvement on his predecessor-but-one, David Cameron.
Cameron was a managerial, Nanny-knows-best prime minister, whose main aim was to stay in power for as long as possible by not rocking the boat.
Boris, by contrast, is a mischief-maker and a fun-lover. Whatever else goes wrong during his time in office, of one thing we can be sure: it will be royally entertaining – like the Restoration of the libertinous, libidinous court of Charles II (r. 1660-1665) after years of dreary puritanism.
I like Boris. He’s funny, witty, scatty, shambolic with a very sharp brain whose cogitations you can almost see as he talks to you. I think he’s going to get along very well with President Trump.
