Under Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has become NATO’s only non-democratic nation. It’s also NATO’s only Muslim-majority member. Erdogan has been trying to re-create Turkey as a new Ottoman imperial power. He feels no allegiance to Western-style democracy.

During the Obama administration, Erdogan snubbed the obsequious American attempts to promote Turkey as the cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy. President Trump should remember that and perhaps reconsider his own sometimes appeasing outreach to Erdogan.

Turkey opposes, if not detests, almost every American ally in the region, and befriends almost every U.S. enemy.  Here are prime examples.

The weekend raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker killed in Syria in 2015 while being held captive  and repeadedly raped by the sadistic ISIS leader.

After the U.S. confirmed Mueller’s death, President Obama issued a statement. “ISIL is a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla. No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”

Obama, however, did not bring those terrorists to justice; nearly five years later, it was Donald Trump who made good on that promise.  Obama and his top national security officials were too busy hunting down Trump campaign aides.

The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.

Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.

“Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”  Spoken like a true Stalinist.

Message from Jack Wheeler:  Before you read Angelo’s excellent analysis, here is a report I just received hours ago from my son Brandon who is with Dave Eubank’s Free Burma Rangers.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 3:11 PM, Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan):

There is no ceasefire here - yes we were able to go and get people out 19, 20th Oct from Ras Al Ein and we thank God and you all for that but every day the Turk-supported FSA (Jihadist-ISIS mercenaries) attack SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) positions - with the FSA / Turkish proxy force attacking SDF now 4 kilometers south of Ras Al Ein / Sari Kani - we are taking heavy machine gun fire from FSA Gun jeeps (And also They have two captured Humvee )and now there are dismounted fighters on the assault shooting at our medical team) - as we move forward to find the SDF wounded , we can’t find them yet and pray we can - we have FSA troops on three sides of us now but were able to get out and will keep trying - earlier today there were three other attacks by the FSA- there is no ceasefire here.

We were pinned down by FSA attack but got out and then carefully we infiltrated back in and around the FSA and found the wounded missing man who was crawling away- we were able to get him out and treated his wound - he survived - this is just one example -- so not a ceasefire. 22 Oct 2019 Dave Eubank and Free Burma Rangers

Thank you and God bless you , Dave

 I am asking TTPers to pray for the safety of Brandon and those with him -- JW

The term “derangement syndrome” has made it into everyday speech, thanks to the now-ubiquitous use of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term coined by Esther Goldberg back in 2015. But TDS is only one of the many derangement syndromes of our time.

The British conservative author and journalist Douglas Murray made derangement a central theme of his recent book, The Madness of Crowds. Writing in the Daily Mail, Murray contends, “We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant.”

In his book, Murray claims that in postmodern society’s retreat from the great narratives offered by religion, patriotism, and traditions of family and community, people have found new ideologies to absorb their passions: social justice, identity politics, and intersectionality – derangements all.

In a difficult period for our country, everyone is let down by commentary that relies on stale talking points.

Channeling Hillary Clinton’s latest podcast eruption, some pundits have lately returned to trying to keep Trump-Russia collusion alive, so let’s go through it again.

To give the complete Trump quote, he said during the 2016 campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In other words, a wisecrack any of us might have made playing off the insecurity of Mrs. Clinton’s email practices as well as the press’s hypocritical eagerness to traffic in Russian leaks.  Hear’s what’s really going on….

There is no logical Democrat explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democrat Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project.

After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the emoluments clause, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux-coup, the Comey memos farce, the “resistance” efforts outlined by the New York Times anonymous op-ed writer, the campaign finance violations accusations, Stormy, tax returns, whistleblowers, leakers, the Mueller 22 months charade, and now impeachment 2.0, what exactly is the point of impeaching Trump just 13 months before the election?

Here are the various rationales behind Trump’s Democrat and leftwing opponents’ latest “whistleblower” hoax. None of these scenarios are mutually exclusive.

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise.

Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democrat effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: “Democracy Dies in Bias.” How did journalism get here?