Saturday, September 28, 2019

Trump Urging Ukrainian Probe of Biden Breaks No Laws - Matthew Vadum


by Matthew Vadum

A Clinton-era U.S.-Ukraine treaty requires the two countries to provide mutual legal assistance.





A treaty from 2000 between Ukraine and the United States requires the two countries to cooperate on law enforcement matters, a factor that may help to explain why President Donald Trump felt comfortable questioning the involvement of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukrainian affairs, during a telephone conversation two months ago with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The American and Ukrainian governments, it turns out, are legally required by treaty to render mutual legal assistance in criminal matters.

The treaty, signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998, provides in Article 1 that “[t]he Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters.” As every schoolchild used to know before teachers’ unions, New Age thinking, and identity politics dumbed down the educational system, under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, properly ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land.

The document states that each “Contracting State shall have a Central Authority to make and receive requests pursuant to this Treaty.” For the U.S., it is “the Attorney General or a person designated by the Attorney General.” For Ukraine, it is “the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Prosecutor General.”

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, the U.S. Senate approved the treaty on Oct. 18, 2000, on a division vote. This means that senators rose from their seats to vote and how each of them voted was not recorded. It is, therefore, unclear, how then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware voted.

All of this matters because after months of hand-wringing, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bowed to the frothing-at-the-mouth leftists of the House Democrat conference Sept. 24 by announcing impeachment proceedings would get underway against the duly elected 45th president of the United States. Democrats cited the Trump-Zelensky conversation as the smoking gun that justifies removing Trump from office. Department of Justice lawyers who reviewed the transcript of the telephone call issued a legal opinion stating that they could not identify any violation of U.S. campaign finance laws during the conversation.

Democrats claim that Trump tried to enlist the Ukrainian government to help him in the 2020 election, when in reality, it is the Democrats who have been aggressively reaching out to Ukraine for assistance in fighting Trump.

It was the Democratic National Committee that asked the Ukrainian government for help in sabotaging Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., acknowledged DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa asked the Ukrainian government for dirt on Trump and for information about his one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort’s ties to Russia, John Solomon previously reported in The Hill newspaper.

A Ukrainian court determined that Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which worked closely with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, and parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko, improperly inserted themselves into the U.S. election by releasing the Manafort-related documents.

According to a Jan. 11, 2017 Politico article, “[t]he Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the [U.S. 2016 presidential] race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation [as campaign manager] and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”

Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy, told Solomon he met with Chalupa, whom he knew was “someone working for the DNC and trying to get Clinton elected.”

“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests,” he told Solomon. “She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election.”

It was also Senate Democrats Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who asked Ukrainian authorities last year to investigate President Trump on pain of losing U.S. foreign aid.

But without even reading the transcript of the July 25 discussion between Trump and Zelensky, Democrats this week went all-in on the wholly unsubstantiated claim that Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package from Ukraine to pressure that country’s government to investigate the Bidens.

Trump made no threats whatsoever during the call. He told Zelensky that he “heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.” He said former federal prosecutor and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr would call him. Barr, it so happens, is conducting an investigation that deals with the 2016 U.S. election and Ukraine’s connection to it.

It stands to reason that if Barr can make a request to the Ukrainians pursuant to the treaty, then surely Trump is allowed to introduce Barr to Zelensky, who in turn could get his country’s officials involved.

Trump also said, “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it – it sounds horrible to me.”

In fact Joe Biden was captured on video at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion on Jan. 23, 2018, bragging about how when he was in office in March 2016 he strong-armed the Ukrainians into firing a top prosecutor by threatening to withhold foreign aid.

“I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars,” the former vice president said.

“They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Before that, while he served as Barack Obama’s vice president, in 2015 and 2016 Joe Biden urged the government of Ukraine to increase its anti-corruption efforts while his utterly unqualified cokehead grifter of a son, Hunter, was working for Kiev-based Burisma Holdings, which is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky. When he was a Ukrainian government official in charge of issuing natural-gas extraction licenses, many of those licenses were granted to concerns controlled by Burisma. This led to investigations in Ukraine over possible money laundering and government corruption. Zlochevsky and Burisma deny wrongdoing and have not been charged with breaking the law.

Around the same time, the younger Biden, with no obvious background in natural gas or Ukrainian affairs, reportedly earned up to $50,000 a month in his five years with Burisma, becoming a member of its board. Another American, Devon Archer, a personal friend of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, also somehow found his way onto the Burisma board.

So did Cofer Black, a former senior CIA official who was a special advisor on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, Thomas Lifson reports at American Thinker.

Romney, the holier-than-thou, pearl-clutching RINO senator from Utah, is one of Trump’s most ardent foes in Congress. Years before the 2012 campaign, Black was succeeded in his job as director of the National Counterterrorism Center by John Brennan, the Communist Party USA-voting director of the CIA under President Obama whose fingerprints are all over the at-least three-year-old Deep State plot to take down President Trump.

Makes you go hmmmm, doesn’t it?

But returning to the transcribed presidential conversation, is there anything nefarious or illicit about Trump asking Zelensky to “look into it,” the “it” being what Biden did?

Apart from the political optics, it appears not.

As president, Trump, is the chief law enforcement official of the United States, and his comments to Zelensky about the Bidens do not appear to violate the Constitution, any statute, or the provisions of the U.S.-Ukraine mutual legal assistance treaty.

Democrats seem to know their case against Trump is paper thin at best. They can’t help exaggerating, and in some cases lying outright, about the contents of the transcript.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) lied to Americans Sept. 26 when he read out a fictional summary of the transcript during a committee hearing that featured testimony from acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.

Schiff said the transcript shows Zelensky “says his country wants to acquire more weapons from us to defend itself. And what is the president’s response? Well, it reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character, and in not so many words this is the essence of what the president communicates: ‘we’ve been very good to your country, very good, no other country has done as much as we have.’”

“‘But you know what?” Schiff continued, pretending to be quoting Trump, “I don’t see much reciprocity here.”

“I want you make up dirt on my political opponent –understand?— lots of it, on this and on that,” Schiff said, again pretending to be quoting Trump.

“This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a graphic betrayal of the president’s oath of office.”

There was a swift backlash.

In the afternoon President Trump told reporters: “I just watched a little bit of this on television. It’s a disgrace to our country. It’s another witch hunt. Here we go again. It’s Adam Schiff and his crew making up stories and sitting there like pious whatever you want to call them. It’s just a – really, it’s a disgrace.”

According to the Epoch Times, Trump said, “it’s a terrible thing for our country. They can’t do any work. They’re frozen – the Democrats. They’re going to lose the election; they know it. That’s why they’re doing it. And it should never be allowed, what’s happened to this president.”

Trump continued, saying, “I have to put up with Adam Schiff on an absolutely perfect phone call with the new president of Ukraine. That was a perfect call. But Adam Schiff doesn’t talk about Joe Biden and his son walking away with millions of dollars from Ukraine, and then millions of dollars from China.”

“He doesn’t talk about Joe Biden firing a prosecutor, and if that prosecutor is not fired, he’s not going to give him money from the United States of America. They don’t talk about that.”

During the hearing, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), said, “While the chairman was speaking, I had someone text me, ‘Is he just making this up?’”

“And yes, yes, he was. Because sometimes fiction is better than the actual words or the text. But luckily, the American public are smart and they have the transcript. They’ve read the conversation, they know when someone’s just making it up.”

Schiff backpedaled later in the hearing after his dramatic, dishonest interpretation of the president’s words, claiming what he read aloud was intended to be a “parody” of the conversation in the transcript.

“My colleague is right … it’s not okay,” Schiff said, responding to Turner’s remarks.

“But also my summary of the president’s call was meant to be, at least part, in parody. The fact that that’s not clear is a separate problem in and of itself.”

Expect many more such Schiff-style “parodies” from the Democrats throughout what promises to be a nasty, drawn-out, and totally unjustified impeachment inquiry.

Regardless of what happens to President Trump, the Democrats have inflicted great harm on the institution of the presidency.

“Impeachment is just one part of the war against Trump that has been waged relentlessly since the day he was elected and even before,” New Neo, presumably a pseudonym, observes at Legal Insurrection.

“This latest issue regarding Trump’s conversation with Zelensky is notable for many things, but one of them is the evidence it gives of the relentless surveillance of Trump by moles in government willing to report every single thing he does that might be capitalized on by the anti-Trump forces. Trump can trust no one, and no foreign head of state who talks to him can trust that their communication will not be broadcast to the world.”

But Democrats don’t care about what happens to America and its institutions. They just want to win, no matter the cost.


Matthew Vadum

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/trump-urging-ukrainian-probe-biden-breaks-no-laws-matthew-vadum/

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The Progressive Rape of the Schools - Sara Dogan


by Sara Dogan

“Who do we hate? Donald Trump!”




Public school children as young as five-years-old were recorded on video shouting anti-Trump slogans and exhortations to “tear it [the border wall] down” after being led to participate in a “Close the Camps: Free the Children” protest during school hours in San Francisco on September 16.

A video made by conservative filmmaker and producer Margaret Vandenberg, who also uses the screen name “Fog City Midge,” reveals children from public schools in San Francisco displaying signs and placards depicting President Trump with devil horns and chanting slogans including “Who do we hate? Donald Trump!” and “Brick by brick, wall by wall, the border wall will fall!”


“Four San Francisco public schools took kids as young as 5 out of class to march in a ‘Close The Camps’ leftist protest,” Vandenberg explained on her YouTube channel page. “Kids were told @realDonaldTrump is an evil racist that hates immigrants, had prepared protest signs at school & had scripts of anti-Trump chants. The event clearly pushed false leftist talking points regarding ‘Concentration Camps’ at the US-Mexico Border and had objectives that included abolishing ICE, granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, decriminalizing border crossings and boycotting any company that does business with Border Patrol.”


“The left is using kids to push their political agenda,” she added. “This is indoctrination and exploitation. Shameful.”


Vandenberg also uncovered a permission slip sent to parents by one of the participating schools, Buena Vista Horace Mann school. The notice explains that “as a school, we at BVHM have decided to participate in the September 16th march to defend immigrant rights.” It was accompanied by an explanation of the protest from the event organizers and their list of demands which include “Full amnesty NOW!,” “Boycott companies providing services to Custom Border Patrol (CBP),” and “Close the camps NOW! – Eliminate all contracts with private prison operators.”  A note adds, “We support all actions to close ICE offices across the country, permanently!” 


“It’s unbelievable to me that we have this radical leftist agenda and these activist teachers in San Francisco public schools who see it as their job not to educate students but to indoctrinate them,” Vandenberg commented to Todd Starnes on Fox News Radio.


During the rally, Vandenberg attempted to interview students and their teachers on camera but was told, in the midst of a public protest, “you need to leave” by a teacher. Another teacher threatened to call the police and claimed that she was harassing them by calmly asking interview questions.


A mother interviewed by Vandenberg acknowledged that teachers had explained the purpose of the protests in class and helped students to make their posters. “I’m supportive of my daughter and this is what she learned in school,” the mother added.


Radio host Starnes later reached out to school leaders for their perspective on the protest but they did not return his calls.


“Can you imagine the outrage if this had been a conservative event, if this had been a Trump rally or an NRA event or a March for Life,” Vandenberg added. “The outrage would’ve been unbelievable, but these people seem to see no issue with what they’ve done.”


Watch Vandenberg's disturbing full-length video exposing this indoctrination.  Other videos exposing classroom indoctrination may be found at StopK12Indoctrination.org. Please consider forwarding this important message to family and friends. 


To learn more about the Freedom Center's campaign to halt indoctrination in K-12 schools, please visit our campaign website, www.stopk12indoctrination.org.  To read the K-12 Code of Ethics CLICK HERETo order the Freedom Center’s new pamphlet, “Leftist Indoctrination in Our K-12 Public Schools,” CLICK HERE. To donate to our campaign to stop K-12 Indoctrination CLICK HERE.


Sara Dogan

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/san-francisco-public-school-students-join-teachers-sara-dogan/

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Judge Napolitano's Descent into Foolishness - Daniel John Sobieski


by Daniel John Sobieski

Napolitano's comments on the Trump-Ukraine phone call constituted a parody of the truth.


Consistent with Fox News Channel's continued listing to port, which I wrote about in my July 31, 2019 American Thinker article "Fox Veers Left," Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, once a staunch defender of objective truth, has provoked a firestorm with his agreement with Democratic clown car passenger Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) that President Trump committed a crime in his July 25 phone conversation with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. As Fox News reported:
Judge Andrew Napolitano told Fox News host Shepard Smith on Tuesday that the president effectively confessed to a crime when he admitted he asked Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Napolitano, a Fox News senior judicial analyst, had framed President Trump's earlier statement as an admission that he tried to "solicit aid for his campaign from a foreign government."
"So that to which the president has admitted is in and of itself a crime," Smith followed. Napolitano responded, "yes," and claimed it was the same crime former Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated as part of the long-running Russia investigation.
Napolitano's comments constituted as much of a parody of the truth as the fable spun by House Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff's recent interrogation of acting director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire over the transcript of the call, which suggests nothing of the sort. Zelensky himself said he was not "pushed" by Trump into investigating the corruption of the Bidens. So there was no quid pro quo, no bribe of a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election as reported by a "whistleblower" who was not a member of the Intelligence Community and had no firsthand knowledge of the call. What was Napolitano talking about?

That is what prominent Washington, D.C. Republican attorney and Fox News guest Joseph diGenova wanted to know when he was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight on September 25:
CARLSON: Joe diGenova is a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a federal prosecutor and he joins us tonight. Joe, thanks so much for coming on.
JOE DIGENOVA, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: You bet.
CARLSON: So it's hard with a story this political to get to the basic legal questions here. So to what the president did or said he did in this conversation with the head of state of Ukraine. Now, I heard to the effect on our air, I heard Judge Andrew Napolitano say that what the president has admitted to doing is a crime. Quote, "it is a crime." Is it a crime? You're a former federal prosecutor.
DIGENOVA: Well, I think Judge Napolitano is a fool. And I think what he said today is foolish. No, it is not a crime. Let me underscore emphatically that nothing that the president said on that call or what we think he said on that call constitutes a crime. And even if he had said, you're not going to get the money, it would not be a crime.
That has sparked somewhat of a feud between Carlson and Fox News host Shepard Smith, and probably between diGenova and Napolitano. It's not the first time Napolitano has done a mind melt with the Deep State swamp creatures, insisting earlier that despite the failure of the Mueller probe to show it, President Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice in the Russiagate investigation. This goofy claim was roundly debunked and repudiated by none other than legal scholar and Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. As reported by Real Clear Politics:
In an interview cited by the president on Twitter, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz makes the case for why FOX News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano is wrong when he says the Mueller report demonstrates that President Trump committed obstruction of justice[.] ...
ANDREW NAPOLITANO: When the president asked Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to get Mueller fired, that is obstruction of justice. When the president asked his then–White House counsel to get Mueller fired and then lie about it, that's obstruction of justice. When the president asked Don McGahn to go back to the special counsel and change his testimony that's obstruction of justice[.] ... But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable.
FOX NEWS HOST: Do you agree? Is this obstruction of justice?
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I do not agree. I think Judge Napolitano is terrific and we often agree about the law, but in my introduction to the Mueller report, I go through the elements of obstruction of justice. The act itself has to be illegal. It can't be an act that is authorized under Article Two of the Constitution.
And it would help if there was actually a crime being investigated. What was the crime committed by Trump that was being investigated by Robert Mueller? There was none, and the whole Mueller investigation may have been triggered by a real crime: the fraud committed on the FISA Court by Obama's DOJ and FBI.

Time was when Napolitano was as suspicious as the rest of us about the Deep State coup and the Obama administration's role in it. As Peter Barry Chowka notes in his excellent piece on the Smith-Carlson feud, something changed Judge Napolitano:
When I wrote about the first public skirmishes in this internal Fox News war in March 2018, Smith — a consistent critic of President Trump — was critical of Napolitano for defending the 45th POTUS. More recently, Napolitano has shifted ground and can be counted on to sound more like a CNN or MSNBC commentator when the subject of Donald Trump comes up.
I have an idea what triggered Napolitano's attitude change. His defense of Donald Trump's claim that Trump Tower was wiretapped by the Obama administration got him fired. Fox took him off the air and suspended him for saying what we all know now to be the case: that even friendly governments were used to set Trump up. Upon his return, perhaps as part of a deal, he began to sing a different tune, agreeing with the likes of Robert Mueller and his "pit bull," Andrew Weissmann.

As it turned out, Trump and Trump Tower were being wiretapped and surveilled on President Obama'a orders, if not by the British. Certainly, the British have resisted the declassification of all documents related to FISA abuse by Obama's FBI and DOJ, lest their role in Russiagate be exposed. And let us not forget that former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, namesake of the infamous Steele dossier, was a British agent. As the Daily Caller reported:
Top British spy officials are resisting a push by Republicans to declassify FBI documents related to the Russia investigation, according to a Telegraph report.
Officials with MI6, Britain's equivalent to the CIA, have warned the Trump White House that releasing the documents could hinder intelligence gathering operations, The Telegraph reported.
Trump said he is "very seriously" declassifying a slew of FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that would shed light on the origins of the FBI's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
The MI6 opposition also raises the possibility that British officials are concerned the sought-after documents contain information that could be embarrassing to the British government.
Alan Dershowitz and Joe diGenova are right. Judge Napolitano has gone over to the dark side of the Force and is currently sailing on the liberal ship of fools captained by Adam Schiff.


Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor's Business Daily and a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/judge_napolitanos_descent_into_foolishnes.html

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On Greta Thunberg and Youth Climate Activism - H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.


by H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.

"Climate delusion hysterics" was on display during "climate week".


Many supporters of President Donald Trump talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but even greater evidence that much of today’s pop culture, mass-media-driven society completely lacks any sense of perspective, focusing on minutiae and media-generated sideshows while ignoring pressing real-world problems, is what I call climate delusion hysterics.

These hysterics were on prominent display once again during “climate week,” when the uninformed or misinformed 16-year-old truant and international public scold Greta Thunberg warned the world will end soon if governments don’t act to prevent climate change. Rage-filled teen Thunberg castigated first the Congress of the United States, to which she was invited to testify, and then the world, telling the United Nations, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood. … We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

It is a sad commentary on the state of our society that Thunberg’s malformed opinions are given such prominent attention on the world stage. Ironically, I am constantly berated by progressive activists for daring to speak about climate change despite not being a “climate scientist” or having published on climate matters in peer-reviewed literature. I’ve been unable to find any evidence Thunberg has a degree in any field of research whatsoever, much less expertise in climate science. In contrast to Thunberg, I’ve been researching and writing about climate change for more than 20 years, longer than she’s even been in existence, yet her views, not my educated ones, are taken seriously.

Whatever one thinks about my or Thunberg’s qualifications to comment on climate matters, just a week before the U.N. trotted her out to castigate the world for using fossil fuels, an international group of 500 distinguished climate researchers—actual experts—sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, executive secretary for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first sentence of which stated bluntly, “There is no climate emergency.” The letter continued, “Current climate policies pointlessly, grievously undermine the economic system, putting lives at risk in countries denied access to affordable, continuous electrical power. We urge you to follow a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics, and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation.”

None of the letter’s signatories—experts with hundreds of years of cumulative climate research and thousands of peer-reviewed publications between them—were asked to discuss their views before the U.S. Congress or the U.N.

In addition, on Monday in New York, on the same day and in the same city the U.N. launched its climate summit, The Heartland Institute hosted a discussion on climate science and policy, at which climate scientists, all with Ph.D.’s, explained why, although climate change is happening, it is likely not primarily caused by humans and the best evidence is there is no climate catastrophe in the offing. Neither Congress nor the U.N. wanted to hear from these experts either.

This is not surprising, alas. It doesn’t fit with their agenda of selling fear to expand their control over individuals’ lives. As the journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken wrote decades ago, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Sadly, nothing has changed since Mencken wrote those prescient words.

In Climate Change Weekly 334, I wrote about how adults are psychologically scarring and emotionally abusing young people with the constant barrage of claims the world is ending due to human-caused climate change. “Among the most perverse and dangerous consequences of the ‘climate delusion’ being hyped almost daily by the fake news mass media is the havoc it is wreaking on the health and psychological well-being of children of all ages,” I wrote. No child is more a victim of this abuse than Greta Thunberg. As noted in articles in the American Spectator and National Review, and by Russell Cook and Scott Adams among dozens of others, no child has been more badly manipulated and used to push an agenda in recent days than Thunberg.

Thunberg’s righteous indignation is justified but misdirected. Instead of railing against the world for using fossil fuels to power economic growth, she should be praising previous generations for discovering how to exploit fossil fuels for the betterment of humanity (including to her own personal benefit, even if she does not realize it) and rebuking the adults around her, her country’s educational system, power-hungry politicians, and the mainstream media for not educating her about those benefits and instead frightening her and other youths with the imaginary hobgoblin of anthropogenic climate disaster.

Yes, Greta, contrary to the indoctrination you’ve suffered, the world is better now than before, due in part to fossil fuels, and you do have a bright future ahead if climate depression doesn’t rob you of it.

Here are some of the facts adults have failed to inform Greta of:

  • Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern medicine. Although it’s possible Greta was born at home with or without a midwife, the chances are she, like the vast majority of her fellow Swedes, was delivered at a modern medical facility operating 24 hours a day powered by electricity, with plastics, refrigeration, lighting, electronic equipment, incubators, and sterilized stainless-steel medical implements—all developed using, powered by, and/or transported using fossil fuels.
  • Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern agriculture. Food abundance has increased even as the amount of land devoted to agriculture has declined, with former farm fields reclaimed by forests and pastures, thanks largely to two factors: (1) the large-scale application and widespread use of modern technologies related to agriculture, many of which depend on fossil fuels, and (2) increased carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, according to the United Nations, the number of hungry people has declined by two billion since 1990. Additionally, research shows there is now 17 percent more food available per person than there was 30 years ago—all during the period of purportedly dangerous climate change attributed to human carbon dioxide emissions.
  • Fossil fuels are saving lives. World poverty has declined rapidly during the recent warming, largely as a result of the development and growing use of fossil fuels. Despite the addition of 3.2 billion people to the planet since 1968, poverty has fallen at a faster rate than at any other time in human history. Forty-four percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981. The share of people living in extreme poverty fell below 10 percent in 2015.
  • Countries where fossil fuels are in widespread use are generally wealthier, and wealthier countries are more resilient in the face of natural disasters than poorer countries lacking access to fossil fuels. Wealthier countries are better able to anticipate natural disasters, they have infrastructure that is more resistant to natural disasters when they strike, and they recover faster in their aftermath. A country’s level of wealth and development is almost entirely responsible for the depth of suffering its people experience during and after natural disasters, and a critical component of a country’s wealth is access to cheap, reliable energy, and in that regard fossil fuels fit the bill best.
  • Fossil fuels supply 81 percent of global primary energy. As fossil fuel use has grown, human welfare has increased, with the U.S. Census Bureau noting in 2016 global average human longevity has increased by 35 years since 1970, with declines in death rates in all age groups, including those aged 60 and older. Between 1970 and 2006, using the U.N.’s official $1/day definition of poverty, world poverty rates fell 80 percent between 1970 and 2006, with the number of poor falling from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Poverty rates, rates of hunger, and infant mortality rates have all continued to fall, and average lifespan has continued to increase, since the date of Thunberg’s birth, during a period of intensive fossil fuel use.
Columnist Scott Adams writes, “The United Nations estimates that the economic impact of climate change will reduce the economy by 10 percent in eighty years. What they don’t tell you is that the economy will be about five times bigger and better by then, so you won’t even notice the 10 percent that didn’t happen. And that worst case is only if we do nothing to address climate change, which is not the case.”

The adults in Greta’s life failed her by not teaching her any of these critical facts. That’s what she should be outraged about.

I will close with a quote from columnist Rich Lowry about why we shouldn’t take Greta-mania seriously:

There’s a reason that we don’t look to teenagers for guidance on fraught issues of public policy. With very rare exceptions—think, say, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was a child prodigy—kids have nothing interesting to say to us. They just repeat back what they’ve been told by adults [or other children], with less nuance and maturity. Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. Kids are powerful pawns. The catchphrase ‘for the children’ has a seductive political appeal, while kids offer their adult supporters a handy two-step. The same people who say, ‘The world must heed this 16-year-old girl’ will turn around and say to anyone who pushes back, ‘How dare you criticize a 16-year-old girl?’ (I can feel the tweets filling up my mentions right now.)

—    H. Sterling Burnett

SOURCES: National Review; Scott Adams; The Heartland Institute; The Heartland Institute; PBS; Climate Change Weekly 334; The American Spectator; Clintel


H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.

Source: https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/on-greta-thunberg-and-youth-climate-activism

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The Muslim Brotherhood Must Be Confronted - Tawfik Hamid


by Tawfik Hamid

"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope"- motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.

  • The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) states: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." If "jihad is our way" and "the Quran is our constitution," it would [be] irrational not to postulate that the MB and its related groups in the U.S. endorse violence to change the U.S. constitution and replace it with the Quran.
  • We cannot say at this stage that Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been brought fully into modernity. We can say, however, that we have two leaders who want to -- or are actually are -- taking their Muslim majority countries onto this path. This is a nightmare for the MB, whose goal is to return the Muslim world to the time of Islamic Caliphate. Designating the MB as a terrorist group can impede their ability to resist the noble attempts of these leaders.
  • "The importance of identifying the Muslim brotherhood as a terrorist organization could not be more clear to our national security and counterterrorism strategy.... Designate the Muslim Brotherhood (MP) a foreign terrorist organization beginning in Egypt and then on a country by country basis. Libya, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and Yemen branches of the MB are the most obvious follow-ons.... Stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government and media and NGO's and recognize their Islamist terror sympathies, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anti-American ideological underpinnings. We must recognize that they are not the only voice for American Muslims or any community of Muslims." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives, July 11, 2018.

According to Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, "The importance of identifying the Muslim brotherhood as a terrorist organization could not be more clear to our national security and counterterrorism strategy." Pictured: Jasser testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee on March 10, 2011 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The White House has, since April, been considering officially designating the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). This designation would follow in the footsteps of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, which have first-hand experience and understanding of the serious threat the MB represents.

The MB's modus operandi typically works through four stages: Preaching, sharing, use of violence, full control. It would therefore be wise to confront them sooner rather than later, before they manifest their full power.

Some of the organization's sympathizers and apologists seem sincerely to believe that the MB is a "moderate" group. Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Let us consider some examples.

The MB's ideological and political backing of the terrorist group Hamas, an offshoot of the MB, is well-documented and publicly acknowledged. Although Hamas claimed to have broken ties to the MB in 2017, apparently to try to improve its ties with the Gulf States, observers were skeptical. While supposedly renouncing all ties to the MB, according to the American Center for Democracy:
"... Sami Abu Zuhri denies all political, organizational or popular ties between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. However, he added that ideologically Hamas belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood (Alarabiya.net, March 22, 2016). Mahmoud al-Zahar made similar statements to Al-Sharq (quoted by Paltoday)."
That the MB through its affiliates continues to provide Hamas with material support seems an open secret. U.S.-based members of the Muslim Brotherhood established a Palestine Committee that was ultimately charged with the task of raising funds to underwrite Hamas's efforts to eliminate the state of Israel. Hamas and the MB are reportedly still calling for Israel's destruction. Terrorist acts by Hamas against innocent civilians and children, even their own, are still ongoing. In April 2018, the European Union condemned Hamas for terrorism and its use of human shields, presumably to prevent Israel from retaliating or to be able to show "dead babies" to the television cameras to cause outrage against Israel, another victim in this plan.

The Qatar-based Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who is called "one of the spiritual fountainheads of the Muslim Brotherhood," and who led the Friday prayer for the group in Tahrir Square after the 2011 revolution in Egypt, has called suicide bombing "a supreme form of jihad for the sake of Allah" and "heroic operations of martyrdom."

On October 6, 2012 the late Mohamed Morsi, former President of Egypt and a high-ranking figure in the MB, invited Tariq Al-Zomor (the Islamist who assassinated President Anwar Sadat) to an official celebration, while ignoring the tradition of inviting President Sadat's family to remember the 1973 Arab-Israel War. Morsi also urged Egyptians to "nurse children and grandchildren on hatred for Jews and Zionists."

So much for describing the MB as "moderate."
The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood states:
"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our constitution (dostoorona; lit. constitution). Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."
If "jihad is our way" and "the Quran is our constitution," it would irrational not to postulate that the MB and its related groups in the U.S. endorse violence to change the U.S. constitution and replace it with the Quran.

While some "peaceful" Islamic organizations describe jihad as an internal spiritual quest or an "inner struggle," the term is not typically used by Islamic organizations to describe "peaceful" activities. The Qur'an clearly says:
"So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." – (Qur'an 9.5), Shakir translation.
And:
"Slay them wherever you may catch them and expel them from the place from which they expelled you. The sin of disbelief in God is greater than committing murder. Do not fight them in the vicinity of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca unless they start to fight. Then slay them for it is the recompense that the disbelievers deserve." – (Qur'an 2.191) Muhammad Sarwar translation.
In the Islamist vocabulary and MB motto, let us remember that the organization Islamic Jihad, which assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, was not seeking peaceful change. In mainstream Islamic sources, the definition of jihad is predominantly described in terms of violence. As Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, noted in congressional testimony:
The next slide looks at the logo. And I think it's important to understand what they are. They have not changed their logo. And at the bottom, under those swords, which are not peaceful, that are not violent symbol, it says wei du (ph).
And wei du (ph) is from chapter 8, verse 16 of the Koran, and it says "make ready." And it's not the Boy Scouts' "be prepared, make ready." This is a passage in the Koran that refers specifically to battle and preparing for militancy. This, despite them coming to power in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere, they never change the symbol and what they are.
One would need to twist the traditional meaning of the word jihad to prove that it was actually meant in the peaceful sense of the word.

Another important point to consider is the otherwise surprising cooperation between Shia Iran and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, despite vast theological differences. It is telling that Iran was one of the first countries to object to President Trump's announcement that he might designate the MB a terrorist organization.

Any honest observer can see that both the Iranian Mullahs and the MB hate the United States, share a global agenda to destroy Israel and, indeed, all of Western civilization.

MB influence in Turkey is also worrisome. Over the past few decades, the MB and their supporters have managed to Islamize a significant portion of Turkish society. The current president, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, is a strong supporter of their organization. Imagine for a moment what might happen if the European Union made the mistake of accepting Turkey as a member. Turkey could, as it has been threatening to do anyway, dramatically facilitate the MB agenda simply by providing entry visas for huge numbers of Islamists from across the Middle East. They could quite literally flood Europe, which is already facing a possible clash of civilizations, and, even without unleashing new waves of terror, demographically change the future of the Europe forever.

The MB plan to force Europe to submit to their Islamic agenda can also be seen in their strong influence in Qatar, one of the biggest producers of natural gas on the planet, and where the country's broadcaster, Al Jazeera, founded and supported by Qatar's ruling Al Thani family, is the main megaphone of the MB. Qatar lavishly funds MB operations not only in the Middle East, but also in the U.S. and Europe.

That Qatar has been trying to dominate the European gas market was made clear by their support for terrorist groups in Syria to remove Al-Assad's regime and allow Qatari pipelines into Europe via Syria and then Turkey. This terror campaign was not limited only to Sunnis in Syria; it has also been extended to support for terrorist groups in other countries such as Egypt, Libya, and Iraq, which can compete with Qatar in exporting energy to Europe. This level of support for Sunni jihadi organizations could not possibly have happened without collaboration with the MB, which is widely regarded as the mother of many of these organizations.

Attempts by the MB to destabilize U.S. allies in the Muslim world, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also cannot be ignored. Both countries currently have leaders who desire to take their countries into modernity and tolerance, and who deserve Western support.

In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has admitted the role of "religious ideology" in the terrorism problem there. He has confronted the religious authorities, demanding that they provide a moderate interpretation of Islam that does not encourage violence. He has even, as president (for the first time in the history of Egypt), visited and celebrated Christmas mass in a Coptic church.

In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, has taken unprecedented concrete steps on the path to modernity within the kingdom. He has disbanded the religious police, begun empowering Saudi women, and for the first time visited a Coptic church in Egypt.

We cannot say at this stage that these two countries have been brought fully into modernity. We can say, however, that we have two leaders who want to -- or are actually are -- taking their Muslim majority countries onto this path. This is a nightmare for the MB, whose goal is to return the Muslim world to the time of Islamic Caliphate. Designating the MB as a terrorist group can impede their ability to resist the noble attempts of these leaders.

Adding to this, the alliance between the MB (and its related organizations and sympathizers) with leftist groups in the U.S. can allow the MB to exert huge influence on U.S. politics to benefit their Islamist agenda. The MB's de facto control of Islamic banking can only help them achieve their goal for the global domination of their religious agenda.

Other Muslims agree. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in his 2018 testimony before the US House of Representatives, concluded:
The importance of identifying the Muslim brotherhood as a terrorist organization could not be more clear to our national security and counterterrorism strategy. This will begin not only a necessary process of treating the cancer at its core before it metastasizes rather than its byproducts after it has already spread.... I leave with you the following recommendations:
1. Designate the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) a foreign terrorist organization beginning in Egypt and then on a country by country basis. Libya, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and Yemen branches of the MB are the most obvious follow-ons.... But I would recommend that the designation be taken in the country by country basis and not a blanket global one, and only be driven by need to designate every group in the world which is either a self–identified actual Muslim Brotherhood organization or an obvious Islamist terror group. This designation is not only an ideological one but one related to material, social, and militant support of the Muslim Brotherhood as a salafi-jihadi movement.....
4. Develop foreign policy mechanisms to disincentivize Qatari and Turkish government facilitation of the Muslim Brotherhood and its global affiliates including those in the West. Considerations should include a move to suspend Turkey from NATO (perhaps warranting a separate hearing on the very complex U.S.- Turkey relations).
5. Lift up diverse pro-liberty, secular reformist Muslim voices beginning with our Muslim Reform Movement and its allies within the Muslim community who are anti-Islamist. Use that strategy and our Declaration of our Muslim Reform Movement to identify allies within Muslim communities across the world.
6. Use the MB designation as a template to transition immediately from the currently useless non-ideological center of gravity that relies on "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) to a much more practical one centered on "Countering Islamism" (CI) or (CVI).
7. Stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government and media and NGO's and recognize their Islamist terror sympathies, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anti-American ideological underpinnings. We must recognize that they are not the only voice for American Muslims or any community of Muslims.
Finally, the MB's threats to our modern human civilization and security cannot be ignored and seriously need immediately to be confronted -- and at all levels.


Dr. Tawfik Hamid, the author of Inside Jihad: How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, How to Defeat It, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14895/confront-muslim-brotherhood

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The real cost of ‘Medicare for All’ could be American lives - Sally C. Pipes


by Sally C. Pipes

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal

Sanders is right to point out the similarities between his plan and government-run health-care systems in other countries. But he’s wrong to think Americans would fare better under Medicare for All.

Sanders and other progressives seeking the Democratic presidential nomination are zeroing in on pharmaceutical and insurer profits, money they say would be better spent providing health care for everyone under “Medicare for All.”
Sanders and other progressives seeking the Democratic presidential nomination are zeroing in on pharmaceutical and insurer profits, money they say would be better spent providing health care for everyone under "Medicare for All."
During the most recent Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case for Medicare for All, saying, “We need a health care system that guarantees health care to all people as every other major country does.”

Sanders is right to point out the similarities between his plan and government-run health-care systems in other countries. But he’s wrong to think Americans would fare better under Medicare for All. Just ask the millions of people suffering under such systems elsewhere.

Sanders and company promise a practically perfect health-care system, one even more generous than the existing Medicare program — comprehensive coverage, with no deductibles or co-pays, for every American.

That care wouldn’t be free. It’d cost between $32 trillion and $38 trillion over 10 years, according to research from the Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous.

But that cost would be obscured. Patients could walk into any hospital or doctor’s office and leave without receiving a bill. Out-of-pocket prescription-drug costs would be capped at $200 a year. To the average American, health care would seem a lot cheaper.

That would stoke nearly unlimited demand for care. But there’s already a limited supply.

Hospitals are closing in rural and urban areas alike. America is projected to be short some 122,000 doctors by 2032.

Hospitals and doctors would have no choice but to ration care — and force people to wait their turn.

That’s exactly what happens in Canada, the closest analog to Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
There, the median wait for treatment from a specialist following referral from a general practitioner is nearly 20 weeks. They pay a princely sum for that wait — more than $13,000 in taxes for the average family of four.

Doctors in the United Kingdom only have enough time to treat their sickest patients. And so there are anorexic women told they’re not skinny enough to receive treatment or elderly patients who have to wait until they’re nearly blind to have their cataracts removed.

Things don’t improve much once patients get off the waiting list. To save time, Canadian doctors frequently prohibit patients from discussing more than one issue per appointment. In the United Kingdom, patients could find themselves shoved into a 15-person “group appointment.”

Worse, these folks are the lucky ones.

In Canada and the United Kingdom, patients have died in overcrowded, understaffed hospitals before seeing a doctor. One retired neurosurgeon in British Columbia reported to the emergency department at the hospital he had served for 50 years with chest pains. Despite clearly expressing his symptoms, he was reportedly given two aspirin tablets without water and told to wait. He died in the waiting room.

Sen. Sanders’ proposal to “guarantee” comprehensive coverage to all Americans is understandably tempting. But the victims of single-payer health care abroad show just how high the cost of Medicare for All would be.

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health-care policy at the Pacific Research Institute.

Source: https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/the-real-cost-of-medicare-for-all-could-be-american-lives/

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If You Liked the Mueller Investigation, You’ll Love Impeachment - Daniel Greenfield


by Daniel Greenfield

A day after the Mueller hearings, they pulled the same scam again.




Stop me if this sounds familiar.

An intelligence operative backed by a Clinton lawyer accuses Trump of an inappropriate relationship with a former Soviet bloc country leading to an investigation and calls for everything from imprisonment to impeachment. The political half of Washington D.C. is muttering quietly, “Didn’t we do this already?”

After spending years accusing Trump of working with the Russians to undermine Hillary, they’re accusing him of working with the Ukrainians to undermine Biden. If Warren pulls far enough ahead, the Democrats will accuse Trump of working with the Poles or the Latvians to undermine her campaign.

The impeachment push is the same discredited scam that the Democrats had pushed on the country at the cost of millions of dollars, years of legislative stalemate, ruined lives and fake news. It’s like getting a scam email from a Nigerian prince, turning him down, and then receiving another email from the same address, except he now claims to be a Zambian prince, but still wants you to cash the same check.

The Democrats could barely be bothered to shake up the scam they’re once again pulling on America.

This time it’s a CIA officer instead of the MI6 guy who put together the Steele Report. And instead of a report authored secretly at the behest of Clinton lawyers, it’s a ‘whistleblower’ complaint defended by a lawyer who had worked for Hillary Clinton and donated to Biden, and comes by way of a whistleblower outfit co-founded by a Hillary Clinton donor who worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Yes, we did this already.

In April, the Mueller report was released. And it was a big, giant nothing. Democrats tried to play it for all they could. At the end of May, Mueller officially called it quits. At the end of July, despairing House Dems dragged him in to testify. Mueller had more trouble remembering things than Joe Biden.

The vicious scam that had begun with the Steele Report was finally dead. Time for a new edition.

The day after Mueller killed the Russia smear dead, President Trump spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of the Ukraine. And the Democrats immediately slotted it in as the new Steele Report. A few weeks into August, the complaint was filed. And by August’s end, it was passed along to Rep. Adam Schiff through the connivance of an intel oversight official who made sure it ended up in Adam’s sweaty hands.

That’s the same scheme which took a product of the Clinton campaign and routed it through the DOJ, FBI and intelligence agencies in order to give the Steele Report a veneer of official legitimacy. This time around the key players fixed the problem that came up when the Steele Report was traced to its source, who turned out to not only be an FBI informant, but was being paid to smear Trump by Hillary Clinton.

Now they did a slightly better job of making their smear look like it originated within the government.

The latest incarnation of the Steele Report, like it, is a tangled mess of hearsay. Its author claims that "more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts". That's a very fancy way of saying that seven dwarves told him where to find their diamond mine.

And of conceding that this isn't a whistleblower, but a gossip.

"I was not a direct witness to most of the events described," he concedes.

Steele was passing along dubious material from sources that may or may not have existed. His new American counterpart is doing the same thing. Whistleblowers are supposed to report on what they actually saw. Not on what they claim somebody told them at the watercooler or the donut counter.

Had the Trump administration and its allies not immediately moved to make all this material public as quickly as possible, Rep. Schiff and the Washington Post could have spent months making things up.

Instead, Rep. Schiff’s efforts to push a false recreation of the phone call between President Trump and the Ukrainian leader fell flat because the transcript and the complaint had already been made public.

And that’s the biggest challenge for Democrats.

The Mueller investigation and the media’s conspiracies theories were able to drag out the Russia hoax for years because so much of the information remained under lock and key, classified either by the government, or hidden by the Mueller team which doled out tidbits to favorite reporters. But this time there’s nothing to hide. And that leaves Rep. Schiff inventing his own imaginary transcripts.

And then claiming that it’s satire.

That’s an act of desperation from the Democrat point man on impeachment. And desperation at the very beginning of the process does not bode well for Team Coup. The Russia hoax was a bruising few years for Trump and his people, but they appeared to have learned a few lessons from it. Rep. Schiff and the Democrats are going into impeachment assuming that they can run the same plays all over again.

That’s not going to work anymore.

After their Russian scam fell apart, they decided to pivot to Ukraine a day later. The Russians and the Ukrainians don’t actually get along. But the average Democrat who, unlike the Biden clan, doesn’t have financial interests in the Ukraine, doesn’t know that and doesn’t care. After spending years accusing Trump of being in bed with the Russians, they’re now accusing Trump of misconduct with their worst enemies. And if neither Russia nor Ukraine pan out, they’ll throw another dart at a map of the world.

The third scandal may involve a French Surete agent revealing that someone once told him in a dream that Trump was secretly working with the Hungarians against Cory Booker. Or someone from NZSIS (New Zealand Security Intelligence Service) announcing that a note slipped under his door proves that Trump is trying to undermine Pete Buttigieg on behalf of Burundi. And Rep. Schiff will make up the rest.

The two elements of the story that remain the same, even as the minor details shift, are not accidental.

The Democrats and their media allies are lazy. And the laziness conveys their contempt for the public. But there’s a reason that they maintained the two key elements, the foreign country and the claim of election sabotage, in both their scams. The reason goes to the heart of the real crime committed here.

The foreign country, especially a former Soviet bloc nation, is a crucial element because it allows the Democrats to tap into counterintelligence resources in targeting the political opposition. The Soviets accused political dissidents of working for the CIA or MI6 for the same reason. The goal is to criminalize the political opposition and to unleash the resources of the intelligence agencies in going after them.

The election sabotage is the second crucial element because it undermines the legitimacy of elections.

After Hillary Clinton lost, the Russian scam was used to reject the legitimacy of President Trump. The Ukraine scam will be used to similarly claim that Biden might have won if it wasn’t for the Ukraine.

Impeachment can’t actually succeed. But it’s a preemptive excuse for claiming Trump didn’t really win.

In 2016, the Democrats rejected President Trump’s first term with a Russian conspiracy theory. In 2020, they intend to reject his second term with a Ukraine conspiracy theory. And if the Ukraine doesn’t work out, there’s always Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia. And all the rest of the old Soviet empire.

There were 7 Warsaw Pact countries and 15 countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. There are 20 Democrats still running for the 2020 nomination. Pick a candidate, pick a country and make up your own scandal. Match up Andrew Yang and Estonia. Or Wayne Messam and Kyrgyzstan.

You too can make up your own case for impeachment. Just like Rep. Adam Schiff.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/if-you-liked-mueller-investigation-youll-love-daniel-greenfield/

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