At a conference on &#8220;Political Risk in the 21st Century&#8221; in Abu Dhabi Monday, Condoleezza Rice, who served as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, offered her thoughts for the first time publicly on the controversy surrounding President Trump&#8217;s alleged attempt to pressure Ukraine to &#8220;look into&#8221; former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Trump&#8217;s famous July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Rice, was &#8220;really murky.&#8221;
&#8220;The call is murky, it is really murky,&#8221; said Rice, as reported by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-impeachment-condoleezza/former-u-s-top-diplomat-rice-concerned-by-shadow-diplomacy-on-ukraine-idUSKBN1XL2A7">Reuters</a>. &#8220;I don’t like for the president of the United States to mention an American citizen for investigation to a foreign leader. I think that is out of bounds.&#8221;
In the highly scrutinized call, which prompted the whistleblower complaint sparking the Democrats&#8217; impeachment inquiry, Trump brought up Ukraine&#8217;s alleged role in meddling with the 2016 election, asking Zelensky to look into it as a &#8220;favor.&#8221; Trump also added his interest in seeing Ukraine look more thoroughly into the allegations swirling around the Bidens. Though the whistleblower complaint described a clear quid pro quo during the call, the transcript released by the Trump administration revealed no such explicit agreement.
&#8220;There&#8217;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,&#8221; Trump told Zelensky. &#8220;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.&#8221;
While Rice found the call uncomfortably &#8220;murky,&#8221; she expressed more concern about the alleged role of Trump&#8217;s personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in pushing Trump&#8217;s agenda in Ukraine. Though she did not reference him by name, Rice highlighted the potential &#8220;conflict&#8221; of having &#8220;someone who says he&#8217;s acting on behalf of the president&#8221; sending mixed messages to another country about U.S. foreign policy. She qualified the statement by noting that she does not know if that actually occurred.
&#8220;What I see right now troubles me,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I see a state of conflict between the foreign policy professionals and someone who says he’s acting on behalf of the president, but frankly I don’t know if that is the case.&#8221;
&#8220;It is deeply troubling,&#8221; she said, explaining: &#8220;The world shouldn’t get confusing messages from the United States of America.&#8221;
While the phone call contained no clear quid pro quo tying an investigation into the Bidens and the $391 million in military aide to Ukraine, in some of the transcripts selectively leaked by the committee headed up by California Democrat Adam Schiff — whose office <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gop-to-argue-whistleblowers-protections-voided-by-consulting-with-schiff-prior-to-filing-complaint-report-says">consulted with the whistleblower</a> before the complaint was filed — some witnesses, including U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland, say they &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyt-pro-trump-diplomat-makes-substantial-update-to-his-impeachment-testimony-on-quid-pro-quo">presumed</a>&#8221; the aide was tied to the investigation.
Trump has maintained all along that there was no quid pro quo and that his call for the investigation into the Bidens&#8217; activities involving Ukraine and Ukraine-based energy company Burisma was fully warranted, as past reports and investigations indicate.
During the &#8220;Political Risk&#8221; event Monday, Rice also warned about the current state of the world, both economically and in terms of growing &#8220;power rivalries.&#8221;
&#8220;The international economy was created as one that was intended to be a positive sum game, as in ‘my growth would not come at your expense,’&#8221; she said in comments reported by <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/11/world-order-is-in-chaos-condoleezza-rice-warns.html">CNBC</a>. &#8220;They created a different kind of system, one that was based on free and open trade and one in which there were great institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank &#8230; that system also relied on U.S. leadership and U.S. military protection. I would suggest to you that now, now that system is under strain and under threat.&#8221;
<div class="group">
&#8220;A second big challenge to the system, the global order that was created after 1945, is the problem of great power rivalry which has emerged strongly in the last several years,&#8221; she said in reference to increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, echoing warnings from Trump. &#8220;If Russia is a power that is somewhat diminished from where it was, China is a rising power. And how to deal with a relationship with China that is actually very complex, not at all simple, is one of the real challenges for the United States today.&#8221;
</div>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-another-whistleblower-comes-forward-files-complaint-against-ukraine-whistleblower-for-soliciting-illicit-donations-report-suggests">Another Whistleblower Comes Forward, Files Complaint Against Ukraine Whistleblower For Soliciting Illicit Donations, Report Suggests</a>

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice Weighs In On Trump Ukraine Call: &#8216;Murky&#8217;

Donald Trump

George W. Bush

Ukraine

Musical icon Elton John has come to the defense of his friend Ellen DeGeneres after the talk show host was swarmed with left-wing criticism for sitting next to former President George W. Bush at an NFL game.
Instead of caving to the mob, DeGeneres defended her friendship with the former president and underscored the obvious: we should be kind to others, even if they happen to have differing political views. 
&#8220;I admire Ellen for standing up and saying what she said,” John told <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/13/769078177/in-me-elton-john-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-a-storied-life">NPR</a>. 
The “Rocket Man” singer piggybacked off DeGeneres’ message of tolerance and even offered praise for Mr. Bush and President Donald Trump for humanitarian efforts addressing HIV/AIDS globally. 
“Unfortunately, what our democracy has become now is that it’s not OK to have different opinions than yours and that is not healthy,” John said, according to <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/elton-john-ellen-degeneres-george-w-bush-twitter">Fox News</a>. 
“George Bush has made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. Ellen DeGeneres has made a lot of mistakes,” he said.
“Yes, there were [bad] decisions that he’s made, but that was made by Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. And I admire Ellen for standing up and saying what she did,” he added. 
John also heaped praise on Mr. Bush for launching the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or <a href="https://www.state.gov/pepfar/">PEPFAR</a>, an $85 billion global investment to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in over 50 countries.
“PEPFAR came from the Republicans. People have to remember that,”  the musician said, noting that the initiative is “the most incredible thing a Republican president has done on a philanthropic level.”
According to Fox News, John said that he appreciated Trump’s continuation of PEPFAR, though he might not agree with most of the president’s policies. 
“People need to come together,” he emphasized. “They need to respect people’s views on life. Except when it’s heresy, and I don’t think George Bush is that kind of guy.”
After the “controversy” of merely sitting next to a former president and smiling, DeGeneres defended herself and her friendship with Bush to her live audience and millions of viewers. 
“Here’s the thing — I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have,” the host said, as reported by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-ellen-degeneres-responds-to-backlash-over-her-friendliness-with-george-w-bush">The Daily Wire</a>. “We’re all different, and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s okay, that we’re all different.”
“For instance, I wish people wouldn’t wear fur. I don’t like it, but I’m friends with people who wear fur,” DeGeneres continued. “But just because I don’t agree with someone on everything, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”
As noted by Fox News, Bush spokesman Freddy Ford told the network that Mr. Bush “appreciated” DeGeneres’ comments. 
“President and Mrs. Bush really enjoyed being with Ellen and [her wife] Portia [de Rossi] and appreciated Ellen’s comments about respecting one another,” Ford said. “They respect her.”

Elton John

Elton John Praises Ellen After Backlash For Bush Friendship; Offers Praise For Bush, Trump

Ellen Degeneres

On Sunday, openly gay comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres was photographed with former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game. Shortly after the photo hit social media, many progressives skewered the comedian for sitting next to the Republican.
On Tuesday, DeGeneres used a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-ellen-degeneres-responds-to-backlash-over-her-friendliness-with-george-w-bush">segment</a> of her daily show to speak about her friendship with Bush, as well as the fact that she is &#8220;friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs&#8221; as she does.
DeGeneres added:
<blockquote>We’re all different, and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s okay, that we’re all different &#8230; just because I don’t agree with someone on everything, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.</blockquote>
As The Daily Wire’s Paul Bois <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/vanity-fair-scolds-ellen-degeneres-for-friendliness-with-george-w-bush">reported</a>, the comedian’s monologue didn’t sit well with some progressives.
In a piece, titled: &#8220;Ellen DeGeneres, George W. Bush, and the Limits of Unconditional Kindness,&#8221; Vanity Fair’s Laura Bradley tore into DeGeneres.
After referring to President Bush as a &#8220;man whose résumé includes the invasion of Iraq and the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina,&#8221; Bradley claimed that DeGeneres’ &#8220;brand&#8221; of &#8220;celebrity whisperer who can befriend just about anyone&#8221; is simply &#8220;incompatible with reality.&#8221;
The mainstream media backlash didn’t stop there.
On Wednesday, VICE published a piece by Harron Walker, titled: &#8220;<a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa7m5g/ellen-degeneres-george-w-bush-friends-science-rich-people">Ellen and Science Confirm: Rich People Only Care About Themselves</a>.&#8221;
In the piece, Walker states that Americans shouldn’t be surprised by DeGeneres and Bush &#8220;yukking it up&#8221; because &#8220;rich people love hanging out with other rich people,&#8221; and &#8220;often struggle with holding empathy&#8221; for others.
<blockquote>Still, it is confusing to think about how DeGeneres, one of the nation’s foremost openly gay celebrities would, could look past Bush’s years of using the bully pulpit to advocate against LGBTQ rights—not to mention, uhhhh, the unnecessary wars he started in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have killed millions of people and traumatized countless others.</blockquote>
Walker goes on to suggest that DeGeneres’ explanation of her &#8220;cognitive dissonance&#8221; wasn’t enough, writing that &#8220;disagreeing about the Bush administration’s ongoing legacy of global violence against Muslim people seems like more than just a difference of opinion.&#8221;
She further suggests that DeGeneres might not care, citing studies conducted by Paul Diff and Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley, which allegedly claim that when an individual accumulates more wealth, &#8220;the less likely that person is to have compassion and empathy for other people, and to use their wealth to help others in need.&#8221;
The backlash against DeGenerous has even crept outside the boundaries of the media, with celebrities taking sides.
Actress Reese Witherspoon initially defended DeGeneres, <a href="https://people.com/movies/reese-witherspoon-defends-ellen-degeneres-amid-george-w-bush-backlash/">tweeting</a>, &#8220;Thank you for this important reminder, Ellen.&#8221; However, Witherspoon eventually deleted the tweet.
Unsurprisingly, other actors are hammering the talk show host.
Actor Mark Ruffalo sent out the following tweet:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths &amp; displacement, and the deep scars—emotional &amp; otherwise—inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can’t even begin to talk about kindness. <a href="https://t.co/dpMwfck6su">https://t.co/dpMwfck6su</a>
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkRuffalo/status/1182005931317583872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
<blockquote>Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths &amp; displacement, and the deep scars—emotional &amp; otherwise—inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can’t even begin to talk about kindness.</blockquote>
Actor John Cusack has gone further, tweeting repeatedly about the story, and even <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/johncusack/status/1182079029559603200?s=21">promoting a video</a> from activist Rafael Shimunov in which images from the Iraq War are superimposed on screen behind DeGeneres as she delivers her monologue in defense of her friendship with Bush.

Ellen DeGeneres.

VICE Slams Ellen, Claiming ‘Rich People Only Care About Themselves’

Hollywood

The woke scolds are now seriously targetting comedy talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres because she dared to say that people should be kind and respectful toward those with whom they disagree.
In a <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/ellen-degeneres-george-w-bush-football-game?utm_social-type=owned&amp;mbid=social_twitter&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_brand=vf&amp;utm_medium=social">scathing op-ed for Vanity Fair</a>, Laura Bradley argues that Ellen DeGeneres somewhat betrayed her LGBT allies by publicly displaying friendliness with George W. Bush at a football game and then using the moment to deliver a message about unity.
“Here’s the thing: I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different, and I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s okay,&#8221; DeGeneres said on Tuesday. &#8220;Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not gonna be friends with them. When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone. It doesn’t matter.”
Referring to George W. Bush as &#8220;the man whose résumé includes the <a class="external-link" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yv54dj/george-bush-and-tony-blair-are-war-criminals-obv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yv54dj/george-bush-and-tony-blair-are-war-criminals-obv&quot;}">invasion of Iraq</a> and the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/hurricane-katrina-george-w-bush-new-orleans">botched federal response</a> to Hurricane Katrina,&#8221; Bradley says that Ellen contributed to the ongoing revisionist history campaign to somehow rehabilitate the former president. This, according to Bradley, stemmed from Ellen&#8217;s brand of &#8220;unconditional kindness,&#8221; which Bradley claims does not jive with reality.
&#8220;There’s something especially on-brand about DeGeneres’s plea for unconditional kindness; she’s made her name as a bubbly talk show host slash celebrity whisperer who can befriend just about anyone,&#8221; writes Bradley. &#8220;But the continued backlash against DeGeneres—even after her address—is also a sign that such a brand is incompatible with reality.&#8221;
&#8220;Ellen has been a towering presence on the talk show scene for a reason; for millions of viewers across America, DeGeneres and her show’s sparkling set represent a sunny alternate reality—one in which everyone is fun and nice and happy to dance and play games,&#8221; Bradley continues. It’s a <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/ellen-degeneres-donald-trump">simulated apolitical utopia</a>, one that seems to reflect DeGeneres’s belief that kindness is the most important virtue of all—one that should trump all else.&#8221;
But that brand only goes so far, claims Bradley, because, at some point, people should be able to determine if the target of their unconditional kindness is worthy of it. Bush does not qualify because he launched the Iraq war, supported traditional marriage, and appointed conservative Supreme Court justices, culminating it the Citizens United decision of 2010.
&#8220;In that clip, DeGeneres seems to hope we will see unity—a representation of what we could achieve if we put aside our differences and recognize our shared humanity. But how deep does this unity run? What are the parameters of the kindness we should all practice?&#8221; Bradley asks.
&#8220;Throughout her address, DeGeneres reduced this history to a difference in &#8216;beliefs,'&#8221; Bradley continues. &#8220;But when one person has historically believed other people should not have the same basic rights as another, it’s hard to treat these differences as benign—especially when that person once exercised their power to help make their beliefs a reality.&#8221;

Pink Honored With Star On The Hollywood Walk Of Fame

Vanity Fair Scolds Ellen DeGeneres For Friendliness With George W. Bush

Comedy talk show host Ellen Degeneres displayed some incredible class this week after the internet went abuzz over photos of herself palling around former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.
&#8220;After photos surfaced of her laughing with Bush in Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones’ box, many on social media wondered why the talk show host, a gay woman, would be friendly with a former president who called for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, among other policy positions that seem at odds with her beliefs,&#8221; reports <a href="https://ew.com/tv/2019/10/08/ellen-degeneres-defends-friendship-with-george-w-bush-be-kind-to-everyone/">Entertainment Weekly</a>.
In response to the internet backlash, the former &#8220;Finding Nemo&#8221; actress said on a clip from Tuesday&#8217;s show of &#8220;The Ellen Degeneres&#8221; show that people should &#8220;be kind to everyone,&#8221; including those with whom they disagree.
&#8220;So this weekend, I went to Dallas for the Cowboys game. And it may not seem like a big deal for a celebrity to attend a football game, but I never leave my house. So it is a big deal,&#8221; Ellen began. &#8220;So there were a hundred thousand people in this stadium. Portia and I were invited by Charlotte Jones &#8212; she’s the daughter of Jerry Jones, who owns the Dallas Cowboys.&#8221;
&#8220;So I gotta say, when we were invited, I was aware that I was going to be surrounded by people with different views and beliefs,&#8221; she continued. &#8220;But during the game, they showed a shot of George and me laughing together, so people were upset. They thought why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president. A lot of people were mad, and they did what people do when they’re mad: they tweet.&#8221;
Despite the nasty tweets directed her way, Ellen shared a particular tweet that she loved: “Ellen and George Bush together makes me have faith in America again.”
Ellen then stated that she is not only friends with George Bush but also friends with people who share different viewpoints than her.
&#8220;Here’s the thing — I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have,&#8221; Ellen said. &#8220;We’re all different, and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s okay, that we’re all different.&#8221;
“For instance, I wish people wouldn’t wear fur. I don’t like it, but I’m friends with people who wear fur,” DeGeneres continued. “But just because I don’t agree with someone on everything, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”
<iframe title="This Photo of Ellen &amp; George W. Bush Will Give You Faith in America Again" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lSZtjol7mJA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Indeed, Degeneres has proven time and time again to be a comedian and talk show host of genuine class who avoids mean-spirited ad hominems against those on the opposite side of the political aisle in favor of cheerful comedy, discussion, and even forgiveness. Nothing better put this on display than when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-kevin-hart-oscars-host.html">she publicly defended</a> comedian Kevin Hart after a mob of online trolls sabotaged his dream gig of hosting the Oscars over past jokes he made that offended members of the LGBT community.
In her hiring practices, Ellen has also shown herself to be an equal opportunity employer by counting the <a href="https://politicon.com/speaker/adam-yenser/">openly conservative comedian Adam Yenser</a> among her writing staff.

WATCH: Ellen Degeneres Responds To Backlash Over Her Friendliness With George W. Bush

Kevin Hart

On Monday, Valerie Plame, a former undercover CIA operative who became famous from a CIA leak scandal in 2003, released a campaign ad accusing President Trump of pardoning the man who &#8220;took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity.&#8221; In a fact-check for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/10/valerie-plames-claim-that-scooter-libby-leaked-her-identity/?noredirect=on">The Washington Post</a> Tuesday, Glenn Kessler, who testified at the leak trial, debunked Plame&#8217;s attempt to blame Scooter Libby for leaking her information and called her out for exaggerating her role in the CIA and trying to make Trump the bad guy.
Plame, who is running as a Democrat for New Mexico&#8217;s 3rd District, has made clear that she is not a fan of Trump. In fact, in August 2017, Plame launched a GoFundMe page to <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/buytwitter">&#8220;#BuyTwitter&#8221; in order to &#8220;#BanTrump.&#8221;</a> In her new campaign ad, Plame makes the following dramatic claims, as highlighted by Kessler:
<blockquote>
I was an undercover CIA operative. My assignment was preventing rogue states and terrorists from getting nuclear weapons. You name a hot spot, I lived it. [images of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea] Then Dick Cheney’s chief of staff took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity. His name: Scooter Libby. Guess who pardoned him last year? [image of President Trump]
</blockquote>
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ICW-dGD1M18" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
For the assertions, Kessler ultimately gives her Three Pinocchios, only sparing her the Post&#8217;s worst rating, Four Pinocchios, for allowing her a &#8220;fuzzy&#8221; potential argument.
Kessler begins by first noting that Plame&#8217;s video potentially misleads viewers about her role in the CIA. &#8220;The ad strongly suggests that Plame was an undercover operative in places such as Iran and North Korea, when that was not the case,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;She was under diplomatic cover in Greece,&#8221; he notes.
While she wasn&#8217;t undercover in Iran and North Korea, she was &#8220;operations chief at the Joint Task Force on Iraq of the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate when her name was publicly disclosed in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a column written by Robert Novak</a> and published in The Washington Post on July 14, 2003,&#8221; Kessler explains.
The real question, he continues, is whether Vice President Dick Cheney&#8217;s chief of staff Scooter Libby was actually the source of the leak, as Plame claims in the ad. The answer is no.
&#8220;Libby was convicted of perjury and lying to the FBI during its investigation, but he was not charged with leaking Plame’s name,&#8221; Kessler explains. The fact-checker goes on to give a detailed account of the famous leak case, including this key passage:
<blockquote>Libby was charged and convicted of misleading investigators about his conversations with reporters, in particular a claim that he received information about Plame from NBC’s Tim Russert. But the only article that directly can be traced to Libby is the item in Time magazine — in which one could argue he only tangentially confirmed information already obtained by the reporter — and the jury acquitted Libby on the charge of lying about what he told [Time&#8217;s Matthew] Cooper. No evidence emerged at trial that Libby had seen the State Department memo or that he knew Plame had a covert status.</blockquote>
&#8220;Plame’s name and CIA role was first disclosed in Robert Novak&#8217;s column. Novak’s original source was Armitage, and his confirming sources were Rove and a CIA spokesman. Novak&#8217;s column led to the firestorm that launched a federal investigation,&#8221; Kessler concludes. &#8220;But no evidence shows that Libby disclosed Plame&#8217;s role to Novak.&#8221;
Kessler notes that Bush administration officials were &#8220;certainly eager to try to discredit Wilson, who had emerged as a damaging critic about the failed search to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,&#8221; so one could possibly &#8220;draw a fuzzy line from Libby’s inquiries about Wilson’s role, the State Department memo and Libby’s conversations with administration officials to the eventual leak of Plame’s name.&#8221; For that reason, Kessler spares Plame the full four Pinocchios.
Kessler also suggests that trying to make Trump retroactively complicit is a stretch:
<blockquote>The indictment says that on June 23, Libby told New York Times reporter Judith Miller that he believed Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. That narrative was later thrown in doubt when Miller later recanted her testimony at the trial, which was damaging to Libby’s case, as she was the only reporter who had claimed Libby volunteered information about Plame. (Miller’s retraction led to Libby getting his law license back well before he was pardoned by Trump.)</blockquote>
Plame&#8217;s campaign has defended its ad, a spokesman telling the Post, &#8220;From his trial, it was clear that Libby gave Valerie’s name to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Please recall that Scooter Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice because he attempted to hide information from the prosecutors. He obstructed justice, perjured himself and was held accountable until Donald Trump pardoned him. No one suggested he leaked it.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51670/updates-nyt-says-trump-ordered-noaa-statement-dems-james-barrett">UPDATES: NYT Says TRUMP Ordered NOAA Statement; Dems Launch Investigation; Trump Responds</a>

Celebrities Visit Build &#8211; October 24, 2018

Dem Candidate Slams Trump For Releasing Man Who ‘Leaked’ Her Name, Gets Smacked By Fact-Check

Washington Post

Eighteen years ago today, in what would be the deadliest assault by a geopolitical foe on U.S. soil since the War of 1812, the global jihad struck the most lethal blow in the history of its wretched movement. The 9/11 airline hijackers were largely trained and funded by Wahhabist/Salafist Sunni zealots based in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/19/911-report-details-saudi-arabia-funding-of-muslim-/">Saudi Arabia</a>, were substantially aided by the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43339/hammer-iranian-revolution-forty-years-old-stand-josh-hammer">terrorist</a> <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/iran-told-to-pay-10-5-billion-to-sept-11-kin-insurers">Iranian</a> regime, and were protected and mollycoddled by Taliban Islamists.
It was not amorphous &#8220;terrorism&#8221; — an easily <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51440/hammer-san-francisco-has-beclowned-itself-labeling-josh-hammer">malleable</a> linguistic concept — in the abstract that killed those <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/09/11/remember-2/">three thousand people</a> on 9/11. It was a much more clearly identifiable and unmistakable foe: genocidal Islamic jihadism.
It is astonishing to ponder that those born now will be eligible to serve in the U.S. military despite being born after 9/11. For those fresh new military recruits, 9/11 will be ingrained in their consciences as but one of many distant historical events — akin to the Vietnam War, the Pearl Harbor attacks, or perhaps even the Battle of Gettysburg. That is a downright harrowing thought for those of us for whom 9/11 was a seminal — perhaps life-changing or career trajectory-altering — event.
Crucially, these impressionable 18-year-old military recruits have grown up thinking of 9/11 and the corresponding bipartisan military adventurism overseas as inextricably linked. It is, of course, true that the Taliban in Afghanistan harbored the al-Qaeda militants who took down the Twin Towers. But it is also true that Afghanistan has already become this generation&#8217;s Vietnam: A seemingly interminable struggle in a faraway land for which there seems no way out.
While there is a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">prudent and responsible &#8220;third way,&#8221;</a> far too often our foreign policy and national security discourse in the post-9/11 era has been oversimplified to a most regrettable dichotomy: That between George W. Bush-era moralistic interventionist neoconservatism and a fanatical isolationism that has never seen a foreign threat worth seriously engaging. For the young generation that has intellectually matured in the proverbial shadow of this oversimplified discourse, 9/11 and our subsequent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are solidified in the mind as part and parcel of Bush-era military interventionism.
As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/us/politics/us-soldier-killed-afghanistan.html">Americans continue to die</a>, eighteen years later, fighting in third-world sharia hellholes to try to quixotically impose Madisonian democracies upon Islamists who effectively live in the seventh century, the public will to fiscally fund and morally support our campaigns naturally wanes. While that support wanes, the isolationist <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/fox-news-tucker-carlson-reportedly-at-center-of-trump-s-decision-not-to-bomb-iran-1.7403783">Tucker Carlson wing</a> of the foreign policy Right <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51610/hammer-bad-trump-presidents-dismissal-john-bolton-josh-hammer">markedly ascends</a>. But Tucker Carlson-esque thinking on foreign policy is exceedingly dangerous. If 9/11 taught us anything, it taught us that real evil exists in this earthly realm — and that evil must be soberly assessed and unambiguously thwarted, lest we succumb to its tyranny. Evil loves a geopolitical vacuum, and there is no greater vacuum than when the post-World War II United States entirely withdraws itself from the world.
The problem is that, no matter its flaws, Carlson&#8217;s isolationism will continue to gain momentum so long as it is juxtaposed with the overly sanguine Pollyannaism of those who would moralistically intervene and seek to build Enlightenment-style Western nation-states in <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2019-02-18/obamas-libya-debacle">sharia-governed desert backwaters</a>. The onus, therefore, falls on those of us <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">true, non-neoconservative counter-jihadi hawks</a> to articulate and advocate for a compelling foreign policy vision that both soberly reflects upon the excesses of bipartisan moralistic interventionism gone awry and rejects the unyielding demands of the &#8220;bring America home&#8221; isolationists.
There is much to be said about what this vision looks like, and my hope is that future columns will help further contribute to the development of this &#8220;third way.&#8221; But instead of deploying U.S. military assets for dictator-toppling and nation-building purposes, a &#8220;third way&#8221; hawkish foreign policy would focus upon utilizing the tools of soft power, &#8220;draw and strike&#8221;-style lesser hard power maneuvering, hard deterrence (e.g., strategic naval asset deployment), statecraft, and sanctions/finances to achieve its goals: To thwart jihadism and deter the hegemonic ambitions of other non-jihadist geopolitical foes, such as Russia and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47057/hammer-china-americas-greatest-21st-century-threat-josh-hammer">China</a>.
The U.S. should label the leading Mexican cartels as State Department-recognized <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/time-designate-mexican-cartels-terrorist-organizations/">foreign terrorist organizations</a>. The U.S. must label the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46714/hammer-designating-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-josh-hammer">Muslim Brotherhood</a>, which is the intellectual progenitor of all contemporary Sunni jihad, as a terrorist group. The U.S. must <a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/01/cutting-us-aid-to-the-lebanese-army-would-increase-pressure-on-the-iran-hezbollah-axis/">defund the Lebanese Armed Forces</a>, given that the entire Lebanese military apparatus has been overrun by Hezbollah. The U.S. must amp up pressure on Qatar and Turkey, which have both long surpassed Saudi Arabia as the leading global bankrollers of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Sunni madrasas alike.
In terms of immigration, the U.S. must focus not just on a border wall but also on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42539/hammer-border-wall-nice-interior-enforcement-nicer-josh-hammer">interior enforcement</a>: After all, two of the 9/11 hijackers — who should, of course, have never received visas in the first instance — were present in the country on that fateful day due to overstaying their visas. Two of the 9/11 hijackers, in other words, were illegal aliens still presently in the country due to a lack of robust interior enforcement.
Why on Earth, for that matter, has the U.S. continued to implement a lax immigration policy that continues to voluntarily <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/aimless-fighting-in-afghanistan-while-we-bring-afghanistan-to-our-shores/">bring the very problem we claim to be fighting overseas</a> to our own shores? Has the development of Rep. Ilhan Omar&#8217;s (D-MN) large Somali immigrant community into the <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/how-rep-ilhan-omars-minnesota-district-became-the-terrorist-recruitment-capital-of-the-us-officials-highly-concerned">nation&#8217;s largest terrorist recruitment hub</a> taught us nothing? Why are we not implementing an immigration policy for the Islamic world that, while allowing for dispensations, starts from a default baseline level of effectively zero? None of the 9/11 hijackers should have been in the United States and, distressingly, our inadequate immigration &#8220;vetting&#8221; procedures are oftentimes hopeless in attempting to prevent the next importations of jihadist evil.
But a true &#8220;third way&#8221; foreign policy approach — a common-sense approach that can repel the nostrums of Tucker Carlson&#8217;s isolationism and moralistic interventionism alike — must begin with a sober assessment of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. There is no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/now-pull-the-plug-on-afghanistan/">still deploy large swaths of troops</a> to Afghanistan. Our fanciful efforts to democratize a seventh century-dwelling bastion of Islamism has manifestly failed, and will never succeed. But even more germanely, there is no present security threat from Afghanistan itself. Unlike Iran, the world&#8217;s most dangerous Islamist nation and number one global funder of jihad, Afghanistan has no nuclear weapon program or expressed desire to develop intercontinental ballistic missile technology, does not fund jihadist outfits or targeted assassinations overseas, and poses no genuine threat to American interests other than the radicalization of Afghans themselves.
It turns out that there is a much simpler and more cost-effective method of dealing with the Afghanistan problem than a seemingly endless military presence — with the concomitant constant risk of <a href="https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/03/21/green-on-blue_attacks_in_afghanistan_the_data_111015.html">&#8220;green-on-blue&#8221; violence</a>. Instead, U.S. policymakers ought to simply amp up border security, interior enforcement, and set Afghan visas to zero. A meaningful withdrawal from Afghanistan, furthermore, would allow genuine counter-jihadi hawks to demonstrate to isolationists that they have no interest in occupying or democratizing every sharia hellhole the world over. And it would save much-needed intellectual, moral, financial, and military capital that must be conserved for a potential showdown with genuine jihadi state actor threats, such as Iran.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">My argument has always been that hawks themselves should support getting out of Afghanistan. We waste intellectual, moral, fiscal, physical, and human capital that we’d be better off saving for fighting adversaries that are actually strategically necessary. <a href="https://t.co/Q6fcyK9HmW">https://t.co/Q6fcyK9HmW</a>
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1160333751118913536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">You want to know how to solve the Afghanistan issue?
Set Afghan visas to zero. Maybe leave a few drones for easy aerial operations.
Done.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1160352043191717888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
By recalibrating our post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy to focus less on nation-building and more on genuine deterrence, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48120/hammer-d-day-was-good-versus-pure-evil-our-josh-hammer">clearly defining military missions for our men and women in uniform</a>, amping up border security at home, cutting immigration from the Islamic world, and conserving financial and military capital for future showdowns with the Iran-Muslim Brotherhood-Qatar-Turkey axis of Islamism, hawks will go a long way toward showing that they have learned the lessons of moralistic interventionism gone awry. In so doing, they will also begin the process of repelling the noxious rise within the conservative movement of those pernicious isolationists whose discredited ideas risk such profound harm.

9/11 Twin Towers

HAMMER: Never Forget 9/11. But We Need To Rethink How We Fight Radical Islamic Jihad.

Afghanistan

Al Qaeda

Conservatism

Foreign Policy

Illegal Immigration

Immigrants

Immigration

Iran

Islam

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about how the media creates Republican scandals, but also tries to distract you from Democratic scandals. Video and partial transcript below: 
I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ve heard about this scandal by now. It&#8217;s just a ridiculous kerfuffle &#8230; I talked about it before, Trump said this Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama. That&#8217;s one of the places it might hit, and everybody said, Oh we just said nothing about it! We said nothing about Alabama. What are you talking about! Foolish! Trump is an idiot! He must be insane! Let&#8217;s invoke the 25th! Let&#8217;s get him out of office now! Impeachment!
I mean, it was nuts. Let me show you a little bit of this. When Trump then put up a map, and he was talking about it, somebody had taken a Sharpie and made it so the hurricane looked like it was going to hit Alabama. This is a tremendous scandal.
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SDgY6oJWl5Y?start=390" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
Let&#8217;s look at, what&#8217;s his name? Brian Stelter. He&#8217;s on top of this, man. He has got this thing covered. Brian Stelter, really getting into the meat of this incredible scandal.
<blockquote>STELTER: Here&#8217;s how I would frame it: This Alabama story was about the president failing a basic geography test. At the time he warned Alabama that Alabamamight get hit, at the time of that tweet, this is the forecast his own government released at 11:00 A.M. This is the most up-to-date forecast at the time of Trump&#8217;s tweet. And look at this track. It turned out to be spot on with Hurricane Dorian right up the coast just as forecast. Fantastic work by government forecasters at the National Weather Service. Anyone who can read a map knows what this shows. No one looked at this and thought that Alabama was going to be at risk.</blockquote>
Nobody looked at it, but Alabama was going to be at risk. Here, also on CNN is Don Lemon, reporting on the hurricane as it approaches.
<blockquote>LEMON: How many states that are under threat right now?
WEATHER MAN: At least six, from the Carolinas right through Georgia coastline into Florida certainly, and then also even into the Gulf of Mexico: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, you need to be on the lookout.</blockquote>
So Trump was right. So they actually are writing articles now that say, well, Trump is right but he was wrong because he took it seriously. In other words, what the press doesn&#8217;t like is [that] the press is so used to lying about Republican presidents, and presidents who have policies they don&#8217;t like, they’re so used to it without being challenged — especially because George W. Bush never fought back against them, which he later said or at least Karl Rove, his adviser, later said was a mistake. They&#8217;re just not used to having people fight back.
So Trump fights back &#8230; funny thing: He doesn&#8217;t like being called a liar. He&#8217;s constantly pointing it out, and he&#8217;s constantly, constantly in the right. I know the scandal itself has nothing, but it&#8217;s indicative of the fact that this is the way every word out of Trump&#8217;s mouth is taken. Everything he says is looked upon like it&#8217;s a problem. At no point does anybody ever say, well, wait &#8230; let&#8217;s stop for a minute. I know Trump said it — evil Trump, demon Trump, Adolf Hitler Trump — but maybe it&#8217;s true. &#8230;
James Mattis has this new book called “Call Sign Chaos” and now people are going through it and they&#8217;re &#8230; trying to get it this thing where Mattis quit and he must hate Trump and Mattis won&#8217;t criticize Trump. And that&#8217;s the big story. But buried in this is a story about a foiled bomb plot against a Washington, D.C. restaurant that was planned by the Iranians.
It was supported by the Iranians and Mattis writes in his book: “Had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart. Blood rushing down sewer drains. It would have been the worst attack on us since 9/11. I sensed,” Mattis says, “that only Iran&#8217;s impression of America&#8217;s impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House absent one fundamental mistake. The terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb. The Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack. Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history as under the Obama administration.”
Right, so he wanted to respond. He thought we should respond. This was going to be an attack — just the fact that it was foiled doesn&#8217;t mean the attack didn&#8217;t exist it did attack. He says, “I wanted calculated actions to restrain the regime so it couldn&#8217;t thrust us into a war. If you allow yourself to be goaded and trifled with, one of two things will happen. Eventually a harder, larger fight will explode or you will get moved out of the neighborhood.”
In other words, either the Iranians would destroy us or we&#8217;d have to go to war in a much bigger way. He says: “In my view, we had to hold Iran to account and strike back when attacked. But there was a reason for the administration&#8217;s restraint. The Obama administration was secretly negotiating with Iran, although I was not privy to the details at that time.” In other words, just like Obama closed down a DEA investigation into Hezbollah drug trafficking in America because he wanted to get his idiotic Iranian nuclear deal. In the same way he did that, he would not respond against an attack that would have been devastating to the United States of America and he would not show Iran what&#8217;s what, because he did not want to get his deal.
This guy was a terrible president and he was an incompetent president. It has nothing to do with him being a “secret Muslim” or “from Kenya” or hating America. Nothing to [do with] it. He was incompetent because his ideas were untrue, and he was too big a narcissist to acknowledge it and change his ideas. And once he realized that everything was going bluey under Obama, Once you realize that was what was happening, he just fell back on the old Democrat playbook of [dividing] people into identity groups and setting them against each other.
When he started talking about, oh the police are killing black people — untrue, but he sold it because the press helped him sell it. When he started talking about, oh poor little children who think they’re girls can&#8217;t go into the girls room because they&#8217;re really boys — that whole identity playbook, that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s about, it&#8217;s to distract you from the fact that their policies do not work, and that was the Obama presidency in a nutshell. Yet, when Trump comes along and does a good job and does things that might work, some of which do work — even if they do work — he is held to a totally different standard.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand!</a>

Donald Trump Signs Tax Reform And Jobs Bill Into Law At The White House

KLAVAN: When A Republican Speaks, It&#8217;s A Scandal

Barack Obama

Media Bias

Republican Party

Trump Administration

The New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on which I completed a judicial clerkship six months ago, is one of the most important federal courts in the country. The Fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and the inclusion of the nation&#8217;s largest border state under the Court&#8217;s jurisdiction necessarily means that its appellate docket is rife with high-profile immigration, criminal, and drug trafficking cases. Moreover, Texas has long been the preferred venue of choice for meaningful conservative impact litigation &#8212; including but hardly limited to litigation commenced by Texas&#8217;s renowned Office of the Solicitor General. Texas&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/39381/judge-rules-obamacare-unconstitutional-james-barrett">current lawsuit against Obamacare</a> is a perfect example.
Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi all have one strikingly obvious feature in common: They are deeply red states. Each state has two Republican senators, and three of the six &#8212; Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Cornyn (R-TX), and John Kennedy (R-LA) &#8212; even serve on the powerful U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Because it bears repeating: We are talking here about Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. These are not Rust Belt swing states. This is, for all intents and purposes, the contemporary geographical heartland of American conservatism.
Due to all of these reasons, the Trump administration&#8217;s (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47899/hammer-senator-josh-hawley-most-important-freshman-josh-hammer">generally</a>) well-oiled judicial nominations machine has placed an outsized emphasis on stacking the Fifth Circuit with deeply principled jurists. The results thus far, which include three Texas-based judges and two Louisiana-based judges, speak for themselves. As I can personally attest from a very recent year of clerking on the Court, Trump nominees on the Fifth Circuit have made a huge difference in terms of three-judge panels and Court-wide en banc votes alike. The Fifth Circuit is truly, as the president might say, being made great again.
But the Court is not yet truly great. There are still far too many close en banc votes of great importance on the Fifth Circuit.
Which brings us to Halil Suleyman (&#8220;Sul&#8221;) Ozerden, the president&#8217;s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/president-donald-j-trump-announces-judicial-nominees-3/">recently announced pick</a> to fill a vacant Mississippi-based Fifth Circuit seat.
It is first important to contextualize the background of the nomination. Unlike the Trump administration&#8217;s five previous Fifth Circuit judicial nominees, the Ozerden pick is not a product of the tag-teaming duo of the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42955/hammer-now-not-time-white-house-go-wobbly-judicial-josh-hammer">White House Counsel&#8217;s Office</a> and the outside Federalist Society. On the contrary, reliable sources inform me that it was due in no small part to objections from these quarters that the Mississippi-based Fifth Circuit seat languished in vacancy for nearly two years. And as Politico <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/13/mulvaney-halil-suleyman-fifth-circuit-1362794">notes</a>, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a groomsman at Ozerden&#8217;s 2003 wedding. Ozerden is said to also be strongly supported by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) &#8212; he of a <a href="https://heritageaction.com/scorecard/members/w000437">65% lifetime scorecard rating</a> from Heritage Action for America.
Readers can surely draw their own conclusions. But again, this is not for a seat in a swing state in a left-leaning appellate court &#8212; this is for a Fifth Circuit seat in Mississippi.
Ozerden&#8217;s name was first publicly floated last August &#8212; to disastrous effect, in conservative legal circles. The influential Carrie Severino of Judicial Crisis Network, citing Ozerden&#8217;s 25% reversal rate on appeal at the conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit, raised questions of <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/conservatives-voice-concerns-over-potential-fifth-circuit-nominee/">&#8220;mere judicial competence.&#8221;</a> According to Severino, Ozerden, who was nominated to a Mississippi-based district court seat by President George W. Bush, &#8220;has not demonstrated a commitment to textualist methods of statutory interpretation&#8221; since joining the bench. My own surveying of Ozerden&#8217;s record leads me to a similar conclusion: Judge Ozerden is often terse in his analysis and his statutory interpretation is frequently heavier on judicial precedent than it is on the actual statutory text itself. &#8220;It sure seems like we could do better than Judge Ozerden&#8221; in Mississippi, Severino concluded. Indeed.
Even more pointedly, Kelly Shackelford, the president and CEO of <a href="https://firstliberty.org">First Liberty Institute</a> &#8212; where I serve in an Of Counsel capacity &#8212; <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/21/judge-ozerden-against-president/">described</a> Ozerden at the Daily Caller last August as someone who &#8220;would be a pick against those who voted for the president&#8221;:
<blockquote>
[J]ust when President Trump has an opportunity to solidify a conservative majority on the Fifth Circuit &#8230; establishment Republicans are pressuring the president to nominate one of their own. &#8230;
There&#8217;s one more open seat on the Fifth Circuit. With a solid judge, it would become the first reliably conservative appeals court in the nation. Why would President Trump waste an opportunity on a judicial seat to uphold his promise to nominate constitutional conservatives by nominating an establishment moderate like Ozerden? I pray he does not.
</blockquote>
After Ozerden&#8217;s formal nomination this month, the conservative criticism of his record has continued unabated. Erick Erickson of The Resurgent has <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/06/12/the-president-should-withdraw-the-nomination-of-halil-suleyman-sul-ozerden-or-the-senate-should-reject-ozerden/">already called for the defeat</a> of Ozerden&#8217;s nomination. And <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/13/mulvaney-halil-suleyman-fifth-circuit-1362794">according to Politico</a>, Severino &#8212; whose beliefs here may reasonably be imputed to that of the broader Federalist Society upper echelon &#8212; is not wavering from her prior criticism.
Again, this is Mississippi. There is zero excuse not to nominate a veritable right-winger for this seat.
There is one case in particular in Ozerden&#8217;s that bespeaks not merely his slipshod judging, but also a seeming hostility to the all-important issue of religious liberty. In the 2012 Southern District of Mississippi case of <a href="https://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FA-MS-0001-0002.pdf">Catholic Diocese of Biloxi v. Sebelius</a>, a case where the eponymous diocese challenged the intrusive and conscience rights-undermining Obamacare contraceptive mandate promulgated by President Barack Obama&#8217;s Department of Health and Human Services, Judge Ozerden dismissed the diocese&#8217;s appeal with curt and reckless abandon. The diocese, like many religious organizations across the country, had argued that the contraceptive mandate required it to provide health plans to its employees in a way that violated its sincerely held religious beliefs. But Judge Ozerden, in all his infinite wisdom, went so far as to even <a href="https://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FA-MS-0001-0003.pdf">deny the diocese&#8217;s motion for oral argument</a>! Instead, as Shackelford <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/21/judge-ozerden-against-president/">wrote</a>, Ozerden felt comfortable &#8220;entrust[ing] the diocese&#8217;s religious liberty to the fleeting benevolence of the same government agencies responsible for endangering that liberty in the first place.&#8221;
It is one thing to deny a motion for oral argument from a pro se prisoner filing a facially frivolous habeas corpus petition; it is quite another to deny a motion for oral argument to a Catholic diocese pleading a real, genuine infringement of its right to conscience.
To make matters worse, Ozerden&#8217;s ruling was also manifestly against both (1) a persuasive district court opinion only sixteen days prior out of the Eastern District of New York (Roman Catholic Archdiocese of N.Y. v. Sebelius), which reached the opposite conclusion and (2) an amicus brief filed on behalf of the Catholic Diocese of Biloxi by 79 sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
What Judge Ozerden did in Catholic Diocese of Biloxi represents nothing less than a deliberate indifference &#8212; indeed, perhaps an outright hostility &#8212; to the interests of religious liberty. And religious liberty, of course, is easily one of the most indispensable issues by which senators ought to vet and assess judicial nominees. Just <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47899/hammer-senator-josh-hawley-most-important-freshman-josh-hammer">ask Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)</a>, who is making quite a name for himself on the issue.
Why would a Fifth Circuit judge be more dismissive of religious liberty than a judge in liberal New York? Again, this is Mississippi.
Here is how Hiram Sasser, general counsel for First Liberty Institute, put it in an exclusive statement to The Daily Wire:
<blockquote>
President Trump has hit five home runs at the Fifth Circuit so far. Judge Ozerden ignored 79 members of Congress, ignored a prior decision in favor of religious liberty on the same issue, and ruled against the Catholic Church without even allowing the Church to have a hearing and its day in court. We cannot let anyone derail President Trump&#8217;s perfect record at the Fifth Circuit and at the last minute cede the swing vote to someone who demonstrates a lack of regard for religious liberty.
</blockquote>
Sasser&#8217;s swing vote point is crucial. As a very recent Fifth Circuit law clerk, I can attest that the Court&#8217;s en banc votes &#8212; in which important cases are brought before all active judges &#8212; are oftentimes nail-biting affairs. The Fifth Circuit is being made great again, but it is not quite fully there yet. Again, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/33529/texas-judge-writes-stinging-rebuke-fights-gun-hank-berrien">I would know</a>. And this Mississippi seat promises to be the proverbial Anthony Kennedy seat on the Court &#8212; the swing vote in en banc voting who will decide crucially important matters of intense interest to conservatives.
We should have zero question marks from the nominee for this Mississippi seat. A close source tells me that Sen. Wicker has strongly intimated to Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Josiah Coleman that he would be the nominee if Ozerden&#8217;s nomination were to go down. That would be the same Justice Coleman who took a <a href="https://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/story/news/local/2015/11/05/mississippi-supreme-court-sex-divorce/75258762/">staggeringly awesome stand against the tyranny of judicial supremacy</a> in a 2015 dissent pertaining to a same-sex divorce case. As reported by the Hattiesburg American at the time:
<blockquote>
Coleman wrote that the idea that the U.S. Constitution means what a majority of the Supreme Court says it means &#8220;is not necessarily true and should be subject to questioning.&#8221;
&#8220;No court should be elevated above the Constitution itself, and if the Supreme Court of the United States has done something it has no constitutional basis for doing &#8212; as forcefully argued by the <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf">Obergefell [v. Hodges]</a> dissenters, then those of us who sit below it must ask ourselves what, if anything, it means.&#8221;
</blockquote>
That is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42341/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">exactly right</a>. As constitutional law scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/01/originalism-a-logical-necessity/">phrased it</a> at National Review last year: &#8220;[T]he Constitution specifies that &#8216;this Constitution&#8217; &#8212; the written text &#8212; is binding on judges and all other government officials. Right after designating the Constitution supreme law, Article VI provides that &#8216;the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby.&#8217; It further specifies that all federal and state officers, of every branch, &#8216;shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.&#8217; All who exercise authority under the Constitution&#8217;s auspices swear an oath of fidelity to abide by the supremacy and binding nature of the Constitution&#8217;s text.&#8221;
Again, conservatives can do much better than Sul Ozerden for this Fifth Circuit swing vote seat. This is Mississippi.
Conservative warriors for religious liberty on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee should come out swinging against the Ozerden nomination. Josh Hawley &#8212; who has been tremendously courageous and defiant in his Committee tenure thus far &#8212; may well be battle-fatigued, but this is yet another important battle. Hawley should summon the will to oppose this nomination.
So should Ted Cruz &#8212; indeed, Cruz should lead this battle. The Fifth Circuit docket is dominated by Texas litigation &#8212; this is Cruz&#8217;s turf. And the outright opposition to the nomination by Texas-based First Liberty Institute should provide Cruz with all the support and political cover he needs to do the right thing here. With Cruz&#8217;s leadership, it is hard to see how at least Hawley does not follow &#8212; and from there, the nomination is likely doomed.
The time is now for conservatives to come out and oppose this weak and uninspired pick for the swing seat on one of the nation&#8217;s most important federal appellate courts. This is an important fight. The White House has made its pick &#8212; there is no retreating.
As conservatives, we can do so much better than Sul Ozerden. Again, this is Mississippi.

gettyimages-157188741

HAMMER: Sul Ozerden Is A Very Weak Fifth Circuit Pick. Kill The Nomination.

Constitution

Judicial Branch

Judiciary

Mississippi

New Orleans

Religion

It was the end of 1996. Bill Clinton had just been re-elected, and he organized an elaborate welcome reception for a foreign guest: General Chi Haotian of China. A breakfast reception was held in his honor and the Democrats loyally attended. Well, all but one attended: Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
Pelosi, outraged, did not <a href="http://cubanexilequarter.blogspot.com/2009/09/mainland-china-cuba-united-states-are.html">mince</a> words:
<blockquote>
&#8220;My objection is not to the visit of Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian, but to our country giving full military honors to the person who was in operational command over the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and who directed the Chinese government&#8217;s military threats against the Taiwanese people during their elections. At the same time that President Clinton will not meet with any of the Chinese dissidents or have an official meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he has an official meeting with the person who crushed and continues to crush dissent in China and Tibet. With its actions, the Clinton administration has given great face to the hardliners in the Chinese regime. General Chi oversaw the massacre of civilians in Tiananmen Square who rallied around the symbol of our democracy, the Statue of Liberty. These people responded to our ideals, they were crushed, and now we honor those who crushed them.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Not long thereafter, a photograph <a href="https://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/news-photo/chinese-defense-min-chi-haotian-meeting-w-pres-bill-clinton-news-photo/50696313">appeared</a> showing a smiling Bill Clinton sitting with General Chi in the Oval Office. The liberal civil-libertarian Nat Hentoff took the photo to Pelosi to inquire about her thoughts: &#8220;&#8216;Oh, my God,&#8217; she said, &#8216;I thought I would never see the day. The president won&#8217;t see the Dalai Lama, he won&#8217;t see the pro-democracy dissidents, he won&#8217;t see Harry Wu, but he did see this thug. It&#8217;s absolutely appalling.'&#8221;
By placing trade with China over criticism of its human rights record, Pelosi said, Clinton&#8217;s China policy had &#8220;led to crackdowns in China. You would be hard put to find a dissident to talk to in China. They&#8217;re all in prison, in labor camps or in exile. Their families have been silenced. It&#8217;s heartbreaking.&#8221;
Pelosi, Hentoff wrote, complained of &#8220;&#8216;huge amounts of money&#8217; being spent to legitimize the trade-over-human-rights policy. &#8216;Corporations allowed to do business in China lobby, make presentations and schmooze with members of Congress and journalists. Money is the biggest enemy of those of us on the other side. &#8230; A corollary obstacle to helping China&#8217;s prisoners of conscience is, as Pelosi puts it, the revolving door by which lobbyists become administration policymakers. &#8216;Sandy Berger,&#8217; she notes, &#8216;was the point person at the Hogan &amp; Harrison law firm for the trade office of the Chinese government. He was a lawyer-lobbyist. When he went into the Clinton administration, he was second to Tony Lake, and now he is the national security adviser.'&#8221;
The late Chinese gulag survivor Harry Wu used to call out politicians who sold out American interests and human rights for Beijing gold. In one <a href="https://www.wnd.com/2001/04/8721/">interview</a>, he spoke of senators who &#8220;took a stand for communist China based on family or business interests. For example, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), her husband is a board member of COSCO [The People&#8217;s Liberation Army&#8217;s Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and he has other investments in China. You see, this is the kind of person [Feinstein] who is never interested in my work.&#8221; In a later <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/10/04/opinion-love-blind-comes-mcconnell-china/16652453/">article</a>, he spoke of &#8220;Sen. Mitch McConnell,&#8221; who &#8220;is one of the strongest supporters of free trade and closer ties with China. &#8230; After all, Jiang Zemin, China&#8217;s former Communist Party boss and dictator, is a close family friend of the senator&#8217;s wife, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao praised her father for building up China&#8217;s industry. Jiang Zemin, the hard-liner who took power following the Tiananmen Square massacre, is notorious for his repression of religious minorities and Tibet.&#8221;
But Wu had only the warmest of words for Pelosi, and vice-versa.
This is not the image of Nancy Pelosi with which I grew up. The Pelosi I came to recognize was the congresswoman who in 2007 flew to Syria and sat with Bashir Assad to criticize President George W. Bush at the same time that Assad was running terrorist bases whence jihadists would cross into Iraq to attack American troops &#8212; guys like Pelosi&#8217;s current House <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/21/dan-crenshaw-why-guys-like-me-go-places-like-syria/?utm_term=.19afc5efb0b3">colleague</a> Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). Those were the same terrorist bases from which ISIS would one day emerge.
I am only now learning about this earlier version of Pelosi thanks to a renewed interest in Nat Hentoff&#8217;s writings. I am not, nor will likely ever, be a fan of Pelosi. Yet it does not change the fact that at that time, on this issue, she did what was right and spoke truth to power.

MITSOTAKIS: Tiananmen Square Massacre At 30 And Remembering Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s Finest Hour

Bill Clinton

China

Nancy Pelosi

Syria

A new <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/257672/americans-view-job-market-hits-new-high.aspx">Gallup poll</a> ought to give President Donald Trump a boost of confidence as he prepares for a tough re-election fight. It turns out that, as Erick Erickson <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/05/21/americans-view-trump-era-economy-more-favorably-than-bush-or-obama-era/">summarizes</a> at The Resurgent: &#8220;More Americans feel good about the economy right now than during the entirety of the Obama or Bush years. Based on Gallup&#8217;s polling, this is the highest they can find in their own data and the only data set they can find that is higher is some Rutgers data from the end of the Clinton era.&#8221;
Per <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/257672/americans-view-job-market-hits-new-high.aspx">Gallup</a>:
<blockquote>
Americans&#8217; confidence in the U.S. job market is the highest in Gallup&#8217;s trend originating in 2001, with 71% in May saying now is a good time to find a quality job. This represents a significant improvement from March and April, when 65% each month rated the job market favorably. Today&#8217;s level is similar to February&#8217;s 69% reading. &#8230;
Americans&#8217; broader perceptions of the U.S. economy in May are similar to what Gallup has found over much of the past year, including in March and April.
<ul>
<li>51% of Americans rate current economic conditions as excellent or good, essentially unchanged from last month&#8217;s 50%.</li>
<li>Just over half of U.S. adults, 54%, say economic conditions are getting better. This is up from 49% in April, but nearly identical to February and March.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Gallup concludes its poll in sanguine, positively rosy fashion: &#8220;The longer-term picture shows that Americans&#8217; positive perceptions of both the economy and the job market are substantially improved today over the prior decade, particularly from 2008 through 2011, as the country was entering and then recovering from the recession and global financial crisis.&#8221;
The economy is, without question, roaring. As The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46744/wow-unemployment-rate-hits-lowest-point-half-josh-hammer">reported</a> earlier this month, the unemployment rate recently hit the lowest mark in half a century. The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-hiring-jumps-in-april-unemployment-falls-to-3-6-11556886731">noted</a> at the time: &#8220;American employers picked up the pace of hiring in April and the unemployment rate fell to a half-century low, adding to signs of healthy U.S. economic growth as the expansion approaches its 10th birthday. Private-sector workers saw solid wage gains, with average hourly earnings up 3.2% in April from a year earlier, matching the prior month&#8217;s increase.&#8221;
This macroeconomic success is all unambiguously promising political news for Trump. Historically, incumbent presidents seeking re-election have fared well when fortified by the tailwinds of a thriving economy. James Carville&#8217;s famous political adage, &#8220;It&#8217;s the economy, stupid!&#8221; has often carried real weight when it comes to voters&#8217; decision-making. Democratic strategist Mark Mellman <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/441482-mellman-lets-hope-its-not-just-the-economy">took to The Hill last month</a> to warn his fellow Democrats that the 2020 presidential election must be fought on political terrain that extends beyond the economy:
<blockquote>
Last week, one of my very smart, and very distinguished, colleagues told The Washington Post in no uncertain terms that the 2020 &#8220;election is going to be about the economy.&#8221;
Unless something changes dramatically, Democrats better hope my friend is wrong, because that&#8217;s an election we will likely lose. &#8230;
If politics were merely a reflection of economics, and Trump was a normal president (he&#8217;s not), his approval rating would be 10 to 20 points higher than it is.
Something&#8217;s holding his approval rating far below its &#8220;natural&#8221; level.
Instead of attacking uphill, let&#8217;s figure out what&#8217;s already holding Trump down and focus 2020 on that.
</blockquote>

Poll On Economy Gives Trump Some Great News

2020 Election

Economy

Gallup

Poll

Joe Biden might be the front-runner among Democratic presidential candidates, but that doesn&#8217;t mean he&#8217;s widely beloved by the party&#8217;s progressive base. A newly resurfaced video of Biden admitting that he genuinely likes former Vice President Dick Cheney, describing him as &#8220;a decent man,&#8221; has triggered Biden&#8217;s left-wing critics.
In a tweet noted by <a href="http://thedc.com/2019/05/02/joe-biden-dick-cheney-video/">The Daily Caller</a>, the Young Turks&#8217; Emma Vigeland posted a video from 2015 of Biden&#8217;s positive comments about the man Democrats have portrayed as the Machiavellian architect of George W. Bush&#8217;s &#8220;warmongering&#8221; regime.
&#8220;First of all, I actually like Dick Cheney, for real,&#8221; said Biden. &#8220;I get on with him. I think he&#8217;s a decent man.&#8221;
Vigeland notes that Biden goes on to praise Cheney, &#8220;without irony,&#8221; as &#8220;extremely helpful&#8221; about the &#8220;legal parameters&#8221; of the office he assumed in 2009.
&#8220;[Walter] Mondale then says his view of Cheney is &#8216;a little bit different,'&#8221; Vigeland adds. &#8220;The crowd laughs.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Joe Biden: &#8220;I actually like Dick Cheney&#8230; I get on with him. I think he&#8217;s a decent man.&#8221;
He adds that Cheney was &#8220;extremely helpful&#8221; about the &#8220;legal parameters&#8221; of the VP office. Without irony.
Mondale then says his view of Cheney is &#8220;a little bit different.&#8221; The crowd laughs <a href="https://t.co/udjSlSCrZV">pic.twitter.com/udjSlSCrZV</a>
&#8212; Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) <a href="https://twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1123975598999789571?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 2, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Vigeland also posted a video of the entire discussion:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
Anyone looking for the full clip (it&#8217;s around the 56:40 mark): <a href="https://t.co/bMTJSvjBO1">https://t.co/bMTJSvjBO1</a>
&#8212; Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) <a href="https://twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1124024815420157952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 2, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Responses online from the Left to the &#8220;decent man&#8221; clip have been overwhelmingly negative. Some examples of posts replying to Vigeland&#8217;s original tweet:
<blockquote>
<a href="https://twitter.com/nikoCSFB/status/1124041758063636480">This is wild.</a> And it&#8217;s even scarier considering this is from 2015 so he wasn&#8217;t saying it to pander in an attempt to run for office&#8230;he genuinely feels this way
<a href="https://twitter.com/Terrence_STR/status/1124049078764146691">I would be a bit apprehensive</a> towards anyone that describes a war criminal so positively&#8230;like sending thousands of my Brothers &amp; Sisters to their deaths &amp; murdering millions of innocent civilians for profit is just water under the bridge. Glad to see our sacrifice is so honored
<a href="https://twitter.com/MarciaWalteres/status/1123983188085354497">Sooooo when&#8217;s the announcement that he&#8217;s dropping out. </a>Soon? He just basically said Cheney was a &#8220;very fine person&#8221; sound familiar?
<a href="https://twitter.com/smartt_nicola/status/1124117525392916480">How quickly do people forget war crimes.</a> I like people who aren&#8217;t war criminals.
<a href="https://twitter.com/yusuf_VI/status/1123988061661147137">Cheney belongs in Guantanamo with Bush</a> and the rest of his admin for lying the US into two wars. War is bad. War under false pretenses is even worse. That should be obvious yet Biden thinks he can alter history and basic decency to defend himself for supporting the Bush admin.
<a href="https://twitter.com/LuciHoneychurch/status/1124164506173702144">Is anyone surprised?</a> Biden was part of the warmongering Obama team that bombed more nations &#8211; and brokered more arms deals &#8211; than any other admin since WWII.
<a href="https://twitter.com/PuestoLoco/status/1124073869097218048">THIS is one of the BIG things I do not like about Joe Biden.</a> He is old and out of touch, trying to play 20th century collegial &#8220;good old boy&#8221; politics with a viper. There is absolutely ZERO good in Dick Cheney. Nada!
<a href="https://twitter.com/visithesea/status/1124103205363666944">He&#8217;s so entrenched. </a>Biden can&#8217;t see the cruelty of cheney n pence and the disastrous real life results because to him they&#8217;re just people he mingles with at cocktail parties.
</blockquote>
As TheDC notes, the video prompted a rebuke from MSNBC host Chris Hayes and racial activist Shaun King, who added another video he presents as damning to the presidential candidate. &#8220;Joe Biden has many absolutely gross moments where he fought for mass incarceration. This is one of the worst,&#8221; King tweeted Thursday. &#8220;His crime bill already passed. Here he brags about writing the law requiring states to double the average length of prison sentences if they wanted federal dollars.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Joe Biden has many absolutely gross moments where he fought for mass incarceration. This is one of the worst.
His crime bill already passed.
Here he brags about writing the law requiring states to double the average length of prison sentences if they wanted federal dollars. <a href="https://t.co/AqQ7gy8VfO">pic.twitter.com/AqQ7gy8VfO</a>
&#8212; Shaun King (@shaunking) <a href="https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1124300911533350912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 3, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46674/nyt-new-details-emerge-about-connection-bidens-james-barrett">NYT: New Details Emerge About Connection Of Bidens To Ukrainian Corruption Scandal</a>

WATCH: Here&#8217;s The Video Of Biden Talking About Dick Cheney That&#8217;s Triggered Left-Wing Critics

Democratic Party

Dick Cheney

Joe Biden

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) used iconic words former president George W. Bush made at Ground Zero atop a heap of rubble in New York City in September 2001 to defend her widely-criticized remarks trivializing the 9/11 terrorist attack that claimed thousands of American lives.
Giving a speech at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in March, Omar <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45846/new-york-post-cover-photo-shreds-ilhan-omar-ryan-saavedra">referred</a> to the atrocity of 9/11 as being an instance where &#8220;some people did something.&#8221;
The Democrat posted the outrageous defense in a tweet published on Friday:
<blockquote>
&#8220;The people &#8212; and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!&#8221; President George W. Bush
Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack? 
</blockquote>
Predictably, Omar then suggested her criticism derives from her being Muslim: &#8220;What if he was a Muslim?&#8221; she added to the tweet.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
&#8220;The people &#8212; and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!&#8221; President George W. Bush
Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack?
What if he was a Muslim <a href="https://t.co/XMazssoD49">https://t.co/XMazssoD49</a>
&#8212; Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) <a href="https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1116683819476750337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
The freshman congresswoman&#8217;s defense received swift backlash online, since, of course, no one in his right mind would suggest then-President Bush was downplaying anything. Bush was simply threatening those who carried out the attack in its immediate aftermath &#8212; directly the opposite of Omar&#8217;s callous trivialization.
As provided by <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/omar-defends-some-people-did-something-comment-by-likening-to-bushs-bullhorn-speech-to-ground-zero-rescue-workers-2019-04-12">Marketwatch</a>, here are Mr. Bush&#8217;s full comments at Ground Zero:
<blockquote>
President Bush: I want you all to know that America today, America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens
Rescue Worker: I can&#8217;t hear you!
President Bush: I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people &#8212; and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!
</blockquote>
Here are Rep. Omar&#8217;s controversial 9/11 comments in context (emphasis added):
<blockquote>
Here&#8217;s the truth. For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I&#8217;m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can&#8217;t just say that today someone is looking at me strange and that I am trying to make myself look pleasant. You have to say that this person is looking at me strange, I am not comfortable with it, and I am going to talk to them and ask them why. Because that is the right you have.
</blockquote>
Americans, particularly New Yorkers, were angered by Omar&#8217;s comments. On Thursday, for example, The New York Post ran a scathing cover and editorial blasting the Democrat for such trivialization:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
The New York Post&#8217;s cover for Thursday calls out Ilhan Omar for trivializing the 9/11 terrorist attacks as &#8220;some people did something&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/xToghXSGw5">pic.twitter.com/xToghXSGw5</a>
&#8212; Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1116264020833476608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
It appears the cover, coupled with the endless commentary blasting Omar, triggered the Democrat into posting such a ridiculous tweet on Friday. But she did nothing to calm the waters. Instead, politicos online reacted to Omar&#8217;s Bush comparison with justified outrage:
&#8220;Here&#8217;s the clip of GWB when he visited Ground Zero on September 21, 2001. Maybe [Rep. Omar] will watch it and gain some understanding of the absurdity of comparing her comments with his,&#8221; posted The Washington Examiner&#8217;s Jay Caruso:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Here&#8217;s the clip of GWB when he visited Ground Zero on September 21, 2001. Maybe <a href="https://twitter.com/IlhanMN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@IlhanMN</a> will watch it and gain some understanding of the absurdity of comparing her comments with his. <a href="https://t.co/A5Cz4wHDuJ">pic.twitter.com/A5Cz4wHDuJ</a>
&#8212; Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) <a href="https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/1116703247249571841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
One America News Network host Liz Wheeler wrote, &#8220;Remember that time Prez Bush stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers &amp; flippantly waved his hand &amp; described his surroundings as &#8216;some people did something?&#8217; OH WAIT NO&#8230; that disgusting description was from you. Bush beat the hell out of the terrorists. You trivialized them.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
Remember that time Prez Bush stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers &amp; flippantly waved his hand &amp; described his surroundings as &#8220;some people did something?&#8221;
OH WAIT NO&#8230; that disgusting description was from you.
Bush beat the hell out of the terrorists. You trivialized them.
&#8212; Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) <a href="https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1116703114130681857?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;I am going to enjoy watching the people who threw their lot in with her being forced to die on these hills over and over,&#8221; said the popular anonymous commentator known as &#8220;Neontaster.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
I am going to enjoy watching the people who threw their lot in with her being forced to die on these hills over and over. <a href="https://t.co/EcNinbuk0s">https://t.co/EcNinbuk0s</a>
&#8212; neontaster (@neontaster) <a href="https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/1116700809952223232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Foreign policy advisor Nile Gardiner reacted, &#8220;Another appalling remark from [Rep. Omar]. A complete absence of compassion for the thousands who died on 9/11 at the hands of Islamist terrorists.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Another appalling remark from <a href="https://twitter.com/IlhanMN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@IlhanMN</a> A complete absence of compassion for the thousands who died on 9/11 at the hands of Islamist terrorists. <a href="https://t.co/XzqmUN3FQ5">https://t.co/XzqmUN3FQ5</a>
&#8212; Nile Gardiner (@NileGardiner) <a href="https://twitter.com/NileGardiner/status/1116713914056740864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro pointed out the obvious: &#8220;That quote was Bush THREATENING the perpetrators of 9/11, not downplaying their evil.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
That quote was Bush THREATENING the perpetrators of 9/11, not downplaying their evil <a href="https://t.co/7OfrphiN5F">https://t.co/7OfrphiN5F</a>
&#8212; Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1116710471959101440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>

Ilhan Omar Uses Iconic Words From George Bush To Defend Her 9/11 Comments. The Internet Erupts.

Ilhan Omar

Terrorism

On Thursday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show,&#8221; the host discusses how the Left&#8217;s attempt to label any conservative as &#8220;alt-right&#8221; &#8212; as The Economist recently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45227/after-shapiros-book-hits-1-ny-times-list-economist-daily-wire">tried to do</a> to Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, one of the most strident critics of the alt-right &#8212; has watered-down the term and is making it impossible to root out actual alt-right activists. Transcript and video below.
This is why I actually don&#8217;t use that phrase anymore. I did a PragerU <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/22836/michael-knowles-prageru-what-alt-right-jacob-airey">video</a> when the alternative right was being brought up as a new topic of discussion, just to make clear what the alternative right is, why it&#8217;s wrong, and why we should move on. Then the left took that term and they watered it down to mean nothing, so now I don&#8217;t use the term and I try to be much more precise. I don&#8217;t use the term racist too frequently because what does it mean &#8212; it had a meaning, and then the left robbed it of meaning. Now I try to be more specific &#8212; I&#8217;ll say racially bigoted. Bigotry at least has not been robbed of its meaning. This is what the Left does.
The term alt-right has been robbed of its meaning, and it&#8217;s too bad because there is an ideology that term once described. An alternative to conservative thought and what it was really specifically being used by its biggest proponents is a politics that essentially boils down to race and ethnicity, without much regard on one hand to values or traditional civic nationalism &#8212; that&#8217;s one side of it.
But where I really object is it&#8217;s without regard to culture and religion and God. You&#8217;re taking all the trappings of Christendom but you&#8217;re robbing it of the Christ &#8212; so what is that? That&#8217;s a sick perversion. That&#8217;s why I reject it as I explained in my PragerU video. Now that term has been robbed of any meaning.
I don&#8217;t use it because I&#8217;m not going to give the Left any opportunity. I hear this everywhere from left-wing commentators, they&#8217;ll use it in passing conversation, to dummies on the street. They&#8217;ll say, this is alt-right. But you don&#8217;t know what that is and don&#8217;t know what that means, and they do it all the time.
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PJp2KScQ0g4" width="560"></iframe></div>
During the Bush years, they did this with the term neocon. All you would hear during the Bush years was &#8220;neocon, he&#8217;s a neocon!&#8221; Neoconservative once had a meaning. It was a movement popularized by Irving Kristol, and it was described as liberals and socialists who were mugged by reality. This turn during the 1960s of people who would have called themselves liberal, some who were really far-left, to see the realities of communism and international socialism to become more conservative, at least with the approach to foreign policy, and many of them came along with a conservative approach to domestic policy as well.
This was robbed of meaning during the Bush years and now the term is useless. To call someone a neocon what does that even mean anymore? Now, when they use the phrase, they mean bigoted war-mongers, people who want to bomb brown people. What does the term alt-right mean? It means anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a racist bigot.
And this brings us to the best week ever for the Right, the worst week ever for the Left, and the last thing they can possibly do, which is to call everybody a bigot. In conversations you&#8217;ll say, I think we should lower the top marginal tax rate, bring it down a little because I think that&#8217;ll be good for the economy, that&#8217;ll help everybody. They&#8217;ll say well but &#8212; and once they finally run out of arguments, they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Well the reason you want to do that is because you&#8217;re a racist.&#8221; Well, I think we should modify our environmental policy and I don&#8217;t think we should over-regulate businesses too much.
Their response is but you&#8217;re a racist. That&#8217;s always the bottom of the argument and that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re seeing here. You&#8217;re not just seeing it from The Economist, which can&#8217;t argue with Ben, because you can&#8217;t argue with the book. Instead, they just call him a bigot. You see this with Eric Holder, former Attorney General, came out and was doing an interview on MSNBC and they were talking about the Mueller probe, the Russia investigation, and DOJ more broadly. He couldn&#8217;t defend his legacy. He can&#8217;t defend two years of ridiculous hoax narrative on the so-called Russian collusion. So, what does he do? He accuses everybody of racism
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-knowles-show/id1266577963?mt=2">Download &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show&#8221; on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/michael-knowles-show">Watch &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show&#8221; on-demand. </a>

KNOWLES: The Left Is Diluting &#8216;Alt-Right&#8217; To Mean Their Enemies

Alt-Right

Eric Holder

Michael Knowles

Proving once again that the only Republican the Left likes is either a dead Republican or the last Republican to serve a particular position, former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is now praising President George W. Bush.
&#8220;In hindsight, I wish every day for a George Bush again,&#8221; Reid told CNN&#8217;s Dana Bash. He added that Bush was like &#8220;Babe Ruth&#8221; compared to President Donald Trump.
&#8220;He and I had our differences but no one ever questioned his patriotism,&#8221; Reid also said.
Here is what Reid said of Bush while the latter was still in office:
&#8220;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601814.html">The man&#8217;s father is a wonderful human being. I think this guy is a loser</a>.&#8221;
&#8220;<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0909/Reid_called_Bush_liar_stood_by_comment.html">President Bush is a liar. He betrayed Nevada and he betrayed the country</a>.&#8221;
CNN reports Reid previously called Bush the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/25/politics/harry-reid-dana-bash-cnntv/index.html">worst president of America ever</a>.
Reid even insulted Bush&#8217;s dog, calling the pet &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24reid-t.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">fat</a>.&#8221;
The New York Times reported in 2007 that Reid referred to Bush as &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/washington/19reid.html">this guy</a>,&#8221; as in, &#8220;I am mystified, dumbfounded about how difficult it is to work with this guy.&#8221;
The Times went on to describe how Reid feels about Bush.
&#8220;In private conversations about Mr. Bush with friends and Senate colleagues, Mr. Reid has even used the word &#8216;hate,&#8217; though he clarifies that it is political not personal hatred that he feels,&#8221; the Times reported.
In December 2007, Reid took to the senate floor to declare: &#8220;I fear that the Bush years will be known as a rare, even dark time.&#8221;
That was more than a decade ago. Now Bush is a saint compared to the current Republican in office, at least to Reid.
Reid&#8217;s insults toward Republican presidents have gotten worse since the Bush years. He&#8217;s referred to Trump as a &#8220;con man,&#8221; a &#8220;human leech,&#8221; and a &#8220;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/25/politics/harry-reid-dana-bash-cnntv/index.html">big fat guy</a>.&#8221; He&#8217;s called Trump &#8220;amoral&#8221; and denies Trump&#8217;s humanity.
&#8220;I just have trouble accepting him as a person, so frankly I don&#8217;t see anything he&#8217;s doing right,&#8221; Reid told Bash.
Reid isn&#8217;t the first high-profile Democrat to miss Bush. At the beginning of this year, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-NV) said <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/03/nancy-pelosi-admits-nostalgia-george-w-bush-trump-era/2430471002/">she was nostalgic</a> for the days of Bush.
She told USA Today in an interview at the time that she and Bush &#8220;had our differences of opinion, especially on the war in Iraq, but we had many areas of agreement and we were able to work together in respectful ways. (I had) respect for him and the job he held and he of Congress and our responsibilities.&#8221;
She also said working with Bush and Obama &#8220;started with a stipulation of fact,&#8221; which was not the case for Trump.
&#8220;With [Trump] we have to have a little more clarity about what the facts are,&#8221; Pelosi said.
Pelosi has <a href="https://www.wtva.com/content/national/500093801.html">previously called Bush a liar</a>.
Democrats always praise the last Republican even when they treated that politician as a monster when he or she was in office. Democrats did the same thing after President George H.W. Bush and Sen. John McCain died. The politicians were praised as statesmen even though they were the devil when in office.

Harry Reid Just Praised George W. Bush. Here’s What Reid Has Said About Bush Previously.

Harry Reid

Adam McKay&#8217;s Vice ­&#8212; the Oscar nominated bio-pic about Vice President Dick Cheney &#8212; is a remarkably revealing film. In the same way you can watch Hallmark movies to better understand some women&#8217;s daydreams, you can watch Vice to get a gander at the absurd, small-minded and hate-filled imaginings of leftists.
To say the movie&#8217;s political views are simplistic is to insult simplism. Cheney is a conniving moral monster who bombs nations for profit. His president, George W. Bush, is an idiot, whom Cheney leads by the nose. Democrats are good. They put solar panels on the White House roof to save the planet! Republicans are bad. They do mean things for mean reasons because they are mean.
It&#8217;s a child&#8217;s view of the world, full of tendentious factual distortions and lies. But then director McKay is a Socialist, so he is a child in effect, or at least he knows what a child knows about economics, human nature and history &#8212; namely nothing.
What is so revealing about the film though is that it&#8217;s about Bush. Not Donald Trump. Bush. It&#8217;s a reminder that the hatred and rage, the wild charges of racism, and the madcap conspiracy theories with which the left has disgraced itself during the Trump administration are not anomalous, not directed at the outsized Trump specifically. This is just how the left thinks about the rest of us in every administration all the time. Republicans are either stupid like Eisenhower, Reagan and W, or they are evil like Nixon and Cheney, or they are both stupid and evil like Donald Trump.
And it&#8217;s not just the politicians either. This is how the left sees you too. Stupid, evil or both.
The fact that this silly film has been nominated for a best picture Oscar is a message from Harvey-Weinstein-World to half of America. The message is two words long. The second word is you.
If Vice is how leftists imagine life, it&#8217;s no wonder they have to spend so much time and energy preventing their childishly black-and-white viewpoint from being debunked by the complicated truth.
They have to take pains to insure that every movie, every television show, every comedy act, every news program, every college course reflects their ideas and only their ideas. They have to invent and propound primitive racist theories like Intersectionalism that give them license to categorize all disagreements as hateful. And if even that&#8217;s not enough, they have to hire friends to commit hate crimes against them so the world seems to look the way they think it looks.
They so surround themselves with people who agree with them, so immerse themselves in their imaginary narratives, they don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re demonizing their opponents, they just think (as one leftist says in Vice) they&#8217;re relating the simple facts.
When actor Jussie Smollett reported the hate crime that police now say was an elaborate hoax, CNN&#8217;s Brooke Baldwin mourned, &#8220;This is America in 2019.&#8221; When media race scammer Nathan Philips started a scene with some innocent Trump-supporting Catholic school kids, CNN&#8217;s Ana Navarro falsely described the incident as, &#8220;Native-American elder taunted by racist MAGA-hat wearing teens&#8230;&#8221;
These people don&#8217;t even know that their brains are suffocating in the plastic bag of their own narrative. Who would tell them? They have demonized, blacklisted and condemned everyone who disagrees with them. They have chased them out of Hollywood. They have banned them from speaking at colleges. They have de-platformed them on social media.
While Vice is Oscar-nominated, the TV mini-series Path to 9/11 will not be released on DVD because it accurately depicts Bill Clinton&#8217;s failure to kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance.
While it becomes more and more clear that the Justice Department&#8217;s coup attempt against Donald Trump is one of the great scandals in American history, &#8220;journalists&#8221; are spending their time speculating on whether Donald Trump is a Russian spy.
Desperate to protect their simplistic imaginations from the healthy debate and interchange of the real and complex world, leftists have transformed themselves into willful idiots. They don&#8217;t know what they don&#8217;t know. And they don&#8217;t know that they don&#8217;t know.

FILM REVIEW: ‘Vice’ Reveals The Leftist Imagination

Christian Bale

Hate Crime

Jussie Smollett

Racism

Socialism

Early this morning, a group of 29 heavily armed FBI officers carried out a pre-dawn raid to apprehend the foppish 66-year-old Republican political consultant Roger Stone at the request of special counsel Robert Mueller. At last our streets are safe, or at least they were before Stone was immediately released on $250,000 bond. CNN, apparently tipped off to the raid, lurked outside Stone&#8217;s Florida home to capture <a href="https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1088769020084604928">video</a> of the arrest.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
&#8220;FBI. Open the door.&#8221;
Watch exclusive CNN footage of the FBI arresting longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. <a href="https://t.co/5QHKDB2mfA">https://t.co/5QHKDB2mfA</a> <a href="https://t.co/UeKo7CmXWo">pic.twitter.com/UeKo7CmXWo</a>
&#8212; CNN (@CNN) <a href="https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1088769020084604928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 25, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Perhaps Roger Stone appreciated the FBI&#8217;s cheap political stunt. No operative in recent memory has earned and encouraged a greater reputation for political dark arts than Stone. A longtime friend and political advisor to President Trump, Stone played his first dirty trick in grade school and boasts that he hasn&#8217;t stopped since. Here are just a handful of Roger Stone&#8217;s greatest hits:
Third Graders For Kennedy: Though he currently sports a <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roger-stone-nixon-tattoo/">tattoo</a> of Richard Nixon on his back, in 1960 eight-year-old Roger Stone supported John F. Kennedy for president. When his Connecticut grade school asked students to choose the next president, Stone <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/07/13/537023277/documentary-reveals-the-dirty-tricks-of-one-of-trumps-closest-political-advisers">recalls</a> that he stood at the end of the cafeteria line and told every student that Richard Nixon wanted school on Saturdays. Kennedy won in a landslide.
Who Framed Pete McCloskey?: After Barry Goldwater&#8217;s 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative pushed Roger Stone politically rightward, he rose up the ranks to play a minor role in the Watergate scandals. Under the pseudonym Jason Rainier, Stone made contributions on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, a Republican primary opponent of Nixon in 1972. He then sent the receipts of his donations to the Manchester Union Leader to paint McCloskey as a leftist interloper.
The Brooks Brothers Riot: While Roger Stone likely had little effect on the outcome of the 1960 presidential election, he may have played a more consequential role in 2000, when he relates that former Secretary of State James A. Baker III recruited him to assist the recount fight in Palm Beach County. In Miami-Dade, Stone purchased advertising on Latin radio stations because, as he observed, &#8220;Latin media is unique in the sense that when you buy advertising you also are buying programming. If you buy, you get to supply the guests.&#8221; Stone offered his Spanish-speaking wife to spread the notion among a largely Cuban-American population that Gore&#8217;s recount constituted a political power grab reminiscent of Fidel Castro. As he tells it, Stone&#8217;s efforts culminated in the so-called &#8220;Brooks Brothers Riot,&#8221; a GOP-coordinated demonstration that shut down the recount in Miami-Dade.
Phony, Psycho, Piece-of-S**t Spitzer: On March 17, 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace seven days after The New York Times exposed his use of high-priced prostitutes. Stone took credit for Spitzer&#8217;s fall from grace, claiming he first heard of the Governor&#8217;s illegal dalliances from a call girl at a Miami swingers&#8217; club. He later worked on behalf of New York State Senate Republicans to dig up dirt on the governor, at one point leaving a threatening message on Spitzer&#8217;s answering machine that concluded, &#8220;There is not a g**dam thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-s**t son can do about it.&#8221; In the months leading up to the resignation, Stone told friends that Spitzer would not last. After the scandal emerged, Stone claimed to have sent a letter to the FBI informing the agency of his conversation at the Miami night club.
Not everyone believes Roger Stone&#8217;s stories. The FBI appears never to have received Stone&#8217;s letter regarding Spitzer&#8217;s affairs. As for the election recount in 2000, Republican lawyer Brad Blakeman claims that Stone had no role in the Brooks Brothers Riot. &#8220;I was the guy in charge of the trailer, and I coordinated the Brooks Brothers riot,&#8221; Blakeman told Jeffrey Toobin in an extensive <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-dirty-trickster">profile</a> for The New Yorker. &#8220;Roger did not have a role that I know of.&#8221; President Trump went further. &#8220;Roger is a stone-cold loser,&#8221; Trump declared. &#8220;He always tries taking credit for things he never did.&#8221; On close inspection, one wonders if Stone actually played any of the dirty tricks that have made him infamous.
Now Roger Stone stands accused of obstructing a congressional inquiry and of witness tampering. Mueller&#8217;s indictment alleges that Stone informed senior Trump campaign aides as early as June or July 2016 that he knew WikiLeaks had obtained documents damaging to Hillary Clinton. By then, however, the hacked emails had already been released to the public. In August, Stone claimed to have been in contact with WikiLeaks; in September 2017, he denied any direct contact with the organization.
WikiLeaks agrees with this latter characterization. &#8220;Stone is playing slovenly Democrat-aligned journalists like a fiddle, brilliantly inserting himself, as is his habit to raise his public profile and market his books,&#8221; according to a Wikileaks spokesman who observed that Stone &#8220;was pushed out of the Trump team a long time ago for just this time of opportunism.&#8221; The most convincing evidence that Stone did not collude on behalf of the Trump campaign with any foreign actors is that he bragged about having done so. Roger Stone&#8217;s dishonesty may save him &#8212; perhaps his dirtiest trick yet.

Roger Stone’s Dishonesty Might Save Him

Eliot Spitzer

Robert Mueller

Roger Stone

Russia

Did President Trump make a mistake in announcing that he will be withdrawing troops from Syria? Andrew Klavan isn&#8217;t so sure that&#8217;s the best tactic to take, and he explained why on Thursday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show.&#8221;
&#8220;Is it in America&#8217;s interest for us to risk our sons keeping the peace in some of these places,&#8221; he asked. &#8220;Here&#8217;s my problem: we don&#8217;t know who we are about this. And we never do, so what we constantly do is we see a crisis and we send troops in with a mission, and a new president comes in with a completely different idea of who America is, and everything changes. And who gets screwed? The troops get screwed, our allies get screwed, the world gets screwed again and again.&#8221;
&#8220;Here&#8217;s what I think,&#8221; Klavan said. &#8220;I am kind of an Imperialist. I actually believe that America is a de facto empire that doesn&#8217;t take the benefits of empire, which is control of the countries that we have to fight with, and getting some kind of profit out of them. We don&#8217;t do that, but we take on all the responsibilities of an empire that are what bring empires down. Which is the military&#8217;s responsibility to fight things out. To me, we&#8217;re in there. We have an interest. Our interest is that if ISIS spreads again, and it&#8217;s not just Isis in Syria, Al-Qaeda is still there if they spread again to take territory, they inspire and invite terrorists to act on their behalf.&#8221;
&#8220;Do we have a responsibility to keep Iran back? And to keep Russia from using its influence? Russia has a naval base over there I believe, they certainly want influence in that territory. Look, there&#8217;s no walking away from history. There just isn&#8217;t. I think Israel and Saudi Arabia are more responsible for taking care of Iran than we are, but two-thousand troops? I don&#8217;t know. That doesn&#8217;t seem like such a big investment. It seems to me like a mistake.&#8221;
Video and transcript below:
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<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_NlbyGdzoR4?start=722" width="560"></iframe></div>
<blockquote>
Is it in America&#8217;s interest for us to risk our sons keeping the peace in some of these places? Here&#8217;s my problem: we don&#8217;t know who we are about this. And we never do, so what we constantly do is we see a crisis and we send troops in with a mission, and a new president comes in with a completely different idea of who America is, and everything changes. And who gets screwed? The troops get screwed, our allies get screwed, the world gets screwed again and again. President G.W. Bush, after 9/11 basically came up with a huge, I think maybe an over-huge, policy where we were going to spread democracy in the Middle East. It wasn&#8217;t a senseless policy. The idea was if we spread democracy, terrorism won&#8217;t take root and all these terrible versions of Islam won&#8217;t get radicalized and we won&#8217;t be the villain anymore. So now we&#8217;ll have democracies over there.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In some ways, it came close to working. The Arab Spring was a tremendous upsurge in the call for more freedom in the Middle East. G.W. Bush almost pulled it off. What was the problem? The problem was that he was gone. He didn&#8217;t do it fast enough. He was gone and a new president came in with an utterly different idea of what America should be.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
You know, they&#8217;re comparing what Trump is doing, pulling out here, with what Obama did in pulling out of Iraq. That might be a fair comparison tactically, but it&#8217;s not a fair comparison philosophically. The two men have utterly different visions of what America should be. What Obama saw in the future, because he always knew what the right side of history was, was that we were just going to become another state in the world nation. He said it himself: it&#8217;s not fair for one country to be ahead of everyone in the world, and we apologize because we&#8217;ve been arrogant and all this stuff. So that&#8217;s why he was pulling out. He was doing the same thing that Trump is doing, but not for the same reason. Trump has a different vision. Trump&#8217;s vision is that we live in a great big world of competing nations in which we are the best. Our responsibilities stop at our boundaries.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The New York Times, a former newspaper, attacked him today, or kind of dug at him today, by saying that he&#8217;d rather use his troops on the American borders than in Syria. He would! He would, and that&#8217;s his philosophy. That&#8217;s absolutely right. Most people don&#8217;t know where Syria is, they don&#8217;t know why we should be in Syria. He won&#8217;t pay any political price right now for pulling out. The problem is, the next time these guys turn up, and they will, the next time you turn on your TV or your phone and you see guys dressed in black beheading people who you&#8217;re sympathetic toward, whether it&#8217;s Yazidi women being sold into slavery or some American guy who&#8217;s over there for some reason who gets beheaded. When you start seeing that stuff, what are you going to do? The same people who are saying America first will be saying, &#8220;we&#8217;ve got to go in there! We&#8217;ve got to do something about this.&#8221; The same Democrats who said what a wonderful guy Obama was, keeping his promise to pull out, are going to say what a terrible guy Trump was keeping his promise to pull out. We don&#8217;t know who we are on the world stage.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Here&#8217;s what I think. I am kind of an Imperialist. I actually believe that America is a de facto empire that doesn&#8217;t take the benefits of empire, which is control of the countries that we have to fight with, and getting some kind of profit out of them. We don&#8217;t do that, but we take on all the responsibilities of empire that are what bring empires down. Which is the military responsibility to fight things out. To me, we&#8217;re in there. We have an interest. Our interest is that if ISIS spreads again, and it&#8217;s not just Isis in Syria, Al-Qaeda is still there if they spread again to take territory, they inspire and invite terrorists to act on their behalf. We remember people killing people saying they are acting on behalf of Isis. They were inspired by this dream they have of an Islamic Caliphate. It seemed to be coming true. We have a responsibility to that.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Do we have a responsibility to keep Iran back? And to keep Russia from using its influence? Russia has a naval base over there I believe, they certainly want influence in that territory. Look, there&#8217;s no walking away from history. There just isn&#8217;t. I think Israel and Saudi Arabia are more responsible for taking care of Iran than we are, but two-thousand troops? I don&#8217;t know. That doesn&#8217;t seem like such a big investment. It seems to me like a mistake.
</blockquote>
<div><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1545488998250000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGMHuRJ199grp6C58JX4AYlVt3xQw" href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here</a>.</div>
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</div>

Klavan: Was It A Mistake To Pull Out Of Syria?

Andrew Klavan

The Golden Globe nominations are in, and Hollywood has managed to remind Middle America, once again, that they detest their political opinions and will take every opportunity they can to tar and feather politicians Americans elect if they don&#8217;t embrace the progressive agenda.
By giving the most nominations to yet another openly partisan film created by an openly partisan filmmaker about respected Republican figures &#8212; this time former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush &#8212; Hollywood has also managed to undermine its attempts to argue that their hatred for Trump is special. The truth is, as &#8220;Vice&#8221; reminds us, the Hollywood left have loathed all recent Republican presidents about as passionately as they currently despise Trump.
As <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/2019-golden-globes-nominations-full-list-1165090/item/best-screenplay-motion-picture-1165148">The Hollywood Reporter</a> announced triumphantly Thursday, &#8220;Vice&#8221; leads the way with 2019 Golden Globe Awards nominations with a total of six. &#8220;The Favourite,&#8221; &#8220;Green Book&#8221; and &#8220;A Star Is Born&#8221; tied for second-most nominations, all earning five.
&#8220;Vice&#8221; was nominated for: Best Motion Picture &#8211; Musical or Comedy; Best Performance by an Actor &#8211; Musical or Comedy (Christian Bale as Dick Cheney); Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture (Amy Adams as Lynn Cheney); Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture (Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush); Best Director &#8211; Motion Picture (Adam McKay); and Best Screenplay &#8211; Motion Picture (Adam McKay).
Here&#8217;s the trailer, which promises viewers a chance to &#8220;discover the untold true story that changed history forever&#8221;:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allowfullscreen height="400" width="854"></iframe></div>
But while the trailer promises to give us the &#8220;untold true story&#8221; about Cheney&#8217;s secret deal with Bush to indulge his Machiavellian plans, and while left-leaning outlets are busy praising the &#8220;transformation&#8221; of Bale and Rockwell into what we&#8217;re supposed to accept as authentic portrayals of the two famous political figures, what is most clear from the early looks and the declarations of the director is that this is yet another example of Hollywood ridiculing conservatives and the Republican Party.
As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/vice-movie-dick-cheney-anti-conservative-vitriol/">Ben Shapiro</a> noted, while Hollywood is doing its best to pump up &#8220;Vice,&#8221; it &#8220;isn&#8217;t unique&#8221;:
<blockquote>
It follows W, starring Josh Brolin, a box-office failure; Truth, another box-office failure starring Robert Redford about Dan Rather&#8217;s attempt to take down George W. Bush with a fake letter about his military service; and You&#8217;re Welcome, America, starring Will Ferrell, which aired on HBO. None of these films raked in the cash. But that&#8217;s not stopping Adam McKay, producer of HBO&#8217;s Succession, from taking on a president who left office a decade ago.
</blockquote>
Meanwhile, the director, McKay, has made sure the public knows exactly his true motives in making the film, and it certainly isn&#8217;t any sort of respect for the figures he portrays.
&#8220;I would choose Trump over Bush and Cheney,&#8221; McKay told <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/christian-bale-takes-washingtons-ultimate-gamesman-vice-1162366">THR</a> in November. &#8220;Donald Trump has no belief system. So I would take the hyenas, the random wild animals running through the White House over Cheney any day of the week.&#8221;
&#8220;I was 100 percent Bernie Sanders, but once Sanders didn&#8217;t win, I was like, &#8216;All right. Let&#8217;s all be grown-ups. I now support Hillary Clinton,'&#8221; McKay told the paper. &#8220;And once she was running against Trump, it was the easiest choice you&#8217;d ever have to make. I was very excited because I have two daughters, and we were going to have a woman president. And I just thought, &#8216;That&#8217;s awesome!'&#8221;
He suffered the same disappointment on election night back in 2004, he said. He was all geared up for a John Kerry victory, surrounded by fellow Hollywood Democrats at David Geffen&#8217;s Malibu home for the election night party. &#8220;Everyone you could imagine was there,&#8221; says McKay, including Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. &#8220;Once again, we&#8217;re like, &#8216;Oh, they&#8217;re going to lose.&#8217; There&#8217;s no way you&#8217;d reelect these guys after the disaster we just had. I remember [then-New York Times op-ed writer] Frank Rich was on the phone, and he&#8217;s like, &#8216;It&#8217;s over.&#8217; And within two minutes, the entire party had cleared out.&#8221;
So, no, Hollywood hasn&#8217;t just recently developed disdain for conservatives and special disgust for the Republican president. They&#8217;ve felt that way for quite some time, as &#8220;Vice&#8221; helpfully reminds us.

Golden Globes Reminds Americans Hollywood Hated Bush &#038; Cheney As Much As They Hate Trump

On Wednesday, speaking in Washington, D.C., at the state funeral for his father, former President George H. W. Bush, former President George W. Bush gave a beautiful and heartbreaking eulogy for his dad, breaking down in tears near the conclusion.
Bush started by joking about his father&#8217;s perennial youth, recalling incidents in his later life, including parachuting out of a plane when he was 90. He segued to his father&#8217;s World War II experiences as a pilot, including being stranded on a life raft in the Pacific, praying his comrades in arms would find him before the enemy did. He spoke of the tragedy that engulfed his parents when their three-year-old daughter died, and finally concluded with a tribute to his father&#8217;s decency, sincerity and kindness.
Text of speech below:
<blockquote>
I once heard it said of man that the idea is to die young as late as possible. At age 85, a favorite pastime of George H.W. Bush was firing up his boat, the Fidelity, and opening up the three 300 horsepower engines to fly, joyfully fly across the Atlantic with the Secret Service boats straining to keep up.
At age 90, George H.W. Bush parachuted out of an aircraft and landed on the grounds of St. Anne&#8217;s by the Sea in Kennebunkport, Maine, the church where his mom was married and where he worshipped often. Mother liked to say he chose the location just in case the chute didn&#8217;t open.
In his 90s, he took great delight when his closest pal, James A. Baker, smuggled a bottle of Grey Goose vodka into his hospital room. Apparently it paired well with the steak Baker had delivered from Morton&#8217;s.
To his very last days, dad&#8217;s life was instructive. As he aged he taught us how to grow with dignity, humor and kindness. When the good lord finally called, how to meet him with courage and with the joy of the promise of what lies ahead.
One reason dad knew how to die young is that he almost did it, twice. When he was a teenager, a staph infection nearly took his life. A few years later he was alone in the Pacific on a life raft, praying that his rescuers would find him before the enemy did. God answered those prayers. It turned out he had other plans for George H.W. Bush.
For dad&#8217;s part, I think those brushes with death made him cherish the gift of life, and he vowed to live every day to the fullest.
Dad was always busy, a man in constant motion, but never too busy to share his love of life with those around him. He taught us to love the outdoors. He loved watching dogs flush a covey. He loved landing the illusive striper. And once confined to a wheelchair, he seemed happiest sitting in his favorite perch on the back porch at Walker&#8217;s Point contemplating the majesty of the Atlantic.
The horizons he saw were bright and hopeful. He was a genuinely optimistic man, and that optimism guided his children and made each of us believe that anything was possible. He continually broadened his horizons with daring decisions.
He was a patriot. After high school he put college on hold and became a navy fighter pilot as World War II broke out.
Like many of his generation, he never talked about his service until his time as a public figure forced his hand. We learned of the attack, the mission completed, the shootdown. We learned of the death of his crewmates whom he thought about throughout his entire life. And we learned of the rescue.
And then another audacious decision; he moved his young family from the comforts of the East coast to Odessa, Texas. He and Mom adjusted to their arid surroundings quickly. he was a tolerant man. after all, he was kind and neighborly to the women with whom he, Mom and I shared a bathroom in our small duplex. Even after he learned their profession, ladies of the night.
Dad could relate to people from all walks of life. He was an empathetic man. He valued character over pedigree, and he was no cynic. He looked for the good in each person and he usually found it.
Dad taught us that public service is noble and necessary, that one can serve with integrity and hold true to the important values like faith and family. He strongly believed that it was important to give back to the community and country in which one lived. He recognized that serving others enriched the giver&#8217;s soul. To us, his was the brightest of a thousand points of light.
When he lost, he shouldered the blame. He accepted that failure is a part of living a full life. but taught us never to be defined by failure. He showed us how setbacks can strengthen.
None of his disappointments could compare with one of life&#8217;s greatest tragedies, the loss of a young child.
Jeb and I were too young to remember the pain and agony he and Mom felt when our 3-year-old sister died. We only learned later that Dad, a man of quiet faith, prayed for her daily. He was sustained by the love of the Almighty and the real and enduring love of her Mom. Dad always believed that one day he would hug his precious Robin again.
He loved to laugh, especially at himself. He could tease and needle but never out of malice. He placed great value on a good joke. That&#8217;s why he chose Simpson to speak.
On e-mail he had a circle of friends with whom he shared or received the latest jokes. His grading system for the quality of the joke was classic George Bush. The rare 7s and 8s were considered huge winners, most of them off-color.
George Bush knew how to be a true and loyal friend. He nurtured and honored his many friendships with a generous and giving soul. There exists thousands of handwritten notes encouraging or sympathizing or thanking his friends and acquaintances.
He had an enormous capacity to give of himself. Many a person would tell you that Dad became a mentor and a father figure in their life. He listened and he consoled. He was their friend. I think of Don Rhodes, Taylor Blanton, Jim Nantz, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and perhaps the unlikeliest of all, the man who defeated him, Bill Clinton. My siblings and I refer to the guys in this group as brothers from other mothers.
He taught us that a day was not meant to be wasted. He played golf at a legendary pace. I always wonder why he insisted on speed golf; he&#8217;s a good golfer. Here&#8217;s my conclusion. He played fast so he could move on to the next event, to enjoy the rest of the day, to expend his enormous energy, to live it all. He was born with just two settings, full throttle, then sleep.
He taught us what it means to be a wonderful father, grandfather and great grandfather. He was firm in his principles and supportive as we began to seek our own ways. He encouraged and comforted but never steered. We tested his patience. I know I did. But he always responded with the great gift of unconditional love.
Last Friday when I was told he had minutes to live, I called him. The guy answered the phone, said &#8220;I think he can hear you but he hasn&#8217;t said anything for most of the day.&#8221; I said, &#8220;Dad, I love you and you&#8217;ve been a wonderful father,&#8221; and the last words he would ever say on Earth were, &#8220;I love you too.&#8221;To us he was close to perfect. but not totally. His short game was lousy. He wasn&#8217;t exactly Fred Astaire on the dance floor. The man couldn&#8217;t stomach vegetables, especially broccoli. And by the way, he passed these genetic defects along to us.
Finally, every day of his 73 years of marriage, Dad taught us all what it means to be a great husband. He married his sweetheart. He adored her. He laughed and cried with her. He was dedicated to her totally.
In his old age dad enjoyed watching police show reruns, the volume on high, all the while holding Mom&#8217;s hand. After Mom died, Dad was strong, but all he really wanted to do was hold Mom&#8217;s hand again.
Of course Dad taught me another special lesson. He showed me what it means to be a President who serves with integrity, leads with courage and acts with love in his heart for the citizens of our country.
When the history books are written, they will say that George H.W. Bush was a great President of the United States, a diplomat of unmatched skill, a Commander in Chief of formidable accomplishment, and a gentleman who executed the duties of his office with dignity and honor.
In his inaugural address the 41st President of the United States said this: &#8220;We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account, we must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it. What do we want the men and women who work with us to say? That we were more driven to succeed than anyone around us or that we stopped to ask if a sick child had gotten better and stayed a moment there to trade a word of friendship?&#8221;
Well, Dad, we&#8217;re going to remember you for exactly that and much more, and we&#8217;re going to miss you. Your decency, sincerity, and kind soul will stay with us forever. So through our tears, let us know the blessings of knowing and loving you, a great and noble man. The best father a son or daughter could have. And in our grief, let us smile knowing that Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom&#8217;s hand again.
</blockquote>
Video below:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RrRzED2vOHA" width="560"></iframe></div>

WATCH: George W. Bush&#8217;s Beautiful, Heartbreaking Eulogy For His Father

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WATCH: George W. Bush’s Beautiful, Heartbreaking Eulogy For His Father