Politicizing school children …

I read about plans to have a nationwide walkout by school children to protest guns.

One preteen was quoted as saying they wanted people to show more kindness to each other and there should be no more guns so “people don’t suffer.”

Then a reported million kids walked out of school – along with thousands of their teachers – to attend rallies against guns.  In some cases, public schools provided buses to bring their students and teachers to these rallies.

The media predictably gushed over all this: here were students as young as first grade marching in unison to mark their opposition to the NRA, lax gun control, and guns in general. Some kids chanted “hey, hey NRA, how many kids did you slay today?” They held signs demanding that Congress ban assault weapons, legislate universal background checks, and more.

The media, liberals, and anti-gun groups were thrilled.  They described it as a “grassroots” movement by children for sensible action on guns. 

In some ways it was more of an Astroturf movement. Behind the scenes all this was organized in part by MoveOn.org, The Women’s March, a Bloomberg-funded group, Planned Parenthood, and of course sympathetic teachers and school administrators.

I don’t have anything against organized protests. I was part of some when I was in college.  However, it was usually against something very specific, with a very specific goal.  I don’t think that was the case with the recent student walk out. 

I seriously doubt many of the young participants knew much beyond what they’d been told in school or on social media. I suspect they didn’t know much about the 2^nd Amendment, our current gun laws, or that previous bans on assault weapons accomplished nothing. Or that the NRA has been in the forefront of promoting background check legislation for years.

Or that the 17 deaths at Parkland were more the result of a systemic failure by school administrators, local mental health and child services professionals, the FBI, and local law enforcement to do their jobs and get a clearly disturbed teen off the streets and into treatment.  There were ample warnings and evidence this nutjob was going to try to kill a lot of people long before he did. But for whatever reason, perhaps fear of getting involved, all those entities fell down on the job.    

That’s a lot tougher to grasp than political talking points to promote an agenda. Ignoring, or hiding, those realities behind bumper-sticker slogans is disingenuous. 

And using children as puppets to advance political goals of adults is a disgrace.  Spare me the crap about how great it is for children to be politically active. If school children started an anti-abortion protest, or marched against illegal immigration, or in opposition to assault weapons bans, the same forces now cheering on political activism by school children would be appalled.  

The children would be dismissed as uninformed and misguided, too young to know any better. Any adult who urging them on would be called a monster.

We all know this.  And all of which would also be true.

Promoting political activism by young school children – whatever the cause – in simply wrong, especially when it’s guided by adult authority figures. School children don’t always have the ability to see when they are being manipulated and used for someone else’s agenda.     

More to the point, whoever in our public schools is teaching young children to become politically active ought to be fired. Kids should be learning English, Math, Science, History, and yes, Civics – that long-abandoned subject that informed kids about the Constitution, how our representative form of government works, and their responsibilities as citizens when they became adults.  

It should not be the role of teachers to propagandize their political beliefs on school children. That should never, ever, be tolerated. 

Yet that’s what’s happening every day. 

Whether it’s teaching that climate change is exclusively man-made is proven science, that gender is a matter of choice not biology, that self-esteem is more important than learning to read and do math, how the traditional concept of a nuclear family and its social benefits is fundamentally bigoted, or how awful we are as a nation compared to others, that’s what’s being taught.

Opinions – which all those are – should never be taught as facts.        

We’re talking about school kids, after all. They may not be able to see the difference. 

The critical reasoning skills of today’s children aren’t that refined. Kids aren’t always aware when they’re being fed propaganda and opinions and not absolute facts. It’s bad enough many rely on misinformation and half-truths on social media.  Yet they also tend to accept whatever teachers tell them without question, and that’s not always the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Or that there are often multiple sides to a story.  On climate change. On the flexibility of gender.  On the value of self-esteem over everything else.  On the relative merits of the traditional nuclear family.  And how we as a nation compare to others.     

I would never accept teaching Creationism and Divine Intervention as the one and only way to explain the various species on the planet. Or that there are only four elements – Earth, Wind, Fire and Water – in place of Science. 

At the same time, it’s equally wrong to teach children to blindly believe a political and environmental agenda that appears to be intentionally one-sided.

Somewhere along the line teachers and school administrators became the high priests of what school children should believe and how they should act.  Perhaps this was because so many parents abrogated their own responsibility to shape the beliefs of their children.  So it was left to teachers and school administrators to fill the void. 

This has been a terrible mistake.  It’s allowed some in our public-school system – not all of course – to seize the opportunity to promote their own agenda and create a new generation of like-minded students to think and believe as they do. 

That’s the unstated, albeit real, goal of many of those pushing school children to become politically active; however, only to support causes they want them to support. They do this by presenting only one political perspective. One set of “facts.” And then their pupils are encouraged to reject anything that conflicts with their teacher’s worldview, which is mostly a progressive liberal perspective. 

So when you see young children holding signs opposing deportation of illegal immigrants, in favor of the rights of transgendered people to use the bathrooms of their choice, or, in this case opposing guns, look carefully beyond their earnest faces and apparent enthusiasm.   

Behind every one is typically someone using them to advance their own agenda.

Usually a teacher.  Or an organized special interest group. 

To them school children are photogenic pawns.  Bait for the media. 

It’s wrong to use children this way.   

Watching the Winter Olympics …

Or not.

Whoever buys the rights to broadcast the Olympics pays a hefty tab. They need to recoup that by selling ads – I understand that.  Just business. 

At some point, however, you start to lose your audience when you lard up your programming with too many spots.  And when you invent short fluff segments for no other reason than to be a buffer between ads, you start to piss off your audience.

Then they do what I do – just DVR the whole night’s programming and fast-forward through all the BS the next day. That’s the only way I can watch the Olympics anymore.

I can skip past the events I don’t care for – and can’t understand why these are in the Olympics anyway – such as short-track speedskating, biathlon, curling, and cross-country skiing, among others. I also can’t understand why anyone, except maybe parents of competitors, wants to see lengthy coverage of training and qualifying runs, either; just show the final event, okay? 

The same goes for the “human interest” crap. I don’t care how competitors got started as kids, how they are best friends with their mom, how often their families moved to get them the best trainers, or, as they did the other night, how much Koreans love Jindos – a certain type of dog. 

They even showed a famous Korean statue of a Jindo. 

Notice they didn’t bring up how Koreans eat dogs, too. Maybe that statue is really in front of a Korean fast-food chain restaurant. Could it be Ronald McJindo? Or Jindo King?

Who knows? Better still, who cares?        

I don’t need to see competitors who have no business being there, with zero chance of anything other than showing how inept they are, just because their country gets to send someone. I don’t need to watch people born, raised, and trained in one country competing under the flag of another country, so they could get in the Olympics. How is someone from Chicago representing France? How is someone from Connecticut representing Nigeria? 

And I certainly don’t need to waste my time on novelty teams. Like the women’s bobsled team from Nigeria.  Or the “unified” North/South Korea women’s hockey team, that, for the record only scored a single goal – total – in all their games.

I don’t need Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski opining on the outfits worn by the figure skaters and the music they’ll skate to.  Or their snappy repartee on which ridiculous outfit and hair style Johnny has deigned to grace us all with that night.  Or Katie Couric saying stupid things like the Dutch excel in skating because during the winter they commute to work on skates. Or the manufactured drama over whether this is Lindsey Vonn’s – or fill-in-the-blank’s – last Olympics. 

Does anyone else really give a damn?     

The only reason to watch the Olympics is supposedly to see the best athletes in the world. That’s simply not happening. The Olympics have devolved into a mind-boggling slog through hour upon hour of make-believe competitors representing their make-believe countries in make-believe sports, with tiny bits of action sandwiched between overwhelming layers of ads and useless filler.

I can’t imagine anyone willingly sitting through it all in real time. I can’t. I won’t.

Apparently, a lot of folks feel the same.  There was a news item today that for the first time in 25 years a network nightly newscast beat NBC’s Olympics coverage in the same time slot.

That’s going to wake up advertisers blowing billions on what’s little more than a sideshow. When people aren’t watching, they’re not getting their money’s worth. 

The eyeballs aren’t there. Mine included. 

I own an AR-15 …

I’m not a survivalist. I’m not a gun nut. I’m not a hunter. I’m certainly not a terrorist.

I’m not ashamed, either.

And I didn’t buy it for self-defense. Nor do I plan on carrying it anywhere but back and forth to the target range. If I was worried about defending myself against an armed intruder, I’d follow the sage advice of a friend who is a former Marine and scoot out the back door first if possible. 

Otherwise, like him, I’d have to ask the intruder to wait awhile until I could retrieve my gun from its case and go to another place in my house for my ammunition.

Going out the back door makes a lot more sense.   

I also don’t believe just anyone who wants this gun – or any other firearm for that matter – should be allowed to get one.  There need to be rules about who can purchase a firearm. Everybody I know who owns firearms is in complete agreement with that.

Every single one. No exceptions.

It’s not about the 2^nd Amendment; it’s about common sense. Only a complete idiot thinks anybody should be able to get a functioning firearm, regardless of their criminal past or mental state.  The NRA agrees there need to be reasonable restrictions. 

Currently there are background checks. But they rely on information on file.  If no one takes seriously and reports that someone has a mental illness, tortures small animals for kicks, has been expelled from school for threatening people, talks about killing classmates, and posts about desires to be a “professional school shooter,” well, that won’t show up.  

Just as it didn’t on the recent Florida school shooter’s background check. 

That’s the glaring flaw in background checks. The checks are only as good as the source data provided to authorities. If you are a wife beater and your spouse never reports it, it won’t show up. If a school administration declines to alert authorities to a scary kid threatening his or her classmates, it won’t show up.  If parents refuse to let police know their teen is stockpiling weapons and body armor and searching for bomb-making instructions online, it won’t show up.

This is how people who should never get a firearm pass background checks.  Make no mistake, there are checks and rules in place, but apathy and political correctness can defeat them.     

When I bought the parts to assemble my AR-15, before I could pick up a critical component – which had to be shipped to a Federally licensed dealer by law – I had to fill out a form and submit to a background check. That form required me to attest that I was at least 18 years of age, had not committed a felony, had no history of mental illness, no record of domestic abuse, and no history of abusing drugs or alcohol, among other things. If there were any discrepancies between what I submitted and the government database I would be denied that critical part.  

Had I tried to buy a completed off-the-shelf AR-15, or any other long gun, from a licensed dealer in Florida I would have had to go through exactly the same process.     

I did everything by the book. 

I assembled all the parts with the help of a friend to produce the finished gun.  It wasn’t difficult at all and took less than an hour. 

And frankly that’s why the AR-15 is the most popular long gun in America.

Not because it’s got a military heritage for Rambo wannabes.  Not because it’s considered an “assault weapon” by some. Not because it is deadly – which of course it can be. 

The real reason is because it’s so easy to build and maintain. It’s like a Lego gun – all the parts snap together, and easily snap apart for cleaning. Another reason is there are so many AR-15-type rifles out there manufacturers of such things as scopes, magazines, and other accessories offer a lot of easily installed options at competitive price points.  

It’s also an accurate gun with very little recoil.  Since I bought and built mine exclusively for target practice at a range nearby, that was important.

However, it has a nasty reputation, mostly because AR-15-type rifles have been used in a number of mass killings, including the Las Vegas massacre and most recently at the school in Florida where a nutjob former student killed 17 people. The AR-15 has been described by some on the left and promoted by the media as a weapon of war, designed exclusively to kill people.   

Because of that, when you tell some people you own an AR-15 they tend to shrink back a bit – as if there’s a side of you they never saw before; perhaps something they should be afraid of. 

Much has been made about how the AR-15 is a “semi-automatic.” To some, that implies it’s a virtual automatic weapon, like a machine gun.  Semi-automatic really only means that after you fire off a round by pulling the trigger, it just chambers another round – so every time you shoot you still have to pull the trigger again.  You could pull the trigger rapidly, of course, but I don’t and nobody I know does that, especially shooting paper targets at 25, 50, 100 or more yards away.     

Which is all I do with it. Well, okay, I shoot primarily at 25 and sometimes 50 yards.  I’m a long way from trying to hit a bullseye at 100 yards or more. I’ve only been at this for about a year now; I’m getting better but not nearly good enough.

The reason I enjoy target shooting is not because I am very good at it, which I’m not, but because – paradoxically, perhaps – it is more relaxing than you might imagine. To be accurate you have to learn to concentrate, monitor your breathing, loosen up, and focus intently.

There’s almost a Zen-like, meditative quality to it. That’s what I like.  Plus, my friend and I always stop at Waffle House for breakfast on our way to the range. 

A pecan waffle and meditation. Is that a perfect day or what?   

I also enjoy the camaraderie at the range. The people you meet there are among the nicest you’ll encounter. Mostly middle-aged and older guys; some former cops, many former military, and some, like me, just getting started.

Everybody I’ve met there is incredibly helpful, courteous, and focused on safety – far from how gun owners are often portrayed. I suspect most if not all of them also support background checks and reasonable restrictions on who can own a firearm. No one in their right mind wants dangerous, mentally unbalanced people to have access to firearms. 

But to prevent that, people need to step up and report bad actors to the authorities, so background checks have the data they need. Schools need to flag and report students with violent tendencies. Parents need to swallow their pride and let someone know their child is a hazard to others. Mental-health professionals need to monitor their patients to see they stay on their meds.  And of course neighbors and others need to have the guts to tell police when they see something that disturbs them. 

Until everyone does that, the wrong people will pass background checks.   

There are now more guns in America than people. There are also more Americans than ever before. That also means there are more mentally unbalanced people among us – more psychopaths, more sociopaths, and more people with violent and homicidal tendencies, as our population grows; it’s the law of big numbers at work.   

Following the shootings in Las Vegas and Florida, it’s easy, at a time like this, to blame the AR-15-type rifles and their wide availability. It’s easy to blame the availability of 20-30-round magazines for their role in these mass shootings. 

There have been calls to ban both after almost every mass shooting.  Last night, some talking head even suggested that one solution might be to put a heavy tax on ammunition. 

Everyone seems to be searching for an easy answer. I can’t blame them. 

It’s far harder to accept that the cause of mass shootings has less to do with the weapon used, and more to do with society’s reluctance to deal with the role of apathetic parents, timid school administrators and mental-health professionals, and the fear of getting involved.   

It’s also hard to accept that media coverage, and our society’s obsession with fame, also contribute to mass shootings.  The Columbine, Sandy Hook, Florida school, and Las Vegas massacre as well, turned the perpetrators into celebrities in a perverse way.  That’s what many of them wanted – fame. Notoriety. Slaughtering people was their path to stardom. 

My AR-15 had no role in that.

The millions of other AR-15s out there in the hands of responsible owners didn’t either. 

But parents, schools, mental-health professionals, and neighbors did.    

Restoring voting rights to felons …

There’s a movement across the nation to restore voting rights to convicted felons. It’s framed as a civil rights issue. The claim is felons are unfairly being disenfranchised of a basic right.   

In all but a handful of the most liberal states, there’s little chance ordinary voters will vote to allow convicted felons to have their voting rights restored. So some proponents of restoring voting rights are doing an end-around to bypass voters.   

Virginia’s Democrat governor used an executive order in 2016 to restore voting rights to about 200,000 felons, about half of whom were African American – a core Democrat voting bloc. In the 2017 gubernatorial election in Virginia, the otherwise lackluster Democrat winner won by a bit more than 200,000 votes.

The executive-order route doesn’t always hold.  In Kentucky, a new Republican governor rescinded a similar order from his Democrat predecessor. 

In Florida, there will be a referendum on the ballot in November to amend the state’s constitution to restore voting rights to convicted felons. If passed by 60% of the voters it might affect as many as 1.5 million felons here. 

Knowing Florida, I don’t think passage is likely.

Perhaps like me you’ve been asked a number of times – usually by college-age people – to sign petitions supporting restoring voting rights to felons.  

I always decline. And when the vote comes up in November I will vote to oppose any measure that enables convicted felons here to vote. 

I’m not entirely heartless. One of my best friends is a felon; he did a particularly stupid thing, went to prison here, and served his time.  He didn’t commit a violent, sex, or drug-related crime, so he would be eligible to vote under the proposed Florida amendment.

As much as I love him like a brother, I can’t vote for the amendment. Sorry.

A felony is a felony. It’s a serious crime. One of the lasting penalties – and long-term disincentives to committing a felony – is that except under extraordinary circumstances a felony conviction follows you for the rest of your life. The threat of a felony conviction is one of the most powerful tools a prosecutor has; anything that diminishes the lasting impact of a potential felony conviction is a bad idea.   

The reality is that it typically takes quite a lot to be convicted of a felony, even here which has a well-deserved reputation for being tough on crime.  In most cases that don’t involve murder, attacks on police, or violent sexual assault, first-time offenders usually get a break – lesser charges with court-ordered community service, restitution and/or probation.

Florida is not alone in this; it’s the norm in most states. 

Capital crimes, grand larceny, and repeat offenders are treated much differently. Especially if you are an adult and commit a violent crime. Florida will throw the book at you. 

You may be a New Testament type of person at heart, but when it comes to violent crimes Florida’s an Old Testament legal system.  

For years Florida was one of the leaders in sending people to the electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky,” before it was retired.  As Florida native Dave Barry once wrote, Florida is a state where many people would be happy to see Old Sparky set on slow roast for some criminals. 

When Florida abandoned the electric chair for other perhaps more humane means of execution that was okay. But when the state supreme court ruled death-sentence convictions could be commuted to life without parole if the original jury verdict wasn’t unanimous, not everybody was happy.  Except, perhaps, death-row inmates. And their lawyers. 

This is still a mostly pro-death penalty state.  When a state’s attorney in Orlando announced she would no longer seek the death penalty in capital cases, the governor reassigned all her capital cases to other prosecutors who would. Most people here probably agreed with the governor. 

Florida residents as a whole aren’t all that forgiving. 

That’s why restoring rights to felons as a ballot issue here will probably fail.  Sure, it will probably pass in certain parts of the state – especially in Democrat-controlled cities and counties – because Democrats see allowing felons to vote as another way to change the electorate more to their favor.

It’s the reason why those same Democrats want to gain amnesty for illegals. More potential Democrat voters. That’s all they are seeking.    

Yet the potential for spiking the electorate is not the primary reason I am opposed to giving felons the right to vote. My opposition is more on principle: we can’t continue to change the rules to take away the consequences of bad decisions someone makes. 

That’s why I am also opposed to cities, like Philadelphia, that have outlawed potential employers asking job candidates if they have ever been convicted of a crime.  What are they thinking?

That it’s perfectly okay to commit a crime?

No, it’s not. Especially a felony. There must be consequences. 

The shitstorm over shitholes …

Trump is reported to have called some places in the world "shitholes" in closed-door discussions on immigration.  

This created an another opportunity for manufactured outrage.  Now, like naughty little boys and girls, the media can’t get enough of saying shit in one form or another.

Shitholes. Shitstorms. Whatever.  

Did Trump say shitholes, or didn’t he? Did he use it to describe mostly African countries? And Haiti? And other places of non-whites? Is it proof that he’s (gasp) a racist? 

Hey folks. Get a grip. 

I’m pretty sure most of us know he said shitholes. Seriously, we all know that.

Now you can draw whatever conclusions you want about whether it was culturally insensitive, politically incorrect, or something else. It probably was. But the truth of the matter is we don’t need more immigrants from shithole countries. Or Haitians. 

It’s true as well there are a lot of shithole countries out there. They’re not all in Africa. 

Ever been to Jamaica?  Get outside the heavily guarded resorts and it’s a shithole.  Sorry, mon, but it is. So is much of Mexico, again once you leave the resorts. When you see large numbers of people living in shacks with hammered soda cans for a roof, and toting water for drinking in recycled gas cans, that’s a shithole. I’ve seen all that firsthand in Jamaica, in Mexico, in Belize, and elsewhere.    

Soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan will tell you those places are shitholes, too.  

I can’t speak for Africa. However, I strongly suspect there are many shithole countries there.  

Any country where most people are illiterate, have no access to clean water, much less toilets, or education, where pre-teen females are traded for goats, and where it’s an accepted belief that men can cure AIDs by having sex with a virgin, is likely a shithole.  

I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Parts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are quite literally shitholes; ask anyone who has been to these. When people are crapping in the streets, that’s a shithole by definition  

Many countries in Central and South America qualify as shitholes as well.  After you get past the guards at your resort or cruise terminal, see how people in the countryside live. It’s typically in abject poverty under the constant threat of abuse by the police or army or criminal gangs.

I don’t blame the people who live in these shitholes. They don’t have much choice.  

And it’s no wonder they’d want to be someplace else. Like here.

Unfortunately, we can’t take them all. The Pope can say all he wants about our duty as Christians to welcome these people to our country but we have our own people to care for.  I’m sorry for the plight of the displaced Syrians, the Somalis, the Guatemalans, the El Salvadorians, the Mexicans, the Nigerians, the Sierra Leoneans, the Congolese, Haitians, and everyone else struggling to survive where they are and holding out hope for a better life here or in Europe.

The harsh reality is we don’t need them.  

We need immigrants, for sure, if for no other reason than our aging workforce and low birth rates among our legal citizens.  We’re in a looming demographic crisis, not as bad as Japan and many European countries, but in time just as serious. 

No one doubts that.

The real issue is which immigrants.  We don’t simply need more warm bodies to feed and support; we already have quite enough of those. We don’t need more illiterate immigrants with no discernable job skills applicable to our changing economy either. And we certainly don’t need to import people who hate our way of life, our culture, and have no intention of respecting our laws. 

Do they have to be white? Of course not.  Nor do they have to be Christians. They just need to have skills and functional mastery of English to contribute meaningfully to our country over time.  The key is not skin color or religion, or even country of origin, but attitude, desire to be a part of America, and the ability to bring something we need. 

Immigrating to America is a privilege, not a universal right. It must be earned by meeting objective standards for admission.

As cold as this sounds, there are plenty of other desirable people in the world – people with education and valuable skills – who want to come here and become citizens; we can afford to pick and choose who we want. We don’t have to open the floodgates and allow everybody in regardless of their ability to contribute, or allow those here illegally to stay, just because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or large agribusinesses want a perpetual source of cheap labor. Or because some politicians want that. 

It doesn’t mean we should only accept rich people with PhDs in quantum physics. However, we should require certain thresholds be met, much as Canada does.  (Far from a wide-open immigration free-for-all see https://www.canadavisa.com/canadian-immigration-requirements.html for reference.) We need to have a merit-based system in place, like Canada.

Now, in fairness, I don’t care if someone comes from a shithole country, or anyplace else for that matter, as long as they meet certain criteria. 

Simply having a pulse and the ability to fog a mirror isn’t enough. Or the desire to escape the crappy place where you now live. Frankly, if you are poor, have no education or skills except to reproduce, and have no ability to support yourself or your family without government assistance, we’re already full up on people like you. We don’t need more.  

And as far as increasing our “diversity,” that’s also a non-starter. Importing people who have nothing to offer just because they are from an obscure place that culturally and educationally might as well be another planet doesn’t make sense.  For a zoo, maybe; not for a country.  

You have to bring something valuable to us to get in. That’s what Trump is after. I suspect most American citizens would agree with that as well. 

No random drawing or quota system can insure that. 

And yes, there are shithole countries.

We don’t need to discriminate against them; nor do we need to favor them. We certainly don’t need to make sure we get a certain percentage of our immigrants from them.

Especially if they have nothing of value to offer us. 

Turning off the noise …

I’ve been a fan of Tucker Carlson for years. He’s bright, articulate, funny and makes good commonsense points much of the time.

But I can’t watch his show anymore. It’s simply too annoying.

It’s not Tucker; it’s his guests. 

I’m tired of the same guests. The same talking points. The same bullshit night after night.

There’s far too much Richard Goodstein, a Democrat strategist.  No matter what the question is – immigration, voter ID, mid-term elections, whatever – Goodstein always doubles back to the U.S. intelligence agencies who said Russia interfered in the last election, and that former Trump campaign officials have already pleaded guilty. Talk about conflating. 

Left out is that no former Trump campaign official – or anyone else, for that matter – has provided anything that proved collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Or that the oft-quoted intelligence report never said there was collusion between Trump and the Russians.    

One scalp collected so far by the Mueller's team is General Flynn, who entered a guilty plea for lying to the FBI, not anything else.  Another was George Papadopoulos, a power-broker wannabe on the campaign staff, who also entered a guilty plea for lying to the FBI.  Paul Manafort has been indicted for financial shenanigans that occurred long before he joined the Trump campaign.

None of these has anything to do with Trump or the campaign. The only thing close – and only tangentially – is the plea by Papadopoulos who had bragged to Russian operatives he could set up a meeting with Trump, and then lied about that to the FBI. Papadopoulos did try repeatedly to get anyone in the campaign to set up that meeting, but he was such a lightweight and the idea was so preposterous nobody in the campaign would even respond to him.    

But Goodstein blathers on. Why this blowhard is always on escapes me. 

Tucker is also often joined by radical feminist Cathy Areu.  Why? I have no idea. 

Areu is a true believer that all men are guilty of toxic masculinity from birth; it’s just a matter of time before every male acts on it to the detriment of society as a whole and toward women in particular. Consequently, every man is automatically guilty of sexual harassment or abuse if they’ve been accused of either by a woman. He’s a male, that’s all anyone needs to know. 

Her looneyness doesn’t stop there. She believes calling breastfeeding by women “natural” reinforces gender stereotypes and puts too much pressure on a woman to feed her children. In the same interview she seemed uncertain as to whether men can breastfeed. 

I guess she skipped Biology 101. Why give air time to this obvious nutjob? 

How about Jorge Ramos? This “journalist” has nothing to add to the immigration debate except that America has a moral obligation to give illegal immigrants amnesty.  And also, no choice.

It’s the same crap every time he’s on: illegals are already here, they are contributing to our economy, they’re paying taxes, and without them there wouldn’t be anybody to harvest our food and do all the jobs Americans won’t do.  There’s no way we can deport them all, either. 

Left out, of course, is that every illegal here is a criminal, having already committed a felony by coming here illegally. There’s also the fact that any illegal “paying taxes” is using forged or stolen Social Security numbers, another felony. Or that Mexico, where Ramos is from, puts in prison anyone who crosses their borders illegally. But we have a moral obligation?  

There’s almost always someone on if Ramos isn’t to talk about the “Dreamers” and how cruel it would be to deport them, as well. It usually focuses on how mean Trump is to announce the end of DACA, the Obama-era program to protect from deportation the hundreds of thousands of kids – most now adults – brought here illegally by their parents, who also came here illegally. 

The argument is always the same: the Dreamers are innocent people serving in our military, police forces, and among the best and brightest – everyone knows that.  Why punish them for the acts of their parents?    

What about the laws the Dreamers have broken – like being here illegally, falsifying documents, getting financial aid and free public education under false pretenses?  And as far as the “serving” in our military and police – maybe at best that’s less than half of 1% of the Dreamers.

Finally, no one wants to bring this up but DACA was an unconstitutional Executive overreach from the get-go. It would never stand up if it hit the Supreme Court docket. Obama knew this. So did every member of Congress. But nobody wanted to do anything.  

DACA was indeed on a path to the Supreme Court when Trump acted.  If overturned there every DACA recipient would be liable for immediate deportation.  When Trump put an end date on DACA, and pushed it over to Congress where it should have been handled legislatively from the beginning, he merely forced Congress to do what they should have done already.   

Nobody defending DACA wants to acknowledge that the real issue is not protection under DACA, but the push to end chain migration.  Without new limits on chain migration, everyone granted permanent legal status could legally bring in a large number of other family members as new citizens; they could also give a pass to their parents, who committed the original illegal immigration crime. 

We’re talking millions of new people, most with no job skills, eligible for benefits. 

Ramos has already said everything he’s going to say. We’ve heard it all before.  Why continue to give this guy – or the Dreamer advocates – a chance to say it all again, and again? 

Then there’s the clueless crackpot of the day. These barely coherent buffoons can’t articulate much less defend whatever bizarre thing they’re promoting.

It could be a call for white genocide. It could be for impeaching the President, although they don’t seem to know how or what reason would qualify as grounds. It could be for abolishing the Electoral College although they seem unaware that would require amending the Constitution. Or it’s about giving lesser sentences just to black male criminals because their mostly illegitimate children grow up without a father. Or it could be for granting “personhood” to animals. Or allowing anyone to choose their own gender or race because that’s how they identify. 

It’s all just more bullshit.

Is Jerry Springer now in charge of programming? That’s what if feels like to me.  What’s next? Interviews with people claiming to have been abducted by aliens who told them Trump is actually an alien replicant? Or that Hillary is secretly a member of the Illuminati?  

It’s getting to be just too much foolish noise. 

I already won’t watch any shows where guests shout at each other.  Or shows where panelists gang up on the token far-left liberal or far-right conservative apparently selected to be the designated punching bag. Or shows so biased and predictable you can almost outline their opening monologue with 98% accuracy before they even come on the air. 

The upside is it’s dramatically reduced the number of shows I feel compelled to watch. This gives me more time for shows not pretending to be anything but fiction.  And those are more entertaining and enlightening than the standard fare today of opinion shows.

Far less annoying, too. 

I still follow the local news on the Orlando stations, mainly for the weather.  For factual national and international news I rely almost entirely on the printed WSJ.

Nobody shouts at each other on those. And they take reporting seriously. 

I appreciate that more and more every day.  

Pleasing the world …

Someone visiting from Canada recently told me Trump needs to be nicer to other world leaders.  They said he comes across as arrogant and a bully when dealing with other nations, and that’s not good for America’s reputation.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this. Nor will it be the last. 

I suppose much of the world longs for the days of Obama. He made a practice of diminishing the importance of his own country at every opportunity. He publicly apologized for what he claimed was America’s arrogance and bad behavior in the past. Things would be different going forward. America would be a better, and more respectful, partner in the global community.      

No wonder so many other world leaders liked him.    

Why wouldn’t they?  He was happy to put our money where his mouth was. He made one-sided deals that helped them and hurt us economically. He made clear there was no reason to fear the military might of America anymore. Under Obama, we went from being military superpower that kept would-be aggressors in check to a paper tiger easily ignored.   

Take Syria, for example. He said there was a “red line” in Syria that couldn’t be crossed by Assad. But did nothing when Assad’s forces used poison gas against their own people. 

Or Libya. There he did nothing when militants sacked our embassy in Benghazi, raped and killed our ambassador, and killed other American security personnel. Obama’s response? An apology for an obscure video no one ever saw he and his State Department blamed for the attack. 

Through his indecision he allowed tyrants in Syria, Iran, and North Korea to thrive and emboldened Russia to annex Crimea. He also created power vacuums that enabled the return of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to Afghanistan, the growth of ISIS, and set off the mass migration of refugees to Europe. 

Obama was everything European leaders wanted. Someone just like them.

Too politically correct to acknowledge the terrorists were Muslims. Too gutless to pull out all the stops to defeat ISIS. Too timid to do anything about Russian aggression in the Ukraine.  Too willing to do a deal with Iran in the false hope that would make the mullahs less hostile.  Always eager to throw Israel under the bus to appease the Palestinians and their supporters.   

He pushed for the Paris Climate Change Accord, the Iran nuke deal and anything else European leaders wanted, including turning his back on Israel.  In return they loved him. He was their man in Washington; finally they had the American President they always wanted. 

He was a fan of big government, the UN, ruling by regulation, cutting military spending, increasing funding for socialist utopian programs, and open borders. In short, just like most European leaders. It was if America was suddenly no more than just another country among others, and now desperate for the approval of others. 

They really liked this new, humble America.

And they took advantage of us whenever possible. They were confident that when Hillary was elected President, business as usual would continue. 

Then shock of shock, Trump was elected. Suddenly all their plans of manipulating American policy from abroad came crashing down. 

Instead of a like-minded globalist running America, a barbarian took over. Someone who had no interest in hobnobbing with intellectuals and cultural elites in Davos; someone more inclined to hold rallies with the blue-collar types in grimy factory towns. Someone who openly praised Brexit. Someone who planned to wage war on bureaucrats domestically and at the UN. Someone who cared less about what other world leaders thought and more about taking care of American interests first.

Someone quite willing to tear down their carefully constructed world order and make them pay their fair share to have America defend them.  And someone quite willing to use American military and economic power as leverage to get what was best for America. 

It was if the progress they’d made in the past eight years under Obama had never happened.

America pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. Trump threatened to crack down on illegal immigrants and refuse to accept Syrian refugees. He stepped up military actions against ISIS, with a promise to “bomb the shit out of them.” He told NATO members to start paying up or America might leave the alliance.  He said he was no longer interested in big multi-country trade pacts and would go for deals with individual countries. 

He also called the terrorists what they actually were: radical Islamic terrorists. 

He put military types instead of career diplomats in his administration wherever possible. Rather than a European wannabe like John Kerry running the State Department, he put in a seasoned business executive – Rex Tillerson.  Rather than weaselly political hacks like Samantha Powers and Susan Rice as our voice in the UN, he appointed Nicki Haley to kick ass and take names.  And instead of naming yet another political opportunist as Secretary of Defense, he appointed James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a widely admired Marine general who had actually led troops.    

He put the world – and especially the UN – on notice there would be no more blank checks from us. If they didn’t treat us fairly, and provide value commensurate with our contributions, they might get cut off or at least see our funding reduced. 

The world shuddered. And it wasn’t just those overseas. 

He told our closest neighbors – Mexico and Canada – he would take a cold, hard look at NAFTA. He said they should prepare for renegotiation of key provisions that currently favored them and cost American jobs.  He let American firms know there would be serious consequences, such as new hefty tariffs on their products, if they closed their plants here and moved those jobs to other countries. He hinted there would be penalties on corporate inversions, done to escape U.S. taxes, as well.    

Now Mexico and Canada shuddered. Especially Mexico.   

He planned to complete a wall on our southern border, and beef up border security there to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs. Oh, and he said Mexico would ultimately pay for his “big, beautiful wall,” one way or another. His plan to step up enforcement of our immigration laws would include deporting perhaps millions of immigrants here illegally, and to seek to stop chain migration. All of that could dramatically cut the volume of remittances from illegals here back to Mexico and potentially flood Mexico with an influx of additional people with no jobs.        

So let’s see: he alienated European elites, he threatened our traditional European allies, he sent an economic shot across the bow to Mexico and Canada, and criticized the UN. 

Obama would have never done this. That’s how we got here after his eight years. And, sadly, after pretty much every administration since Reagan.    

Recently, a lot has been made about how Trump has cost us allies.  And how much we can ill afford losing our allies in Europe and the Middle East. 

But has he really? And is there a case that many of our “allies” are actually “frenemies,” in practice? Could we ever count on them to support us as we’ve always supported them?

For example, have all the NATO members lived up to their financial obligations, or have many used our military presence for protection instead? Have they been perfectly content to have us spend our money for decades to defend them, so they could spend their money on other things? 

More to the point, are our so-called allies ever willing to forgo their own national interests when there’s money and jobs involved?

Does anyone honestly believe there aren’t European companies and others from our “allies” like Pakistan doing business with Iran and North Korea, and selling technology and weapons to other “rogue” states and sponsors of terrorism around the world?

Does anyone think Mexico tries to keep illegal immigrants and drugs from crossing its borders into our country? Can anyone say Mexico and Canada haven’t successfully pulled jobs from the U.S. through NAFTA, albeit with help from naïve American politicians?

Does anyone really believe the UN today is anything more than a forum for haters of America and Israel? And that it’s not a bloated bureaucracy staffed by overpaid paper pushers, all only looking out for the interests of their own countries?

Look, it’s only natural for the leader of any country to put the interests of their own nation first. I don’t blame them. Nor does Trump, for that matter. 

However, when Trump does it and puts our interests first, the same world leaders recoil. 

Screw ‘em.  Trump was elected President of the United States, not the world. 

Obama saw the job differently. 

I prefer Trump’s approach.