Chaos in America Caused by: Identity and Tribalism are Realities in the Politics of the USA

A Fatal Failing of Establishment Elites

5/29/2020 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne Tha God.

A miffed Biden signed off, saying, "If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black."

Biden was saying that no self-respecting black American would vote for Trump over him this November. Indeed, any such individual would have been labeled in the 1960s with the slur Uncle Tom.

As Biden put it, if you're for Trump, "you ain't black."

Recognizing the damage he may have done with his own and his party's most loyal constituency, which might object to being taken for granted as knee-jerk Democratic voters, Biden's staff put in a hasty call to a gathering of the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce.

There, Biden burbled full apologies: "I would never take the African American community for granted. ... I shouldn't have been such a wise guy. ... No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background." He had just been kidding.

Now, as a gaffe, this was not of the magnitude of James G. Blaine's failure to object when a friendly Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Sam Burchard, rose to disparage the New York Irish Blaine had been courting as being "the Party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."

In 1884, that slur soured Catholics on Blaine, helping to cost him New York's state's electoral votes and the White House. Thanks to Burchard, Grover Cleveland would become the only Democrat to win the presidency in the half-century between 1860 and 1912.

Biden's gaffe and Burchard's slur have this in common: Both manifest a measure of condescension toward a large bloc of voters.

Hillary Clinton did something similar in 2016.

At a closed-door gathering of contributors, she volunteered, to their amusement, that half of all Trump's voters belong in a "basket of deplorables" for being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic."

Their pathologies are part of their character, Clinton was saying. And while many were "irredeemable," fortunately, they are "not America."

During the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was guilty of the same elitist condescension when he told a San Francisco gathering of gay right advocates why he was not doing well in the Keystone State:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Hard times have curdled the character of these folks, Obama was saying, turning them into bigots and Bible-and-gun nuts.

The people of whom he was speaking would deliver Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and the nation to Donald Trump in 2016.

As for Biden's remark, "No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background," it is surely true.

But while not mandatory to support someone of the same race, ethnicity gender or faith, it is naive to deny that identity and tribalism are realities in the politics of this nation.

Was it not the possibility that he could become the first Catholic president why JFK won four of five Catholic votes in 1960?

Was the 95-4 thumping of John McCain by Obama among African Americans not due to the fact that Obama was the first African American nominated by a major party?

Much of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign focused on "shattering the glass ceiling." Did not Clinton see her gender as a primary political asset in winning "the women's vote"?

And, what, other than a naked appeal to gender, was behind Biden's declaration during the primaries that, in picking a running mate, he would exclude all white men, indeed, all men, and select a woman? And what, other than an appeal to black and female voters was behind Biden's pledge to name a black woman to the Supreme Court?

Biden is now under pressure to choose not only a woman, but a woman of color, an African American, such as Sen. Kamala Harris of California or Georgia activist Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

It tells us something about where American politics is going that, to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, Biden, a white male vice president, like all his predecessors, has now ruled out any white man in selecting his own vice president.

Biden's message to Middle America:

This may have been your country, but no more. Get used to it. Which might explain why Trump did so well with white men in 2016.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Ensure Immigration Policies Preserve American Interests

Immigration Policy Changes Due to COVID-19: What to Keep and What to Discard

5/26/2020 - Spencer Raley Townhall.com

 The United States is now two months into a nearly nationwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The lives of every American have been changed to some degree, with tens of millions working from home in an effort to help “flatten the curve.” Millions of others are out of work completely, leading to record-high unemployment claims.

Government policies have not been immune to change either, especially in the immigration world. In fact, as one of the first actions the United States took in order to slow the spread of COVID-19, President Trump issued an executive order limiting travel from hard-hit nations. And despite the mainstream media and many prominent Democrat officials condemning the move, almost every major nation has followed the President’s lead implementing public-health-oriented travel restrictions and border controls.

Since then, additional immigration-related COVID-19 policy changes have been put in place. Many of these changes were made out of concern for the health of not only U.S. citizens and immigration officials, but also to protect those who are accused of breaking our immigration laws. The United States prides itself on ensuring that those who break our laws not only have their day in court, but are also held in humane conditions until and after those court proceedings take place.

As noted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), some of these policy changes were long overdue, and should seriously be considered as long-term solutions to persistent problems. Others were hastily constructed responses to extreme circumstances. Those should be reversed at the first opportunity.

Examples of policies that should be ended ASAP include the closure of many immigration courts, ending deportation flights to some countries, and the scaling down of interior enforcement actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three of these policies have the potential to negatively impact the integrity of our immigration laws. Immigration courts are already severely backlogged. Adding to that backlog by keeping courts closed tells migrants that even if they are apprehended, it will probably be years before a judge hears their case. Shutting down deportation flights only compounds that problem. And scaling back interior enforcement sends a bad message that it’s OK to break our immigration laws.

While these are supposed to be temporary changes designed to protect people from COVID-19 infection, the mass-immigration lobby has made it clear that it has no intention of ever seeing these temporary measures disappear. Just as they refuse to see the “temporary” in programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS), open-border activists can certainly be expected to manufacture outrage when the time comes to get back to immigration business as usual.

By contrast, there are some “temporary changes” that should have already been in place for some time, such as the Trump administration’s attempts to limit the importation of foreign workers while so many Americans are unemployed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.  On March 20, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced “the immediate and temporary suspension of premium processing service for all Form I-129 and I-140 petitions until further notice due to Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).”

However, even before this pandemic caused the national unemployment rate to spike up to nearly 15 percent – the highest since the Great Depression – it made absolutely no sense to keep importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers every year to compete with American labor. For example, another recent study conducted prior to the COVID pandemic found that nearly 30 percent of all STEM positions are now filled by foreign-born workers. This is despite the fact that only one-third of native-born Americans with a STEM degree currently hold a job in their preferred field.

Sometimes, during unexpected extreme circumstances, policy decisions can be made in the heat of the moment. Typically, those decisions shouldn’t survive too far beyond the crisis they were meant to address. Other times, difficult circumstances force us to rise to the challenge and enact long-overdue policies that should have been put in place long ago. If there is one immigration lesson that we should learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that we now have a prime opportunity to ensure that our immigration policies preserve American interests. And only those new measures which support that goal should still be on the books when we have finally succeeded in flattening the epidemic curve.

Obama Administration a Perfect Example of Arbitrary Absolutism

Obamagate: Obama’s Ship of Lies and Deceit Has Run Aground

5/23/2020 - Susan Stamper Brown Townhall.com

Former President Barack Obama is a smooth-talking liar. He uses his tongue like a brush to paint vivid word pictures so believable, the clueless swoon, believing every word. Likewise, his administration followed his lead, spinning a web of corruption we’re only now starting to unravel.  

Until recently, we had no idea how far, deep, and wide the corruption within the Obama administration reached. That is until the Michael Flynn unmaskers were themselves, unmasked. We now see up close how much Obama and his administration, along with Deep State players in various three-letter agencies and leftist-run media, bartered in corruption, lies, and the weaponization of government power.

Apparently, there were two streams of flagrant corruption flowing concurrently. They eventually collided and began running together sometime after the 2016 Presidential election to create a swollen river of treachery to overrun the proverbial banks of the new Trump administration.

The first stream of corruption was the Trump-Russia collusion narrative based on the now-discredited Steele Dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat Party. With everyone distracted and the Trump administration on defense dealing with impeachment, it was a set up for the most perfect of storms.

Meanwhile, Obama cronies were stealthily obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, purportedly using the dossier, which was nothing more than an elaborate Russian disinformation campaign. The leftist controlled media and congressional Democrats jumped in and sailed that ship for three years until it ran aground with the Mueller investigation’s failure. 

Sometime in December, the second “stream of corruption” was birthed when at least thirty Obama administration officials made requests to unmask Flynn. The door opened, and the Obama administration received the tools it needed to spy on its successor. 

Why did the Obama administration specifically target Michael Flynn? Sure, Flynn is a stellar guy, but he seemed like a minor player in the scheme of things. And why did the FBI offer to pay the Steele dossier author to collect intelligence on Flynn weeks before the 2016 election? 

Furthermore, why would former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice -- (the Obama administration’s apparent unofficial director of mistruth and misdirection) -- write a bizarre email to herself on Trump’s Inauguration day regarding a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting--wherein Obama wanted to make it clear the Flynn investigation was being handled “by the book,” repeating the term twice more in the email.

Baloney Alert: common sense tells you that if something was “handled by the book,” there’s no need to mention it once, let alone three times.

What’s Obama’s obsession with Flynn? 

After all, Flynn was Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency Director for only a couple of years. 

Might it be that Flynn held the proverbial keys to Obama’s legacy, the Iranian nuclear deal? 

An excellent piece, “How Russiagate Began With Obama’s Iran Deal Domestic Spying Campaign,” by Lee Smith, states: “Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran and to publicize them.”

As I write, there’s breaking news. FBI Director Christopher Wray says the bureau will conduct an “after-action review” of the Michael Flynn investigation. This news comes on the heels of a recent discovery that the FBI wiretapped a Flynn conversation with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak -- without masking his name and circulating the information throughout the Obama administration.

This story is fluid, so it’ll stretch and grow before this goes to print. Even still, there’s a takeaway lesson here. 

The self-proclaimed ‘‘scandal-free” Obama administration was scandal-filled. He might be a super-smooth talker, but he’s no god. Not even close. The difference between Obama and God is that God doesn’t think he’s Obama. Something that Democrats don’t get because they see truth as fluid as a swiftly flowing stream.

Susan is a nationally syndicated columnist who lives in Alaska. She feels safer around the grizzlies that roam her property than the leftists that roam worldwide. She has written for scores of newspapers and media publications across the U.S., including USA Today, Townhall, The Christian Post, GOPUSA, BizPac Review, and Jewish World Review. Susan is listed as America's 50 Best conservative columnists for 2015 and 2016, and America's 40 Best Conservative columnists for 2017. Contact Susan at writestamper@protonmail.com. She recently began archiving her columns on Twitter @StamperBrown.

Have No Fear - We Will Survive!

Losing Our Fears, in War and Plague

5/14/2020 12 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Seventy-five years ago this month, Germany surrendered, ending the European theater of World War II. At the war's beginning, no one believed Germany would utterly collapse in May 1945.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, German invaders were on the verge of capturing Moscow. Britain was isolated. London had barely survived a terrible German bombing during the Blitz.

A sleeping America was neutral, but it was beginning to realize it was weak and mostly unarmed in a scary world.

But by 1943, a booming U.S. economy was fielding vast military forces from Alaska to the Sahara. Britain and America were bombing the German heartland. The Soviet Red Army had trapped and destroyed a million-man German army at Stalingrad.

How did the Allies -- Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S. -- turn around the European war so quickly?

The huge Red Army would suffer close to 11 million deaths in halting German offensives. Britain would never give up despite terrible losses at home and at sea from German bombers, rockets and submarines.

Yet the key to victory was the U.S. economy. It would eventually outproduce all the major economies on both sides of the war combined.

But how did the U.S. arm so quickly, build such effective weapons so soon, and from almost nothing field a military some 12 million strong?

Neo-socialist President Franklin D. Roosevelt unleashed American business under the aegis of successful entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, William Knudsen of General Motors, Henry Kaiser of Kaiser Shipyards and Charles Wilson of General Electric.

They were all given relatively free rein from New Deal strictures to work and profit without burdensome government regulations. The result was a military juggernaut that overwhelmed America's enemies.

Politics went on, but in less partisan fashion. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate in 1942, while Roosevelt won a fourth presidential term in 1944.

Roosevelt was able to dodge charges of rank partisanship during the war by appointing Republicans to key positions in his administration. Republican Henry Stimson became secretary of war. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Frank Knox was the all-important secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt stocked the War Production Board with Republican capitalists.

The media turned from either propagandizing the success of the New Deal or hyping its failures to warning Americans of the looming existential threat that would soon make their differences irrelevant.

Most importantly, Americans lost their fears.

From 1929 to 1938, the U.S. economy was in ruins. FDR's New Deal could not restore economic growth or consumer confidence. As late as 1938, economic growth had sunk to negative 3.3 percent. Unemployment soared to an unsustainable 19 percent.

Only the threat of war terrified Americans into taking a gamble -- to work feverishly and to ramp up industry.

By the end 1941, the early rearmament effort had spiked GDP growth to 17.7 percent. 

Unemployment had fallen to about 10 percent and would soon fall to about 2 percent.

Americans began losing their dread that they could do nothing against a decade-long depression. The less they feared the Axis powers, the more they restarted the economy and began to produce a plethora of goods and services.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans did not stay neutral, wait for government assistance or expect other nations to protect them.

Does World War II offer any lessons regarding our wrecked economy and staggering unemployment from the lockdown reaction to the coronavirus?

Perhaps. Government cannot restore prosperity. Only entrepreneurs and risk-takers can. Americans must master their fears of the virus and dare to go back to work.

Otherwise, locked-down states will continue to borrow to pay out public assistance without creating wealth from labor, production and investment. Bankrupt states will beg the federal government to print money that it doesn't have for bailouts to pay those who are not working and not creating collective wealth.

The media must stick to reporting on the virus and the ailing economy. Their often petty obsessions with destroying President Trump are long past monotonous.

Trump himself must keep working with any Democratic governors who realize they must put their states back to work in order to have the money to pay for the fight against the virus.

Interest rates are low. Gas is as cheap as it's been in years. Inflation remains moribund. People are tired of being housebound. They want to get back to work to make and spend money.

All that is missing is confidence -- or rather, the conviction that the coronavirus is no more dangerous than were the Axis powers and can be beaten far more quickly if we show the sort of will our grandparents had.