BREAKING NEWS, The Culture Wars, About That Deal

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

BREAKING NEWS
 
President Trump today revoked former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance.  It's about time!  Brennan has been actively engaged in the #Resistance movement to bring down the president of the United States, and appears to be implicated in the deep state efforts to spy on the Trump campaign. 
 
Below are excerpts of a statement issued by President Trump explaining the decision:
 
"Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations . . . about this Administration.  Mr. Brennan's lying and recent conduct . . . is wholly inconsistent with access to the Nation's most closely held secrets and facilitates the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.  
 
"More broadly, the issue of Mr. Brennan's security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our Nation's most sensitive secrets long after their time in Government has ended.  Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks. . .
 
"For this reason, I have also begun to review the more general question of the access to classified information by former Government officials."
 
 
 
Progress?
 
The media say progressive candidates are winning in primary contests across the country this summer. But they must have a very different definition of progressive than I have.
 
Looking around, I see many candidates who are anti-Israel and perhaps even anti-Semitic.  Some are self-described socialists, and their platforms ignore something your parents probably taught you -- that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
 
Some of these progressives are running on the idea of open borders – which is rejected by 70 percent of the public.
 
A Muslim candidate from the Midwest won a primary this week even though he's friends with radical Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.  He also made news for wearing a T-shirt that when translated from Spanish to English said, "I don't believe in borders."
 
This same candidate was credibly accused this week of physically abusing a girlfriend in 2016. And a police report has emerged indicating that he may have assaulted another woman, back in 2005.
 
Meanwhile in a governor's race in New England, the media are celebrating the nomination of the first ever candidate who identifies as transgender, which means he believes he was "assigned the wrong gender at birth."
 
But the science is settled on this. Sex is in our DNA, determined by our chromosomes, not our feelings.  If he is confused about that, what else might he be confused about as governor?
 
These are all things leftists claim as part of the progressive agenda.  But I don't think this is what most Americans would call progress.
 
 
 
The Culture Wars
 
Students returning to school this month in Alabama, Florida and Tennessee will be greeted by displays of our national motto, "In God We Trust."  The push to get God back in our schools is part of an initiative supported by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation. 
 
If you like the idea, find other friends who agree with you and talk to your state legislators.  But I'm sure lawsuits are coming, which leads me to another observation. 
 
It is the Supreme Court that has caused the culture wars in the United States.  Liberals, unable to prevail at the ballot box, rushed to the courts in order to take away the rights of people in diverse states to reflect the values of their states and communities. 
 
Prior to Roe v. Wade, individual states had their own laws on abortion.  Some were lax, some were tough. The Supreme Court struck them all down.  Prior to 1963, states had different laws on school prayer.  The court ruled them all unconstitutional.
 
Prior to 2015, 30 states had constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  But five lawyers in black robes thought they knew better than the American people.
 
Why should judges decide whether Alabama and Florida can post "In God We Trust" in our schools?  It's also on our currency.  But as long as left-wing activists and judges insist on imposing their values on the country, the culture wars will rage on.
 
Speaking of which, the state of Colorado is harassing Jack Phillips again.  Like most states, Colorado has a lot to be concerned about -- crime, education, transportation issues, the impact of its experiment with legalized marijuana. 
 
But evidently there are some bureaucrats whose number one concern is crushing the rights of a Christian baker.  Welcome to left-wing "tolerance," my friends. 
 
 
 
About That Deal. . .
 
As you know, I was a fierce opponent of Barack Obama's nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.  I am gratified that President Trump has kept his campaign promise to withdraw from that deal. 
 
It was shocking that the Obama Administration could make such a bad deal to begin with.  At the time, many critics were wondering what they were thinking when they sent billions of dollars to the Iranian regime and why they were so furious that the prime minister of Israel was invited to speak to Congress about the deal.
 
Well, we don't have to guess anymore because Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator of the Iranian nuclear deal, has just written a column in Foreign Affairs explaining what she and her Iranian counterparts were thinking. 
 
For example, on Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress, Sherman writes:
 
"The speech was the equivalent of throwing a grenade into the negotiations. The Iranian negotiators had grown accustomed to Netanyahu's hyperbolic rhetoric but were incensed by the fact that the U.S. Congress seemed to be endorsing it."
 
It is amazing that Sherman seems to sympathize with the Iranian regime when it regularly calls for a second Holocaust and chants "Death to Israel! Death to America!"  They call us "the Great Satan." 
 
And Netanyahu's rhetoric is "hyperbolic"?
 
Regarding her biggest concern about the deal, Sherman explains:
 
"I always expected that the greatest challenge to the deal's success would be violations by Iran, not the political machinations of the president of the United States. . . I don't know if the Iran deal can survive the reinstatement of sanctions."
 
First of all, there were plenty of "political machinations" by President Obama.  In fact, his decision to deliberately evade the constitutional process for passing treaties is why President Trump was able to abandon it.
 
But more importantly, Sherman concedes that she was negotiating a deal to transfer billions of dollars to an enemy with American blood on its hands in spite of the fact that she expected Iran to cheat on the deal!