"Trump Can't Swim"

The left-wing bias of the national media is on full display on the front page of today's Washington Post. Consider this headline: "South Koreans Are Dealing With A New Wild Card -- In Washington."

South Korea is facing an unstable enemy, armed with nuclear weapons, who is obsessed with taking over the entire peninsula. But according to the Post, South Koreans are really worried about . . . Donald Trump.

If that were true, South Korean government officials would say to us, "Hey, look, we can handle this. We don't need your help." But they aren't saying that because they don't believe that.

The Post article is like several that have appeared recently suggesting that Trump is trigger happy, that he has abandoned his "America First isolationism" for a "neo-con" foreign policy that involves only brute force. What has set off this avalanche?

First, Trump launched Tomahawk missiles against a brutal dictator, a war criminal who used poison gas on innocent civilians. The U.S. had it within our power to obliterate the Assad regime. All things considered, the strikes Trump ordered were very restrained.

The second event happened last week when we used a big bomb in an active war zone. We eliminated 100 ISIS fighters, entrenched in caves, so our sons and daughters did not have to die attempting to clear out those caves. Yet the media now act like Trump is a war monger.

Meanwhile, they continue to pursue the "fake news" that he colluded with the Russians while simultaneously suggesting that Trump's belligerence has taken relations with Russia to a new low. Which is it?

The media are also attacking Trump for backing off a campaign statement to label China a currency manipulator. But they largely ignore the fact that he got China's attention and its cooperation in pressuring North Korea.

Yet in spite of the media's best efforts, Trump's approval rating continues to climb. Two weeks ago, he was at 43%. Today, he's at 50%.

As the saying goes, if the president walked across the surface of the Potomac River this afternoon, the morning headlines would read, "Trump Can't Swim."

Islamists Conquer Homeland

The hit cable show Homeland was one of the very few shows post-9/11 that accurately portrayed the danger of radical Islam. Based on an Israeli series, Homeland routinely showed how jihadists exploited mosques and religious cover to paralyze our ability to respond. The heroes in the show were U.S. intelligence officers who overcame political correctness and tracked down the jihadists.

Predictably, for the last few years, there has been a concerted campaign by the burgeoning American-Islamist apologist movement, led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attacking the show and its story lines. They have demanded that Homeland end its "stereotyping" of Muslims. And, of course, predictably, this past season which recently ended, could have been produced by CAIR.

The "good guys" in the show are now a female president who lost her son in Afghanistan and is sick of fighting radical Islam. The lead heroine, a female CIA agent, has left the agency and now works defending the civil rights of Muslims.

Israel is trying to deceive the United States into thinking that Iran is cheating on the nuclear deal. The bad guys are no longer the jihadists, but sinister forces, including racist agents, within our security apparatus who are working with the Israelis.

The bottom line is that the Islamic lobby in the United States, representing about 1% of the U.S. population, has brought this cable TV hit to heel in a way that Christian groups, speaking for at least half the country, could never do when dealing with a show that unfairly maligned Christians. We got a hint of why the Islamic lobby was successful from recent interviews with one of the leading actors, Mandy Patinkin.

Last month, Patinkin told the Associated Press that he and the writers were concerned about the show's direction and were committed to correcting it. He said:
 

"In all kinds of entertainment . . . there are always the bad guys; the cowboys and Indians, then the Russians were the bad guys, the Nazis were the bad guys. Now it seems like Muslim 'terrorists' are the bad guys. So, inadvertently . . . unintentionally we were not helping the Muslim community and we take responsibility for it. And I know I can speak for the writers when they want to right that error that happened because of storytelling."

Last week, during a discussion about Muslim refugees, Patinkin told MSNBC that Muslims have made "contributions to the world of a monumental nature." Then he noted that Homeland was attempting to atone for its past politically correct sins by tweaking the storyline so that "in this season, that maybe it is the white men in government and the military establishment [who] are the bad guys, not the Muslim community."

How predictable. Perhaps next season, Homeland will tell us that Dick Cheney, George Bush and the Mossad were responsible for 9/11.

"Buy American"

This afternoon, President Trump flew to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to sign an executive order instructing government agencies to stop abuses of the H-1B visa program. The "Buy American, Hire American" order directs the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Labor and State to draft "new rules to prevent immigration fraud and abuse" to ensure that American citizens are not being unfairly displaced by cheaper foreign workers.

The H-1B program has been widely criticized. Last year, Donald Trump blasted several companies that outsourced American IT jobs and then forced U.S. workers to train their foreign replacements. Today, President Trump is keeping another promise -- ordering the government to put American workers first.