Who Was the Real John McCain?

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August is rainy season in Panama and so perhaps, if he wasn’t out to sea, the Naval officer held an umbrella over his wife 82 years ago as they made their way into the Coco Solo hospital in the Canal Zone. You could conceivably ask her yourself, because she’s still kicking and reportedly feisty at 106.

I went to the Coco Solo emergency room a couple of times in the 1970s, but the nurses weren’t telling any John McCain stories there, and I never saw the maternity ward. If they told me the infant McCain snatched a cigar from his father and demanded a match, it might be the most astonishing story I’ve heard about him. But just barely.

I’m not sure what to believe about John Sidney McCain III.

He has the most ferocious detractors, who accuse him of informing on fellow captives in a North Vietnamese prison, and betraying critical military information that enabled the enemy to shoot down more U.S. aviators. His accusers range from obvious flakes to some people who appear pretty credible to me.

But he has credible die-hard defenders, too, who insist that he conducted himself honorably under the most extreme conditions. All we know for sure is that he went into harm’s way in his country’s service, was held in captivity for five years and came home in great pain, unable to comb his own hair. Like most Americans, I’m inclined to give a banged-up ex-POW the benefit of the doubt.

But McCain himself was not so generous toward POW/MIA activists, whom he ridiculed as “hoaxers” and “charlatans.” I have no firm opinion whether we left a significant number of soldiers and Marines behind in Vietnam. I don’t pretend to know. But if the government sent one of my loved ones off to war and he or she never came back, I think we would be entitled to the utmost transparency. At last count, there are 1,597 unexplained missing. The government is accountable for each citizen it sent into harm’s way.

That’s what Congress acknowledged in the Missing Service Personnel Act, including enforcement teeth against government employees who might withhold or conceal information from the families of the missing. You would think that a heroic ex-POW would want the truth to come out. Yet Sen. McCain was instrumental in gutting the criminal penalties just a year after they were enacted.

He did so by attaching an amendment to an unrelated military bill in a closed House-Senate conference committee. His amendment also relieved battlefield commanders of a legal burden to search for missing men, and promptly report the incidents up their chain of command. Why?

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense, and the senator said that without his amendment, the law “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers, and turn military commanders into clerks.” He said the Pentagon would find it impossible to find staff willing to work with its files because of the potential for criminal liability.

But do we really want to hire government staff who are unwilling to be bound by the law? Is accountability for his troops really just a clerical nuisance for a battlefield commander?

The senator reportedly was hostile to transparency in the Vietnamese government, as well. U.S. files about the extent of POW collaboration and cooperation with the enemy remain airtight (classified), but the North Vietnamese kept records, too. Some were reportedly archived at a museum there.

Fellow U.S. delegates who visited Vietnam with Sen. McCain said he became visibly agitated on the subject, and warned their Vietnamese counterparts that Vietnam would never get diplomatic recognition if it released those records, which included his own.

Without trying to guess McCain’s motives, it’s obvious that he considered government service a personal domain in which he was free to move the chess pieces around without any particular accountability to the pawns.

He once ditched a plane and bailed out while returning to Norfolk after the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. He said the engine quit. He lost a plane in the water during training because, he said, that engine quit, too. When the Navy recovered the plane, the engine fired right up but the admiral’s son continued the course in a new plane.

The fact-checking websites have lined up to absolve McCain of responsibility for the catastrophic U.S.S. Forrestal fire in 1967 that killed 134 and injured 161 crew on the aircraft carrier. But it’s still controversial among fellow sailors who said he was notorious for “wet starts” that produced a flare to startle the pilots behind him on the flight deck. He was immediately transferred off the stricken ship after the disaster, to a public relations position in Saigon, far from embittered crewmates.

To his credit, he wanted to get back in the fight. He got assigned to another aircraft carrier off the coast of North Vietnam. McCain was not a fighter pilot. He flew bombers. Like the other bomber pilots, he was excited to learn about a significant new target, a thermal power plant in Hanoi. He lobbied to get assigned to the attack, scheduled for noon. He had an early lunch of pork chops and hoped to be back in the Officers’ Mess for more in a couple of hours.

But there would be no more pork chops for five and a half years. The maverick flew dumb that day, disregarding his training and getting himself shot down at inexcusably low altitude by anti-aircraft artillery. His biography and campaign literature later claimed he was shot out of the sky by a SAM missile, but Navy records and fellow bomber pilots agree that ordinary “triple-A” brought him down.

McCain was horribly injured during ejection from his aircraft, once again due to his disregard for Navy training. A younger, greener pilot was shot down in the same flak, ejected properly and was uninjured. He and McCain went to the same prison.

The cause of McCain’s injuries is controversial. His obvious impairment made him a sentimental hero. Most Americans believe his injuries resulted from torture by North Vietnamese interrogators.

Does it matter whether he caused his own injuries by sloth during ejection? Yes and no. I’m not sure how many of us could think clearly in a plane that’s just been shot out of the sky. Not me. He graduated from Naval Academy 894th out of a class of 899. I’m sure he was doing the best he could, at that point. He’s still a hero even if he made a series of poor decisions.

But it matters if he has lied to us or let his supporters lie to us in order to shame us into acquiescing in his politics, or discouraging us from exercising our best judgment. We’ll never really know whether the North Vietnamese tortured Lt. Cdr. McCain, partly because Sen. McCain used his political power to ensure that the relevant records are unavailable to us. On this subject and others, the senator strongly preferred that we just take his word for it.

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Scam PACs Killed the Tea Party. Now the GOP Is Facing the Consequences

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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is in trouble. He’s running for re-election in Texas, the race is closer than it has any right to be, and the Tea Party isn’t around to help him this time.

The latest polls conducted in August have Cruz leading his opponent, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, by just four points and then just one point. O’Rourke has consistently dwarfed Cruz’s fund-raising, building a national profile through glowing articles written to energize grassroots progressives. The Left is eager to show a blue wave is happening by defeating Cruz, the Senate’s highest-profile conservative in arguably the most conservative state in the union.

Conservatives aren’t matching the Democrats’ grassroots enthusiasm. The Star-Telegram reports that Cruz, on the campaign trail, is telling Texas voters he does not have enough money to compete with O’Rourke’s million-dollar TV ad assault.

“We’re seeing the airwaves flooded [with O’Rourke’s TV ads],” Cruz told a rally at The Colony, Texas. “We’ve got to save our resources to turn out and mobilize conservatives.”

The Tea Party grassroots groups that were instrumental to electing Cruz to the Senate in 2012, defeating an establishment Republican in the GOP primary, aren’t able to offer the same assistance as they did when the Tea Party was ascendent in 2010 and 2012. The money just isn’t there, as the Star-Telegram highlights:

Of the groups that worked to help Cruz do that in his first race, FreedomWorks (which raised more than $23 million during that election cycle and spent roughly $500,000 helping Cruz) reported $117,000 on hand as of June 30.

The Senate Conservatives Fund, which raised roughly $16 million in the 2012 election cycle, has brought in about $4 million in the 2018 cycle. The Tea Party Express reported $0 raised in the 2018 election cycle, according to reports with the Federal Election Commission.

One GOP Senate operative attributes the lack of small-dollar donations to all of the focus on President Donald Trump and the political antics surrounding the White House.

“All of the grassroots enthusiasm that drove tea party fundraising spends all of its time supporting Trump on Twitter,” the operative told the Star-Tribune anonymously, so that he could speak candidly. “There[‘s] so much focus on Trump, it’s really sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the small-dollar enthusiasm.”

The weak fund-raising showing from Tea Party grassroots groups isn’t a problem that affects only Ted Cruz. More broadly, these conservative organizations do not have the resources to defend conservative incumbents across the country and help conservative challengers defeat Democrats.

But blaming the focus on Trump as the sole reason conservatives are in trouble is misdiagnosing the problem. The fact of the matter is that the Tea Party and conservative political movement is dead. It was murdered.

It was murdered by greedy lawyers and political consultants who saw thousands of limited-government activists rise up in 2009 to oppose the Obama agenda and thought they could get rich by cheating these people. They created scam PACs, political action committees that promised to take on the Washington establishment if you would just open your pocketbook, while in reality they enriched their own operatives. As Politico reported in 2015, these PACs raised millions of dollars from earnest, well-intentioned grassroots conservatives and then flushed that money into the D.C. swamp:

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found that 33 PACs that court small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs. POLITICO’s list is not all-inclusive, and some conservatives fret that it’s almost impossible to identify all the groups that are out there, let alone to rein them in.

“These groups have the pulse of the crowd, and they recognize that they can make a profit off the angst of the conservative base voters who are looking for outsiders,” said the influential conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who has taken it upon himself to call out PAC operators and fundraisers he sees as scams. They are “completely a drain,” said Erickson, whose assessments of candidates and groups carry particular weight among tea party activists and the Republicans who court them. “The conservative activists feel like they’ve contributed to a cause greater than themselves, but the money goes to the consultants, and eventually the activists get burned out and stop giving money, including to the legitimate causes.”

Valuable resources were parasitically sucked from the conservative movement, resources that could have supported conservative candidates against the establishment and pushed forward a conservative agenda. Combine that with a backstabbing Republican leadership, and the hard work of the conservative grassroots was rewarded with inaction from Congress. Even with full Republican control of government and the final dying action of the Tea Party, embodied in the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the only significant delivery from Congress and the president has been tax cuts, the expectation of every GOP administration.

Is it any wonder that conservative grassroots are no longer donating? They’ve given money for years, and what are the returns for that investment? Where are the bold conservative reforms?

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee is seeing record fund-raising, a sign that GOP establishment donors are still engaged. The party establishment is empowered to support candidates who will support them, while grassroots conservatives are tuned out. That’s partly why conservative candidates who could be thought of as “Tea Party” insurgents performed miserably against incumbent Republicans in the 2018 primaries: There’s no movement to support them.

But Republicans need the conservative movement. They cannot win the midterms by offering a milquetoast, unambitious agenda of cutting taxes and complaining that there aren’t enough Republicans in the Senate to do anything else. Cruz is likely to beat O’Rourke; he’s a Republican running in Texas, after all. But Republicans in bluer parts of the country aren’t so fortunate. They need the conservative grassroots to support their campaigns and turn out to vote.

Unfortunately, there is no Tea Party to defend the GOP majorities in 2018. The Democrats are dancing on its grave. (For more from the author of “Scam PACs Killed the Tea Party. Now the GOP Is Facing the Consequences” please click HERE)

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Pope Francis: Resign, and Let Pope Benedict Return From Retirement

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By Conservative HQ. No institution that is sick can cure itself, and the Catholic Church is grievously ill. Like any patient, the institutional Church must be a willing participant in the cure. But it will be up to the Catholic laity to administer the necessary fixes.

We join others who have already made the call for Pope Francis to resign, and ask you to do the same by clicking and signing this petition, which will be widely circulated to thousands of Catholic leaders including clergy, laity, and the media. While the Pope’s failures have been many, the flashpoint may be that he chose to ignore the warning issued by Apostolic Nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò about the pattern of sexual abuse under Archbishop McCarrick of Washington, D.C. Pope Benedict had demoted McCarrick. Ignoring the warning, Pope Francis chose to promote and insulate McCarrick, leaving the inescapable conclusion that the current Pope’s resignation is the only acceptable beginning of both the legal and spiritual remedies.

The bigger picture, however, is that the Church needs a change that will exert energy about God’s law and the core, natural human institution, the family. Pope Francis is compromised, and does not have the credibility to lead in this reform and transition.

Like a past, strong, and credible CEO coming out of retirement to salvage the reputation of the entity, Pope Benedict is the natural replacement for Pope Francis during a period of transition.

Changing the head of the Catholic Church is far from the only steps that need to be taken. If the remedy is left to the current hierarchy within the Church, no credible, meaningful, and lasting reforms will be undertaken or, if enacted, won’t succeed. The “deep state,” so to speak, within the Catholic Church is insulated and will fight to preserve itself at the expense of curing the homosexual sex abuse that has incubated within the Church under the current hierarchy. (Read more from “Pope Francis: Resign, and Let Pope Benedict Return From Retirement” HERE)

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Pope Francis ‘Serene’ Despite Calls for Resignation

By New York Post. Pope Francis is “serene” despite calls for him to resign over allegations that he covered up for a US cardinal accused of sexual misconduct, the Vatican’s secretary of state said Thursday.

“From what I saw – I haven’t seen him today, but I have seen him in these days; I was with him during the trip to Ireland and after – he seems serene,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin said in an interview with Vatican Insider, the online supplement to Italian newspaper La Stampa.

An 11-page letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has created “much bitterness and worry” within the Vatican, Parolin said – but the pontiff “has the ability to take a very serene approach.”

The inflammatory statement made by Vigano Saturday accused Pope Francis – and other high-ranking church officials – of failing to act on accusations of sexual abuse by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Vigano claims he told Pope Francis that McCarrick was a “serial predator” back in 2013. (Read more from “Pope Francis ‘Serene’ Despite Calls for Resignation” HERE)

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What Nonreligious People Get Wrong About Religious People

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With the media furiously obsessed over the supposed imminent end of the Trump presidency (spoiler alert: nope), the new conversation among the elite concerns the supposed evils of Vice President Mike Pence. Pence, our leftist thought leaders proclaim, is perhaps even more frightening than President Trump. Frank Bruni of The New York Times terms Pence a “holy terror waiting in the wings … a bigot … a liar … cruel.”

This is nothing new. Conan O’Brien says that “many members of Congress are preparing for a Mike Pence presidency. Yeah, they’re preparing by binge-watching ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’” Joy Behar called Pence’s faith a “mental illness.” John Oliver trolled Pence last year by mocking his daughter’s children’s book about a bunny rabbit — in Oliver’s parody book, the bunny rabbit is gay. Because, of course, Pence would hate a gay bunny.

Last year, the media went into a tizzy when they learned that Pence refuses to dine alone with women other than his wife (the same media have since been shocked to learn that Harvey Weinstein loved dining alone with women other than his wife). This policy made Pence a bigot. But that was just the beginning. Pence, said the media, supported “gay conversion therapy.” This, of course, is false as well. But that didn’t stop the media from feting gay 2018 Winter Olympian Adam Rippon, who proceeded to trot out that debunked chestnut.

What is so frightening about Pence? His status as a religious Christian. According to many on the left, Pence’s religiosity means he’s a theocrat. Never mind the fact that Pence is a limited-government conservative who isn’t generally interested in imposing policy preferences from above; he believes in The Jesus, and therefore, he must want to install himself at the head of the United Christian States of America.

But that isn’t even what bothers those on the left. What bothers many on the left about Pence is the same thing that bothers them about religious Christians in general: They seem convinced that religious Americans are merely bigots hiding behind the Bible. The perspective is well-expressed by Greg Carey, professor of the New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary: “People either use religion to justify their bigotry or they refuse to give up their bigotry for the sake of maintaining false religious security.” Or let’s listen to Bruni again, this time from April 2015: “Our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to.” Or Hillary Clinton in 2016: “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

This view of religious belief is deeply demeaning. The suggestion seems to be that religious texts are utterly malleable, and that human beings twist them to fit their preconceived notions. But the suggestion is alien to most religious people, who believe that their religion dictates and they listen. This perception gap plagues our public discourse and helps explain why the left seems so unperturbed by violating the religious-practice rights of other Americans: They think those Americans are bad human beings using the Bible to shield themselves. Pence is merely the latest example.

The great irony, of course, is that religious people generally wish to be left alone. They’re not seeking to impose “The Handmaid’s Tale”; such compulsion is endemic to a left that insists we “bake the cake.” Such psychological projection damages the public discourse and undermines cultural unity. If the left truly wants a more tolerant America, perhaps it should start by assuming that its opponents in the religious community aren’t mere bigots cloaked in the vestments of God — and perhaps it ought to think more deeply about whether the true bigotry lies within itself. (For more from the author of “What Nonreligious People Get Wrong About Religious People” please click HERE)

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Here Are the Questions Bruce Ohr Needs to Answer in His Testimony Before Congress

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Bruce Ohr is scheduled to testify Tuesday behind a closed-door session of the House Oversight Committee. Earlier this month, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes outed Ohr as an overlooked, but important, figure in the Obama administration’s targeting of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Recent revelations confirm Nunes’ characterization of Ohr: In his former position as the associate deputy attorney general under then-deputy attorney general Sally Yates, Ohr began feeding the FBI information from Christopher Steele, the former British spy who put together the unverified Trump dossier. Steele continued providing information to the FBI through Ohr, after the FBI had officially cut him off as a source and ordered him to stop gathering “intel.” Steele had leaked the investigation to the press. . .

While the oversight committee will be most concerned with understanding the role governmental actors played in Spygate, before questioning Ohr on those details, Gowdy should first establish the identity of everyone on the outside connected to the investigation of Russia and Trump. We know Ohr spoke with his wife Nellie Ohr, who also worked on the Russia opposition-research project funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, as well as Steele and Steele’s Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson.

Who else, if anyone, provided Ohr with information on Russia or Trump? Who else provided Steele, Simpson, Nellie, Fusion, or governmental agencies information on Russia or Trump? Were there other sources? Were they paid? How did these individuals communicate? What telephone or text numbers, email accounts, or other methods of communication were used? What in-person meetings occurred? Where and why? . . .

Next, the oversight committee should ask Ohr to reveal the name of every individual within the DOJ who knew that he had contacts with Steele and Simpson about the Russia investigation. Similarly, the committee should ask which DOJ officials knew that Nellie worked for Fusion and was involved in investigating Trump. (Read more from “Here Are the Questions Bruce Ohr Needs to Answer in His Testimony Before Congress” HERE)

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The Fall and Future Rise of Catholicism

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Satan: “Give me one hundred years and I can destroy the Catholic Church.”

God: “You have it.”

This visionary exchange is not an obscure rumor in a small backwater village, but from Pope Leo himself, in 1884, after he collapsed saying Mass one morning in the Vatican. When he came to, he immediately composed the famous Prayer to St. Michael and ordered it read aloud at the end of every Mass. Many Catholic parishes still do.

Catholics and non-Catholics alike have a right to know what is going on in the Catholic Church. A confusing and inconsistent pope is augmented by homosexuals within the Vatican and in many of the key positions. Papal appointments point to ominous signs of continued confusion.

Just when this hundred years began, and whether it was a literal hundred years, we do not know. But fast forward to the Fatima visions of 1917, warning of Russia’s role in the destruction of freedom and the Church, and then when Joe Stalin ordered the historically acknowledged infiltration of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s. That he ordered the same to be done to the Catholic Church was only logical. Himself a former seminarian, Stalin realized that homosexuals would be his best agents, men who had lost any sense of natural law, sacrilege, conscience, or fear of Judgment.

While Russia even now is rediscovering Christianity, the influence of communism continues in the west. Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand were close personal friends of Pope John Paul II before and after his rise to the papacy. Dietrich takes his place with the great Catholic intellects of the 20th century who opposed both fascism and communism.

Dietrich privately interviewed ex-communist Bella Dodd, an admitted Stalinist agent, after she had testified before Congress in the 1950s. She returned to Catholicism under the aegis of America’s most famous Catholic of the 20th century, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Dodd said that she herself placed 1200 communist/homosexuals into American seminaries and knew that the number was over 3,000 from the work of other agents.

Alice, about thirty years Dietrich’s junior and now in her 90s gave a long interview with the Catholic news site Church Militant, the thorn in the side of the USCCB. She stated that as each subsequent generation of homosexual prelates wormed themselves into the hierarchy, they made sure that faithful priests were punished and marginalized, while pliant ones were brought

into the matrix. They would be rewarded with influence and appointments, then coached into promoting the denigration of the rich legacy of Catholicism.

Becoming drum-beat supporters of socialism was part of the agenda, rather than the far more effective and selfless reputation of Catholic institutions. Contraception and abortion were to be scorned or sidelined in importance. Instruction in the faith was to be insipid, and liturgical “reforms” transferred the essence of the Mass from an unbloody sacrifice of depth and mystery into a shallow, informal celebration where the focus became Man rather than God. Thus, we can now understand the completely unauthorized changes that came under the false “Spirit of Vatican II”. They now have generations of momentum behind their acceptance.

The earthquakes of confusion initiated by Pope Francis are now seen in the light of this homosexual or Lavender Mafia. It explains the marginalization of faithful Catholics who have begged for relief from the many ills plaguing the Church. This includes the mysterious staying power of “Catholic” politicians, who have worked in concert promoting the sexual revolution, socialism, homosexuality, contraception and abortion.

Even as prayers were said in churches throughout the United States this week, the focus was only on the victims, unquestionably just and necessary. However, not once did the prayers or letters mention the word “homosexuality” and refused to confront the foundational evil that has infected the Church: bishops and priests who are practicing homosexuals themselves or protect those who are, whether willingly or through intimidation.

The almost daily exposure of this is likely an answer to prayer. Catholicism has an uncanny ability to resurface after every crisis brings it to the edge of annihilation. Since Christ’s Passion, this has been discovered by the Romans, Arians, Moslems, Norsemen, Albigensians, Protestants, and the French Revolutionaries.

We await the certain rebound of the Church. It will be smaller, but stronger. It is the solution Jesus took when his disciples walked away from him in John 6 because of His “hard sayings”. It might even reunite much of Christendom. It will take a while.

But it will happen.

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Bill Clinton Got His Supreme Court Pick While Under Investigation. Trump Should Get His.

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Back in July, some Senate Democrats started demanding that the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh be delayed until after the Mueller investigation is finished.

None of them, however, explained the connection between the two.

Now, after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction stemming from the Mueller investigation, they are at it again. They make no more sense today than they did a month ago, especially given that some of those senators have openly opposed Kavanaugh from the get-go.

As I wrote in July, President Bill Clinton was under criminal investigation in 1993 when he nominated Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Senate voted 96-3 to confirm her nomination just 42 days later.

A year later, Clinton was actually under subpoena when he nominated Justice Stephen Breyer. The Senate voted 87-9 to confirm his nomination and no Democrat feigned concern or suggested delaying the confirmation process.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said that the American Bar Association’s rating is the “gold standard” for evaluating judicial nominees.

Eighty percent of Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals received a “well qualified” rating from the ABA — a higher percentage than any of the previous five presidents of both parties. Yet most Democrats voted against more than three-quarters of those nominees.

Let’s be honest, these Senate Democrats oppose Trump’s every policy, nomination, decision, thought, word, and deed. So does it surprise anyone that senators who are unalterably opposed to the president and to his judicial nominees would scrounge around for some way to interfere with the Kavanaugh confirmation process?

Schumer said in 2009 that a nominee’s judicial record is the best way to evaluate a nominee. Yet most Senate Democrats refuse to look at the 700 opinions that Kavanaugh wrote or joined over a dozen years on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

So does it surprise anyone that senators who aren’t even pretending to examine this nominee’s record or evaluate his qualifications would grasp at straws to disrupt the confirmation process?

The time between Kavanaugh’s nomination and hearing will be 25 percent longer than the last several Supreme Court nominees. The Judiciary Committee has made public hundreds of thousands of pages of documents relating to Kavanaugh’s executive branch service.

Yet Senate Democrats insist on seeing emails from hundreds of George W. Bush administration staffers, with whom Kavanaugh did not work, about matters for which Kavanaugh was not responsible.

So does it surprise anyone that senators — many of whom announced opposition to Trump’s nominee before they even knew who it was — would make fake “arguments” that serve only to degrade the confirmation process even further?

No, none of this surprises anyone. (For more from the author of “Bill Clinton Got His Supreme Court Pick While Under Investigation. Trump Should Get His.” please click HERE)

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The Left Doesn’t Suffer From Trump Derangement Syndrome or Bush Derangement Syndrome. They’ve Got a Terminal Case of Republican Derangement Syndrome.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about Trump Derangement Syndrome — the media’s incessant inability to talk about anything but Trump, their determination to paint every action Trump takes as simultaneously idiotic and malevolent, their utter unwillingness to report on anything remotely resembling positive news for Trump. But the truth is that the media and the Left don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome — they merely suffer from Republican Derangement Syndrome. That’s the broader classification under which Bush Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome fall. It’s not just Trump they hate — it’s Republicans generally.

That’s perfectly obvious from the treatment of Vice President Mike Pence by the Left. Pence has been castigated as a theocratic madman, a “holy terror,” in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who asked, “Are you sure you want to get rid of Donald Trump?” Then there are authors Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner, who argue in their new book The Shadow President that Pence is “the most successful Christian supremacist in American history.” It’s become a meme on the Left that should Pence accede to the presidency, he would immediately impose The Handmaid’s Tale.

And that should be unsurprising. The same Left castigated John McCain as a radical, Mitt Romney as a racist, sexist, bigot homophobe. No matter which Republican follows Trump, we can be sure that the Left will dishonestly look back to the glory days of Trump, when Republicans were “truly moderate.”

All of which is why Trump is president in the first place. Republicans looked at Joe Biden suggesting Mitt Romney — Mitt Freaking Romney! — wanted to put black people back in chains, and figured that no matter who they nominated, they’d be castigated as the worst people on earth. They figured they might as well nominate a guy who wouldn’t take such attacks sitting down — they might as well get behind a counterpuncher. And nobody was better at counterpunching during the campaign — above and below the belt — than Trump. (Read more from “The Left Doesn’t Suffer From Trump Derangement Syndrome or Bush Derangement Syndrome. They’ve Got a Terminal Case of Republican Derangement Syndrome.” HERE)

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The Oligarchs’ War Against the People Goes Into Hyper Drive With Manafort, Cohen Convictions, Hunter Indictment

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As of yesterday, no reasonable person should remain convinced that the People control America. Three different activists were the targets of severe legal persecution solely because of their support for President Trump.

One of three – the President’s ex-campaign chair, Paul Manafort – was convicted of a series of felonies that amount to child’s play compared to the sins of the insider-trading-bastards who fill the halls of Congress. What gives? He dared help elect a populist to the presidency.

Also yesterday, Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, copped a plea to a series of felonies. He “confessed” – under threat of extensive jail time – that he conspired to assist then-candidate Donald Trump in committing criminal campaign finance violations. Of course, the pay-offs he pled guilty to were nothing close to the criminal actions of the Establishment in numerous US elections, including mine in Alaska where federal contractors actually used millions of federal dollars to actively campaign against me and reelect (by fraud) one of the Establishment’s favorite senators, Lisa Murkowski. In fact, numerous felonies were committed for Murkowski to retain her seat in the Senate. But, as we all know, normally only those who fight for the People get prosecuted.

And just when you thought yesterday’s news couldn’t get any worse, the MSM blasts out the indictment of Duncan Hunter. Hunter, one of the first Congressmen to endorse candidate Trump, was not-so-surprisingly also indicted for campaign finance violations. The Congressman – probably the poorest member of Congress and certainly one of the more outspoken ones – supposedly used campaign donations to pay his personal expenses, according to a federal informant. He may end up joining Congressman Steve Stockman later this year in the federal pen. Steve was convicted of similar violations after he spoke out against Obama and then had the nerve(!) to run against Establishment-pawn John Cornyn in Texas.

We the People must wake up to what’s going on in America. From shutting down our speech on social media, to prosecuting those of us who’d dare help elect someone who confronts the oligarchs, the pattern is undeniable: do anything to restore liberty and prepare to be squashed.

And never forget: the People do not control their government. Call it the Oligarchs, the Deep State, the Establishment, or whatever, it’s something other than us. It’s time to wake up and prepare to defend your liberties.

NOVEMBER IS COMING: I Don’t Want You to Get Paranoid About the Midterms, but It’s Time to Get Paranoid About the Midterms

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By Doug Ross. If you don’t show up in November, these will be your new leaders in Congress:

Impeachment proceedings? Non-stop subpoenas? More appeasement of China and Iran? Marxists in Congress?

Start mobilizing your family, your friends, your colleagues now. It is our mission to send these Communists packing in November. If you don’t turn out, if we don’t turn out, the #MAGA experiment is over.

Volunteer. And vote in November Like Your Life Depends On It. (For more from the author of “November Is Coming: I Don’t Want You to Get Paranoid About the Midterms, but It’s Time to Get Paranoid About the Midterms” please click HERE)
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What to Expect if the Democrats Win the Midterms

By Robert Oscar Lopez. Would conservatives achieve an easy victory against the left if it came down to civil war? The question seems less absurd by the day as tensions increase between the right and left. Many conservative writers seem to think the left would fold quickly and the right would triumph.

One has good reason to doubt that. Consider basic issues like political bias in universities, or religious integrity. After decades of exposés and outcries from conservatives over liberal tyranny, universities are as biased as they ever were. Past cases of anti-conservative persecution (including mine) remain unaddressed.

Meanwhile, in the world of Masterpiece Cakeshop, conservatives celebrate a largely toothless victory at the Supreme Court over a wedding cake for two men. While a small fortune went to defending a Colorado pastry chef who wouldn’t make a cake for a ceremony approximating a wedding, a dozen states have banned “conversion therapy” in terms so broad that many church ministries will be outlawed.

The LGBT movement is no longer worried about taking over state legislatures to stop religious liberty laws. Soon they won’t have to do that. They are gaining in power at the denominational governance level of Christian churches and changing doctrine so religious liberty will not even be an issue. The religious position itself will be so thoroughly corrupted that no Christians will have “deeply felt” convictions against homosexuality.

I am nowhere near as confident as Kurt Schlichter that the right wing could trounce the left wing in battle. . . It is true that conservatives have more guns and are probably better street fighters. But conservatives also cave in large numbers even when their most sacred cows are in danger – such as the First Amendment or Christian principles. The two latter issues sit at the core of academic bias and debates on sexuality, respectively. I have the war wounds from both battles and can attest to the repeating scenario: conservatives talk and talk about what they believe and how bad the left is. Then they give up droves when it comes time to fight. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Microsoft Uncovers New Russian Hacking Attempts Targeting Republicans Ahead of Midterm Elections

By AP. Microsoft said Tuesday it has uncovered new Russian hacking attempts targeting U.S. political groups ahead of the midterm elections.

The company said that a hacking group tied to the Russian government created fake internet domains that appeared to spoof two American conservative organizations: the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute. Three other fake domains were designed to look as if they belonged to the U.S. Senate. . .

The revelation came just weeks after a similar Microsoft discovery led Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who is running for re-election, to reveal that Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate her Senate computer network. (Read more from “Microsoft Uncovers New Russian Hacking Attempts Targeting Republicans Ahead of Midterm Elections” HERE)

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