Three on the Fox bench

art credit: worldartsme.com

Subtitle: Hosts who don’t interrupt

Over the Christmas break, the pinch-hitters are guest hosting most of the prime time news and opinion broadcasts at Fox. In some cases, the bench team outperforms the regular hosts.

Guest host for Sean Hannity is David Webb. He is intelligent, he listens, and he asks follow-up questions. Webb is calm and collected and measured, never strident or frenetic.

Guest host for Tucker Carlson is Mark Steyn. Disclosure: Mark Steyn is my favorite online commentator/blogger. But Steyn as host, even when saddled with a ghastly line-up of guest talking heads, is informed, incisive, and FUNNY. (And when he is a guest on Carlson's show, he usually has Tucker in stitches).

Daytime host Brian Kilmeade subbed for Hannity or maybe it was Laura Ingraham, and not once did I reach for the mute button. He also has co-written a book about Andrew Jackson and The Battle of New Orleans and hosted a recent Sunday night special on the subject. It was excellent, and I hope Fox re-runs it.

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Judge Roy Moore vs RINO Mitch McConnell and the Uniparty

image credit: sol1776.blogspot.com 

Mark Steyn is a favorite of mine, and here are a few of his post-election thoughts:

[Judge Roy] Moore lost narrowly enough to suggest that it wasn't the accusations that did him in. He could have survived those, just about. What killed him was that he was running against both the Democrats and the Republicans - including Alabama's own senior senator, Richard Shelby. (Trump post-Billy Bush was in a similar position, as the likes of Paul Ryan, Kelly Ayotte, etc, stampeded to distance themselves.) But Roy Moore was the nominee only because the smart guys over-invested in Luther Strange (just as in 2015 they over-invested in Jeb Bush). In the first round of primary voting, Mitch McConnell's priority was to prop up Strange by taking out what he regarded as his principal threat, Mo Brooks. Congressman Brooks would have made an excellent senator, and would have been elected in a walk, and he can also claim more plausibly than Moore to be a populist conservative aligned with the Trump agenda. But McConnell didn't want him in the Senate and, as he saw it, once Brooks was gone, Luther Strange would have no trouble walloping Moore in the run-off.

Unfortunately, Strange owed his eminence in Alabama to the patronage of a corrupt and discredited governor. As I wrote three months ago, given the disposition of GOP primary electorates in the Age of Trump, they were unlikely to turn to "a creature from the Alabama swamp ...to drain the Washington swamp". So, thanks to McConnell and the ten million bucks he blew through, Moore won the run-off and became the candidate. And thus, of all preposterous outcomes, Alabama is now a blue state.

. . . 

A final thought on Moore: Yes, he's a kook, and an insufficiently nimble one to dodge the incoming schoolgirls. But as I wrote three months ago:

Whatever one feels about Roy Moore, he's principled enough to be willing to lose his job over the Ten Commandments and same-sex marriage. That's unusual in American politics.

Read Steyn’s full column here. I think he is correct to place blame on Mitch McConnell and the GOPe Uniparty. 

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There’s a Cleveland Connection

image credit: www.joyfulchristianliving.com

 Mark Steyn has lots more on the DNC computer hacking scandal:

On Monday night Imran Awan, the principal IT aide to former DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was arrested at Dulles Airport attempting to flee the country. "IT" means information technology, as in computers, as in hacking, as in what the Democrats insist happened to the election.

. . .

Monday's airport arrest follows the seizure of broken hard drives from the garage of the Awans' former home. 

. . .

What connects the "fake news" and the real news is the DNC. The Russia "story" exists because the election wasn't hacked but the DNC was. Wikileaks released the Democrats' embarrassing emails to the world, although, helpfully, the US media mostly declined to report on them. . .  As it happens, the world's most inevitable presidential victor somehow managed to lose the election, and casting around for a reason the Dems decided that blaming it on a stiff tired unlikeable legacy candidate with no message and a minimal campaign schedule was too implausible. So instead they decided to blame it on Russian "hacking".

. . .

Five months ago, as the coppers began closing the net on the family, other Democrats began distancing themselves from the Awan clan, notwithstanding their peerless IT skills. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York fired Mrs Awan on February 28th.

And here’s the Cleveland Connection:

Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio fired Mr Awan on March 1st. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not fire Awan until yesterday - after his arrest at the airport. 

Read more about this particular swamp here.

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The Manchester jihad attack

Victim in Manchester: eight-year-old Saffie Roussos

photo from Religion of Peace website

Being a Tea Party person, I subscribe to the three core values:

Fiscal responsibility

Limited government

Free markets

Those values are under attack by ISIS and jihadists who have declared war on all infidels, such as us. The Manchester suicide bombing is only the latest in the continuing jihad against Western Civilization.

And to hear the official government responses, the UK (and Germany and France and Sweden and . . . ) are still playing defense. That guarantees one result: more terror attacks. As usual, Mark Steyn nails it in his “Dangerous Woman Meets Danger Man” column:

Angela Merkel pronounced the attack "incomprehensible". But she can't be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care. . . .

the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism.

. . .

Few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly.

Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

. . .

If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I'd be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon - before it's too late.

The rest of his column is here.

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The War Against Trump

David Horowitz of the Freedom Center was raised a Communist. He rejected Communism in favor of freedom, and his perspective is always inspiring and insightful. And he knows how to call them [the Progressive left] out. Here’s his short piece on Front Page Magazine today (I’d bookmark it or email it to yourself for reference when you anticipate a discussion around the dinner table!):

the Democrats and their media accomplices have declared all-out war on the Trump White House. Under the guise of “resistance” – as though the Trump was the head of an occupying army rather than an elected president - they have set out to destroy his administration. They are not “sore losers,” as many had surmised when their hysterical attacks on Trump as an American Hitler began, they are an army of saboteurs bent on destroying the government the voters preferred. Their general, Barack Obama, is an unrepentant radical who abused the office of the presidency when he was in power, and as ex-president is now leading a war to overthrow his successor.  

With the election over, the Democratic Party is now in the hands of the Bernie Sanders-Tom Perez-Keith Ellison-Barack Obama radical left. Abetted by a corrupt media, funded by the anti-American billionaire George Soros, egged on by Obama’s corrupt attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and a collusive press, the left has launched vile and violent demonstrations in the streets, rancid witch-hunts in the halls of Congress posing as “confirmation hearings,” and treasonous intelligence leaks, which have already claimed Trump’s National Security advisor General Michael Flynn as their victim. Their next target Attorney General Jeff Sessions is already in their crosshairs, the object of character assassinations by senators Schumer, Warren, and other Democrats, and by their disgraced and disgraceful media accomplices. 

For none of this would have been possible without the active collusion of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the media networks who have promoted the false narrative of an alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to fix with the election. There is zero evidence of such collusion but plenty of evidence that Obama and his cohorts have disregarded the Constitution and the law to spy on reporters they don’t like, to use the IRS and other government agencies to take down their opponents and undermine the democratic system.

As I explained in my book Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, the source of this civil war mentality is a profound rejection of the American idea. This is the idea that we are equal citizens regardless of our origins, and that we are accountable as individuals for what we do. The left’s creed – identity politics – is an anti-American, racially charged determination to reject individual accountability and individual freedom, and to establish in their place group privileges, and racial/gender hierarchies. These hierarchies are based on the malicious premise that whites, heterosexuals and males are oppressors and - in the words of the Democratic platform - America is a society governed by “systemic racism,” which needs to be fundamentally transformed.

This collectivist, racial creed is the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party and its allies in the mainstream media. It is the inspiration for the war Democrats have declared on the newly elected government of Donald Trump. In his inaugural address, Trump addressed the war in uncompromising but thoroughly American terms. “Through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other…. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice…. Whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag.” This is the American creed, and it is the voice of the American people who elected Trump in November 2016.

A War Against Trump??? Surely that is an overstatement. Um, ask Monica Crowley. (And for back-up on CNN's Crowley hit job, see here.) And look what CRTV / Mark Levin / and “a billionaire named Cary Katz” just did to Mark Steyn. And that’s on top of  Michael “Hockey Stick graph” Mann’s lawsuit again Steyn -- that is still stuck in the circuit court.

Unfortunately, it does not seem possible to overstate the case, and Horowitz sums it up.

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RIP John Glenn

Among several similarly-themed cartoons posted on the Townhall website, this one by Mike Lester was my favorite (with the sky-hook just out of sight).

Mark Steyn offered some sobering thoughts on the dwindling supply of American heroes here. He quoted John Derbyshire: 

Soon they will all be gone: the last participants in the human race's most astonishing, most audacious, most wonderfully inspirational adventure to date. 

Gone with them will be the memory of a U.S.A. that could accomplish such marvels, in those last years of heroic national vigor, before we turned our energies to guilt and rancor and divisive social crusades, and to persuading ourselves and each other that in the human sphere, everything is equal to everything else.

Steyn concludes:

John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.

Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.

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Steyn: Laws are for the Little People

art credit: zazzle

Mark Steyn has been on hiatus for several months, but he popped up yesterday and posted a column before the debate. As usual, he knocks it out of the park. The entire article is here, but here’s a small sampling:

As I've said for years - on radio, TV and in print - for me the overriding issue in American politics is the corruption. In the Obama era, we have seen the remorseless merging of the party and the state - in the IRS, in the Justice Department and elsewhere. Whatever one feels about, say, Scandinavia, they at least come to their statism and socialism more or less honestly. Not so the United States.

It's bad enough that Democrats aren't agitated about this corruption - but then it works to their advantage. Slightly more mysterious is why so many of my friends on the right aren't incensed by it.

. . .

Needless to say, if you get your news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc, etc, you will be entirely unaware of all this. 

. . .

The present arrangements work for the political class, the permanent bureaucracy, their client groups, and the lawless. But not for millions of the law-abiding. Consider illegal immigration, for example, which pre-Trump was entirely discussed in terms of the interests of the lawbreakers - how to "bring them out of the shadows", how to give them "a path to citizenship", celebrate their "family values" and "work ethic" - and never in terms of the law-abiding, whose wages they depress, whose communities they transform, and, in too many criminal cases, whose lives they wreck.  . . .

. . .

Hillary is the most known known in the history of knowns. And what we know of her is that she's stinkingly corrupt, above the law, and able to suborn entire government agencies in the cause of her corruption. Where do you think we're gonna be after eight years of that?

As Trump says repeatedly. “We will never fix a rigged system by relying on the people who rigged it in the first place.” The full article is on Steyn's website here. 

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