Trump, Climate Treaty, and America's Sovereignty

photo credit: conservative tribune

E. Jeffrey Ludwig at American Thinker had some inspiring observations after listening to President Trump’s Rose Garden speech explaining his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Ludwig singled out this paragraph from the speech (his emphasis):

There are serious legal and constitutional issues as well.  Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, and across the world, should not have more to say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives, thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America's sovereignty. Our constitution is unique among all nations of the world. And it is my highest obligation and greatest honor to protect it. And I will[.] ... It would once have been unthinkable that an international agreement could prevent the United States from conducting its own domestic economic affairs, but this is the new reality we face if we do not leave the agreement or if we do not negotiate a far better deal."

Before taking  look at a few of Ludwig’s further thoughts on this speech, I would note that the EU folks took the bait, and they don’t even know it. The headline at The Independent:

Trump prides himself as being the ultimate deal maker - but he just broke one of the best deals we had

The Guardian reports that France’s new President, Emmanuel Macron responded (my emphasis): “I tell you firmly tonight: we will not renegotiate a less ambitious accord. There is no way,” said Macron. In other words, Trump slammed the door, and Macron et al nailed it shut. What cards are they left holding?

Ludwig comments on Trump’s decision to invoke America’s sovereignty in his speech:

In saying these words, President Trump announced to the world that we are departing from the trajectory of the U.S. toward globalization. . .

Sovereignty has not been discussed in the public square for a long time.  . . .

Trump is thus speaking against not merely membership in the Paris Agreement.  By speaking of our sovereignty, he is throwing down the gauntlet to our entire strategy of world relations during the post-WWII period.  His reference to sovereignty suggests to this writer that he is forthrightly bucking a 72-year trend toward multilateralism, a 72-year trend of diluting American sovereignty.  He is saying no to a furtherance of the many financial and legal compromises made when entering into to such extensive networks.  With great clarity, he closed his announcement by saying, "In other words, the Paris framework is just a starting point.  As bad as it is.  Not an end point."

Seeing that our continued membership would be the beginning of a further phase towards global governance, the president decided boldly to say "no."  We can conclude that his "no" is likewise to be seen as a first step – a game-changing, powerful, proactive step – toward regaining our precious sovereignty.

Read the rest here.

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A Good News Day

art credit: pinterest

President Trump announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty. Time to pop a cork. Another campaign promise kept.

Conservative Treehouse has the video of the President’s announcement today in the Rose Garden. 

Meanwhile, Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog is monitoring the liberal splodey heads in his aptly titled “Let the Hysteria Begin.” Check in for updates.

And tonight at 9, the Cavs meet the Warriors in the finals. Go Cavs.

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Obamacare Repeal? Here we go again.

art credit: angry.net

Just before the Memorial Day weekend, The Spectator reported that

Obamacare Repeal Will Be Hard and McConnell Just Made It Harder

According to this report, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave RINOs … more reason to dig in their heels:

This week in an interview with Reuters he said, “I don’t know how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment. But that’s the goal. And exactly what the composition of that [bill] is I’m not going to speculate about because it serves no purpose.”

Let’s count the ways that remark is foolish.

First, it sends a signal to RINOs in the Senate like Bill Cassidy (R-Gutless) and Susan Collins (R-Weak Knees) that McConnell isn’t going to fight very hard to repeal Obamacare. Thus, they can be obstinate in their demands, knowing that McConnell will eventually give in.

Second, it boosts the morale of Obamacare proponents. For example, both Talking Points Memo and the Daily Kos could scarcely contain their glee in reporting McConnell’s remarks.

Finally, it discourages the Republican base. How many times has McConnell said repealing Obamacare was a top priority? In 2012, McConnell insisted he would repeal Obamacare if he became Senate Majority Leader. He reiterated those sentiments the following year when he told CPAC that Obamacare should be repealed “root and branch.” About a month after Trump won the election, McConnell said the “Obamacare repeal resolution will be the first item up in the New Year.” Now he is, in effect, saying, “Gosh, this is too hard.” That sends the message to the Republican base that he was never serious about Obamacare repeal to begin with. It’s not a good idea going into the 2018 election with Republican voters thinking, “Yep, Senate Republicans sold us out again.”

There is nothing wrong with admitting that repealing Obamacare is going to be difficult. You’d have to be sprinkling something pretty potent on your breakfast cereal to think otherwise. But McConnell needed to do so in such a way that rallies the base, lets RINOs know that they won’t have much leeway, and puts Democrats on the defensive.

The rest of the report is here. Main take-away: The GOP hides behind the label “Party of Stupid.” It's better than being exposed as the Party of “Bought” – as in “Uniparty.”

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Memorial Day weekend in Cleveland

photo by Pat J Dooley Photography

Memorial Day parades and ceremonies in Northeast Ohio

photo credit: history.com

                               

Cleveland.com has a list of Memorial Day parades and events 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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Trump Derangement Syndrome behavior

 cartoon credit here 

So many of my friends and relatives seem to live rational lives, yet when it comes to politics, their emotions take over. That makes it next to impossible to apply critical thinking to a discussion of issues of concern. But it’s not a new phenomenon.

Paul Murphy just published a column at the American Thinker website, provocatively titled “Democrats in the Cesspits of Despair.” He goes into the theory of cognitive dissonance and applies it to what we’ve seen with Bush or Palin Derangement Syndrome, and now, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Murphy’s analysis won’t make hard left liberals (and that’s most of the media) more honest or less destructive, but at least it explains the behaviour. (Another article on the related topic of “The Obama Cult” is here).

Anyway, here are a few take-aways from Murphy’s column (and the entire article is here):

When Leon Festinger and his associates undertook the work leading to their widely misunderstood and maligned theory of cognitive dissonance, their ultimate goal was to understand how forty million decent Germans and tens of millions in the rest of Europe could so enthusiastically support Nazi methods -- and it's their research on how cult members react to the unequivocal disproof of some central belief that's important today -- because the increasing calls among Democrats for violence shows that same process at work here as in Germany of the 1930s.

In brief, what happens when events disprove a cult's major belief is that some adherents drop out; a majority first reshape their vision of reality to accommodate both their belief and an edited version of reality and then either gradually fade out of the cult or double down on their efforts to find confirmatory opinion by compromising others; and, a few set out to force others to act as if the belief stands unchallenged.

. . .

The key elements that have to be in place for the true believers to slide toward dishonesty and violence are personal commitment to the belief, undeniable disproof, and enough rationality for the person to know that the belief has been disproven.

That two of these are in place with the Trump victory deniers is obvious: most of the journalists and others now attacking Trump in particular and Republicans in general have overwhelming and long term commitments to the progressive cause. This despite the fact that every major attempt to act on those beliefs, whether by Uncle Joe, Chairman Mao, the Kim Dynasty in North Korea, or that great hero and champion of the poor, Hugo Chavez, has turned into a murderous regime corrupting everyone and everything it touched.

. . .

Thus the behavioral explanation for the fact that conservatives will generally accept electoral defeat gracefully whereas Democrats eagerly embrace hypocrisy, corruption, dishonesty and even violence to continue the fight by any means necessary is simply this: reality supports conservative belief, but pushes leftists down the slippery slope to the insanity of Trump derangement syndrome.  Reality forces them to continually choose between recognizing the emptiness and historical absurdity of their core beliefs or holding themselves hostage to those beliefs by escalating their commitment, no matter what foul means may be required to make reality conform to their fantasy.

The few times that I have had any success in persuading someone who leans liberal to reconsider their worldview, it’s been because I kept suggesting that they expand their sources of news. Most of the time, the person had at least heard of the Drudge Report or Yahoo News, but otherwise didn’t know about other alternative news aggregators (such as Real Clear Politics, or two of the conservative aggregators, PolitiPage and Lucianne). In other words, accessing more news has on occasion led to someone dropping out of the cult.

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