Trump Is Necessary to Restore Two-Party Rule

 The enablers of the Never-Trump conspiracy-like George Will and Peggy Noonan get called out by Conrad Black.  "Complacent mediocracies" are good beginnings.  Pusillanimous Fools is a better description.  

The only justice in this is that the American elites, in gaudily demonstrating their complacency, mediocrity, and institutional dishonesty on a monstrous scale, have punished themselves before the entire world; unfortunately the whole nation shares in the collateral damage of this exposé of gigantic failure and usurpation. No further puppetization of Joe Biden, as George Will proposes, will achieve anything. 

Before this international nightmare of incompetence is over, George Will and Peggy Noonan and the other conservatives who should have known better will be well launched in their foreseeable effort to justify allowing snobbery, which was comprehensible up to a point, to override their political judgment. As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” and America will survive. Confession is good for the soul and the Will-Noonan axis could benefit from a bit of that, too. 

The country will not mourn their passing.

Press Now Plumbs Its Own Depths Of Depravity

There has never been a presidential campaign in the United States where the administration was so massively opposed by the principal press outlets as in this election. Nor, in at least a century, have the national political media so widely and thoroughly discarded the traditional criterion for journalistic professionalism: the clear division between comment and reporting.

Many aspects of the Trump presidency are unprecedented; he is the first president never to have sought or held a public office, elected or unelected, or a high military command; and this is the first presidency, at least in living memory, in which almost the entire national political press have completely and constantly misreported the president’s public remarks and policies.

The former newspaper of record, the New York Times, has been commendably forthright in declaring that it was opposing rather than just reporting on the Trump administration. Mr. Trump delivered the greatest speech of his career on Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, devoted altogether to celebrating the idealism of the American Revolution, the suppression of the Confederate insurrection in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and the enactment — albeit tardily — of the Jeffersonian promise, renewed by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, that all men are created equal. The Washington Post editorial board declared that he had reached “new depths of depravity.” This is an outrage worthy only of the press of a totalitarian country describing an opposition figure.

With few exceptions, the United States is now served by a national political media that is incapable of reporting about the president accurately, that baits him at press briefings with disgusting insolence, and that is extraordinarily negligent in ignoring or downplaying anything that reflects poorly on the president’s other enemies, the media’s allies in the war against the president.

The hideous permutation of the legitimate protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 — protests the president endorsed — into widespread arson, pillage, vandalism, and assault resulting in more than 20 deaths in many cities across the country was largely ignored or deemphasized by the media.

2020 Vote Looks Like 1972 — With No Watergate

Whatever anyone might think of the president’s public personality, his progress toward his goal of radically altering the government and shattering or co-opting the long-tenured OBushinton political establishment has been a relentless and unstoppable juggernaut. His candidacy was mocked, his chances of election were minimized, his ability to avoid impeachment was artificially maintained in doubt for over two years, and the idea that he will be easy to defeat next year is only starting to expire, strangled by facts.

The country is prosperous and the attempt to orchestrate economic pessimism will be no more successful than all the bunk about misogyny, incitements to violence, “racially charged” demagogy, corruption, treason, chaos in the White House, and the rest of it.

Conrad Black: The inconvenient truth about Trump — he's doing what he said he would

In fact, by the ultimate litmus test of the integrity of holders of high political office, the extent to which his record in office conforms to pre-electoral promises, Trump’s record has been the best of any U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929), who promised, and did, nothing, in the piping days of American isolationism, Prohibition and complete absence of requirements for collateral in borrowing to buy equities. (This was a bi-partisan policy trifecta that eventually gave us Al Capone, Hitler, the Great Depression and the Second World War.)

Trump promised prosperity, tax cuts, renegotiation of disadvantageous trade deals, the annihilation of ISIL, the establishment of a southern border that would control entry to the country, the shaping up of the military, revival of the concept of nuclear non-proliferation regarding Iran and North Korea, withdrawal from the inane and self-punitive Paris Climate accord, a resuscitation of education through non-unionized schools and incentives to the reintroduction of free speech in academia and the end of NATO’s condition as a gang of defenceless freeloaders (such as Canada), generously accepting a military guaranty of their territory by the United States without paying for it.

The fact that he has delivered wholly or partially on all of this is, to borrow a phrase from one of the great charlatans ever elected to U.S. national office, Al Gore, “an inconvenient truth” that the conventional media of the Western world have great difficulty acknowledging. The Canadian media would have to be scrutinized by a veritable Sherlock Holmes to unearth the facts that the United States now has 1.6 million more positions to be filled than unemployed people, that per capita GDP growth has tripled, the economic growth rate is more than three times that of the European Union, more than 50 per cent above the Obama record, and that working- and middle-class income and purchasing power are growing for the first time this millennium.

Of course, if you read the press here and in Europe, you would conclude that Trump is a dolt who never amounted to anything.

Democrats Are Painted Into a Corner

Conrad Black

Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the offense of obstruction of justice in his four-page summary of the Mueller report: a corrupt act for corrupt purposes in contemplation of a legal proceeding.

The attorney general, William Barr, the then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and the Justice Department counsel concurred that none of the elements was present in the conduct of the president as recounted by Mr. Mueller. The dream died, except in the febrile imagination of the Democrats, who launched an unfounded attack on the attorney general’s integrity.

Everyone knows that the prospects of a successful move to impeach and remove the president from office by two thirds of the Senate finding that he has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, as the Constitution requires, are less than zero.

The turn of the tables has been exquisite and complete. The idea that anyone ever nominated by a serious American political party would collude with a foreign power to rig a presidential election is insane. No one, not even a scoundrel such as Aaron Burr or a third-party naif such as Henry Wallace, would have dreamt of such a thing.

But in their desperation and denial after the unimaginable victory of someone pledged to clean out the entire political class that has ruled America since the Reagan years, the Democrats paid $10 million for a false dossier on Mr. Trump, corrupted and politicized the intelligence services and the FBI, set up an echo chamber of self-verification with the national media Trump had already reviled as dishonest, and provoked the creation of a special counsel to look into Trump–Russian collusion.

The Republican congressional leaders sat on their hands to see if the leader none of them had supported would be impeached, and the Democrats and their scripted press choristers smugly carped and waited like noisy crocodiles for their victim to be reduced to inert helplessness. Guess what.

America's best and brightest are our worst and dumbest

Conrad Black:

It is not now clear whether the Democrats’ pathological attachment to the fantasy that they have some chance of destroying the Trump presidency legally is based on continuing hysteria and frenzy, or addiction to continued harassment of the president even as the credibility of doing so plummets, or is an attempt to forestall the investigation and exposure of the malfeasance of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign in producing the fraud of Trump–Russian collusion. All serious observers can (and do) agree that there is no chance of removing this president from office by impeachment. It requires considerable perseverance and selectivity in canvassing the American media to elicit this fact, but the special counsel, Robert Mueller, despite his glaring anti-Trump biases and obscenely partisan group of investigators, found the president (and all other Americans) to be blameless on the charge of illegal collusion with anyone in Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Conrad Black: Still Dreaming of Watergate II

Of all the asinine and, at times, almost psychotic misstatements about the bone-crushing victory the president has won, the prize goes, with admirable historical symmetry, to John Dean.

It was Dean who led the destruction of lawyer-client privilege in the Watergate debacle, and with it of much of America’s claim to be a society of laws. Having been the corrupt source of many of the most fatuous illegalities in the amateur obstruction put forward by members of President Richard Nixon’s entourage, John Dean was the first rat down the hawser, denouncing his client, employer, and benefactor with contemptuous disregard for the truth and in the supreme demonstration of the evil of the American plea bargain system.

This perversion of the justice system, more than anything else, has ensured that prosecutors in the United States, win a percentage of their cases about equal to those of North Korea and Cuba. They extort inculpatory evidence against the main target by threatening witnesses and give the denunciators immunity from perjury and a sweetheart sentence.

Dean’s performance exceeds in venality even the antics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, American history’s most successful fiction-writers. (At least Gore Vidal acknowledged he was writing historical novels.) Odious though Woodward and Bernstein are, irritatingly imperishable though they are, as far as I know they didn’t break any laws and didn’t dishonor a learned profession. (Having employed thousands of journalists for decades, I can attest that they aren’t part of a profession and few of them are learned.)

And this ...

The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since the Civil War

Conrad Black

The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.

For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.

….Make Those Responsible Pay at the Polls

This entire monstrous travesty is finally coming apart without even waiting for the horrible disappointment of the special counsel’s inability to adduce a scrap of evidence to justify his replication of Torquemada as an inquisitor and of the Gestapo and KGB at rounding up and accusing unarmed individuals who were not flight risks. The collapse of this grotesque putsch, under the irresistible pressure of a functioning attorney general and Senate committees that are not hamstrung by NeverTrumpers, will cause a revulsion against the Democratic Party that will be seismic and prolonged.

The disgrace of their misconduct is profound and shocking. Richard Nixon, against whom there is no conclusive evidence that he broke any laws (although a number of people in his entourage did) never did anything like this. J. Edgar Hoover in 47 years at the head of the FBI and its predecessor organization, never tried to meddle in a presidential election. Those responsible will pay for this, including at the polls.

Without realizing the proportions of the emergency, America has survived the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. All those who legitimately oppose or dislike the president, including traditional high-brow Republicans who find him distasteful, should join in the condemnation of this largely criminal assault on democracy, and then, if they wish, go out and try to beat him fair and square, the good old-fashioned way, in a free election. But they must abide by the election’s result.

Conrad Black: "Mueller’s Got Nothing"

His probe has yet to uncover evidence of actual criminal acts by the president.

The revelations of the last few days are, though disguised, the crash in ignominy of the Robert Mueller putsch. But they are far from the end of the story. While the sire of the Mueller hit-squad assault, former FBI director James Comey, declared 245 times at last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he did not recall events that occurred in the last several years, the president’s official enemies confessed that the best they could do to show collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign was that lawyer Michael Cohen, who had almost nothing to do with the campaign, had received a message in 2015 from someone promising “synergy” between Russia and a Trump presidency. Cohen did not respond to the message. There is no evidence of such collusion, as chief FBI bloodhound Peter Strzok acknowledged to his intimate colleague Lisa Page in 2016, and collusion is not a statutory offense anyway, unless it is for an illegal purpose. Despite 29 months of mighty investigative effort, not a shred of evidence of such wrongful collusion has been adduced.

Collusion to rig the presidential election was cited by Hillary Clinton, along with being “shivved three times by Jim Comey,” as the reasons for her election loss, in her post-electoral memoir, What Happened. The first didn’t occur, and of the three administrations of the shiv, two were dubious exonerations about which the former FBI director now, under oath, has suffered a merciless attack of amnesia. An optimist could at least celebrate the end of this malignant idiocy of impeaching Trump for collusion with Russia, but there is something about the Trump phenomenon that is only now becoming clear: His support is irreducible and his enemies are inexhaustible, so, in the worst imaginable application of the tired phrase, the show must go on. His enemies hate him so fanatically, they cannot accept the absence of evidence against him.

Carl Bernstein, who predicted almost two years ago that the Steele dossier would bring Trump down, and announced almost a year ago that the president qualified under the 25th Amendment as mentally incompetent to serve, was nodded to approvingly by CNN’s always mechanically anti-Trump Brian Stelter when Bernstein asseverated that Mueller was causing the world to “tremble” by the gravity of his revelations. Poor Anderson Cooper, television’s saddest person, thought the “synergy” message, which Cohen did not respond to, “could stick.” Stick to what? He and his fellow commentators, adhering to CNN’s rigorous policy of 100 percent partisan hatred of the president, thought the whole business seemed “collusiony.” I submit that this sort of mindless, biased drivel is an assault on reasonable standards of public information and thus in some measure constitutes a form of animosity to the people. This lends a color of right to Trump’s references to his more perfervid media critics as “enemies of the people.”

Conrad Black: "Trump and His Enemies"

The United States is now like Egypt, in that the armed forces are the only respected institution left standing. A narrow majority disapprove of the president, and steadily larger majorities are doubtful of the judiciary, despise the Congress, loathe the academy, and detest the national media. In a democracy, somebody will pay for this, and it is unlikely to be Donald John Trump, the principal accuser of the others. Woodward should never have survived as an author after inventing the deathbed confession of a comatose William Casey in his nasty novel Veil about the Iran-Contra fiasco, but this time he took one for the losing team and shot himself in the head with a howitzer. Sending him into battle to win it for the Democrats two months before the election is like dispatching a small brigade of very aged arsonists to fight one of the California summer forest fires that the new prophet of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, says was caused by this president’s opinion of climate change.

Read the whole thing.

A Ghastly and Tasteless Escalation of Tensions…With Ourselves

Conrad Black on the war Trump finds himself in.

The response to the Helsinki meeting has been so extreme on all sides that questions about the maturity, stability, and intelligence of the entire American political community are incited and require some act of faith to deal with positively. Earlier U.S. presidents created shock waves as great as these but managed them better.

The Trump phenomenon and his assault on the political establishment were bound to cause immense convulsions....

There will long be debate about which side, Trump or his enemies, is chiefly responsible for this worrisome and unseemly escalation where his enemies want to remove him from office for undiscovered crimes before he is able to have them prosecuted and imprisoned for crimes of which there is, unfortunately, a good deal of indisputable evidence. Trump’s enemies could not resist the temptation to try to undo the election; he would have let bygones be bygones, but he is not one to turn the other cheek when attacked.

On Immigration and the Supreme Court, Democrats Are Snookered

Conrad Black via Instapundit

“One overconfident position of Trump’s enemies after another has been overrun, and now they are having to face the most blood-curdling horror of all: He may durably uproot and expel them from their incumbency and legitimacy as a permanent government, and he may actually succeed as a president. This is the explanation for the mushroom cloud of Democratic disconcertion about the ambivalent Anthony Kennedy. He provided the deciding vote on the three cases mentioned that closed this session of the Court, but he was pro-choice, pro the legality of Obamacare, and as liberal as he was conservative. All of the nominees on the president’s list of 25, from which the well-respected Justice Neil Gorsuch was chosen last year, are clearly qualified. All, when probed about abortion, will say something like what Circuit Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a practicing Roman Catholic with seven children, replied at her confirmation hearing, that no judge should allow personal views to get in the way of established law.”

The Kidman Doctrine Trumps George Will As John Bolton Rises

Conrad Black takes George Will and Richard Haass to the woodshed.

It is distressing to see my friend of nearly 40 years, George Will, writing such words of frenzied despair about the president and his national-security adviser-designate, John Bolton. It is also worrisome to see my cordial acquaintance of 20 years, Richard Haass, writing as mournfully as he did last week of the end of the Liberal World Order.

One expects, a year into an administration that went to war in the election campaign against the entire political class in both parties and among the national press (such as George Will) and the foreign-policy establishment (and Richard Haass is one of the best of them), that there will be panic below decks. One hears it every day from Joe Scarborough and Wolf Blitzer and their legions of screeching sound-alikes.

But George Will and Richard Haass are eminent men, flag officers on this ship. That George Will has a cultural and temperamental problem with Donald Trump is no surprise, and neither is Richard Haass’s concern that the Western Alliance is crumbling (though that, if true, has more to do with the Alliance-deaf previous two administrations and the flabby complacency of most of America’s so-called allies).

Read the whole thing, including the penultimate paragraphs:

This is bunk; Mr. Trump is returning to that policy. Richard also decries that “the U.S. is experiencing unprecedented attacks from its own president on the country’s media, courts, and law-enforcement institutions,” and relates this to the rise of “authoritarianism” in such places as Turkey, Russia, and China, and to Britain’s Brexit vote.

Mr. Trump isn’t the problem, but among the symptoms of the problem are that the director and deputy director of the FBI have been fired for cause as the Bureau virtually became the dirty-tricks arm of the Democratic National Committee, and that, as the Center for Media Studies and Pew Research have both recorded, 90% of national-press comment on Mr. Trump is hostile. Mr. Trump may have aggravated some of the current nastiness, but his chief offense has been breaking ranks with the bipartisan coalition that produced the only period of absolute and relative decline in American history.

Trump’s Quiet Victories

Conrad Black on Trump's ability to drive his enemies mad.

Donald Trump has not just been a distasteful opponent, as the D.C. political establishment generally considered Nixon; or a convivial Californian outsider like Reagan, who changed economic and strategic course but didn’t attack pillars of Washington incumbency. Nixon and Reagan had contested numerous elections as Republicans, and despite the odd rhetorical flourish, weren’t going to do more than make course corrections from their Democratic predecessors, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

But Trump was different. He launched a movement, paid for his own campaign, (no ghastly fund-raisers with the dumb, opinionated rich), dismissed the Bushes, McCain, and Romney as Clinton-Obama sound-alikes, and frontally assaulted Wall Street, Hollywood, the national media, the lobby system, and every adult in Washington D.C. (which voted 96 percent against him).

Trump’s crushing victory in the Republican primaries was attributed to the weakness of the other candidates―he would hit a stonewall with Hillary. His victory over Hillary was a freakish product of the vagaries of the electoral system (from which John Quincy Adams, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, JFK, and George W. Bush also benefited), and of Russian interference via Wikileaks and otherwise, and the conduct of FBI director James Comey. (Comey was at first praised for his “integrity” for recommending against indictment of Mrs. Clinton after recounting a sequence of her likely illegalities.) As was foreseen, the response of the solid anti-Trump press after the election was not that public grievances against Washington must be based on something, but rather that there were more racist, sexist, gun-happy, Bible-thumping, lager-lout philistines than had been appreciated....

The bizarrerie of the intellectual right is illimitable. My dear and esteemed friend George Will, after an acrobatic exercise in the columnar snobbery that Trump was unaware that Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the start of the Civil War, (Jackson was concerned about the danger of civil war throughout his presidency, as George knows and Mr. Trump was alleging), has fled into the television embrace of Rachel the Madd and Mika Buzzfeed at MSNBC, the most astonishing flight since Joachim von Ribbentrop went to Moscow. They have all walked the plank; President Trump has induced self-destructive political bilharzia in the deranged effigies of once-serious and important people. I still love them, but I grieve for them....

The self-targeted Democratic torpedoes, which Trump had the tactical intelligence to goad and then to consign to due process, were the lies about collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, and the challenge to the president’s constitutional authority over immigration, (reinforced by ninjas smashing and burning at Berkeley, and the mobbing of travelers at airports around the country and overseas). The torpedoes will come home on those who launched them in the next few months, warhead-first and at high speed. Then, frenzied partisanship will start to give way to the instinct of self-preservation, and the locked-arm solidarity of the Never-Trumpers will start to break up. The party of Jefferson and FDR is unrecognizable, but it can still be distinguished from a liberal ISIS. The president’s shortcomings are overly notorious, but his enemies are no longer of this world. He will win, and change the nation for the better.

Read the whole thing.

The press doesn't get it and never will. But at long last it's no longer important.

The mountain of Mr. Remnick’s adulation gives birth to a tiny, squeaking mouse. His explanation of Mr. Trump’s success, the tedious screed about Trump the psychotic, extremist dumbbell, is just a jangling echo of the Democratic campaign: a coast-to-coast, wall-to-wall smear job in the absence of any argument for the reelection of the Democrats. It would have been no less fair for the Republicans to have tied Mr. Obama hand-and-foot to Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

Mr. Trump won because the United States has had the 15 worst years of misgovernment by all branches and both parties, and the only period of absolute and relative decline, in its history. The new president will have a clear mandate for reform of taxes, spending, health care, immigration, and campaign financing; for a workfare program to address decrepit infrastructure; and for a redefinition of the national interest between George W. Bush’s mindless interventionism andMr. Obama’s Panglossian crusade to make friends of America’s enemies.

Donald Trump is the oldest and wealthiest person elected president, the first not to have had a public office or high military command, the first to pay for his own campaign, and the first since Washington to waive his salary. He has defeated the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, and almost all the dishonest, myth-making national press (including David Remnick). The national political press has declined even more precipitously than the political class, and the president-elect was elevated despite the animosity of both, a signal achievement whose significance those who have been vanquished show no signs of grasping.