3 January 2018
The Times Rides to Mueller’s Rescue
Wednesday - January 3, 2018 at 12:36 am

This post was viewed 71 times.
Votes: 5.00 Stars!
Share Pat's Columns!
By Patrick J. Buchanan
What caused the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, which evolved into the criminal investigation that is said today to imperil the Trump presidency?
As James Comey’s FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have, for 18 months, failed to prove Donald Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, what was it, in mid-2016, that justified starting this investigation?
What was the basis for the belief Trump was colluding, that he was the Manchurian candidate of Vladimir Putin? What evidence did the FBI cite to get FISA court warrants to surveil and wiretap Trump’s team?
Republican congressmen have for months been demanding answers to these questions. And, as Mueller’s men have stonewalled, suspicions have arisen that this investigation was, from the outset, a politicized operation to take down Trump.
Feeding those suspicions has been the proven anti-Trump bias of investigators. Also, wiretap warrants of Trump’s team are said to have been issued on the basis of a “dirty dossier” that was floating around town in 2016 — but which mainstream media refused to publish as they could not validate its lurid allegations.
Who produced the dossier?
Ex-British spy Christopher Steele, whose dirt was delivered by ex-Kremlin agents. And Steele was himself a hireling of Fusion GPS, the oppo research outfit enlisted and paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Writes the Washington Times, Steele “paid Kremlin sources with Democratic cash.”
Yet, if Steele’s dossier is a farrago of falsehoods and fake news, and the dossier’s contents were used to justify warrants for wiretaps on Trump associates, Mueller has a problem.
Prosecutions his team brings could be contaminated by what the FBI did, leaving his investigation discredited.
Fortunately, all this was cleared up for us New Year’s Eve by a major revelation in The New York Times. Top headline on page one:
“Unlikely Source Propelled Russia Meddling Inquiry”
The story that followed correctly framed the crucial question:
“What so alarmed American officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?”
The Times then gave us the answer we have been looking for:
“It was not, as Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”
The ally: Australia, whose ambassador to Britain was in an “upscale London Bar” in the West End in May 2016, drinking with a sloshed George Papadopoulos, who had ties to the Trump campaign and who informed the diplomat that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos had reportedly been told in April that Russia had access to Clinton’s emails.
Thus, when the DNC and John Podesta emails were splashed all over the U.S. press in June, Amb. Alexander Downer, recalling his conversation with Papadopoulos, informed his government, which has excellent ties to U.S. intelligence, and the FBI took it from there.
The Times’ story pounds home this version of events:
“The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Trump’s associates conspired.”
This, the Times assures us, “answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year.”
Well, perhaps.
But if Papadopoulos’s drunken babbling to the Aussie ambassador triggered the investigation in July 2016, why was George not interviewed by the FBI until January 2017?
According to the Times, an FBI agent in Rome had been told by Steele in June 2016 what he had learned from the Russians.
And Steele was interviewed by the FBI in October 2016.
If Papadopoulos triggered the investigation, why the seeming FBI disinterest in him — as compared to Steele?
Yet another major question remains unanswered.
If, as the Times writes, the FBI was looking “into Russian attempts to disrupt the elections,” why did the FBI not open an investigation into the KGB roots of the Steele dossier that was written to destroy the Republican candidate, Donald Trump?
If Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Putin to damage Clinton was worthy of an all-out FBI investigation, why did the Clinton-DNC scheme to tie Trump to Russian prostitutes, using British spies and former KGB agents, not merit an FBI investigation?
Why was there less concern about the Clinton campaign’s ties to Russian agents, than to Trumpian “collusion” that is yet unproven?
Consider what the British spy Steele and his former KGB/FSB comrades accomplished:
They have kept alive a special counsel’s investigation that has divided our country, imperiled the FBI’s reputation, preoccupied and damaged a president, and partially paralyzed the U.S. government.
Putin must be marveling at the astonishing success of his old comrades from KGB days, who could pull off an intelligence coup like this and so cripple the superpower that won the Cold War.

Buchanan

he is Catholic, I think

convert? But anyway.. need more Catholics in politics

It would be nice if we had a coherent foreign policy, based on America's true interests.  

Trump: In Immigration Debate, Race Matters
Tuesday - January 16, 2018 at 2:39 am

This post was viewed 57 times.
Votes: 5.00 Stars!
Share Pat's Columns!

By Patrick J. Buchanan
President Trump “said things which were hate-filled, vile and racist. … I cannot believe … any president has ever spoken the words that I … heard our president speak yesterday.”
So wailed Sen. Dick Durbin after departing the White House.
And what caused the minority leader to almost faint dead away?
Trump called Haiti a “s—-hole country,” said Durbin, and then asked why we don’t have more immigrants from neat places “like Norway.”
With that, there erupted one of the great media firestorms of the Trump era. On Martin Luther King Day, it was still blazing.
Trump concedes he may have disparaged Haiti, which, at last check, was not listed among “Best Places to Live” in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Trump insists he did not demean the Haitian people.
Still, by contrasting Norway as a desirable source of immigrants, as opposed to Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, Trump tabled a question that is roiling the West, the answer to which will decide its fate.
Trump is saying with words, as he has with policies, that in taking in a million people a year, race, religion and national origin matter, if we are to preserve our national unity and national character.
Moreover, on deciding who comes, and who does not, Americans have the sovereign right to discriminate in favor of some continents, countries and cultures, and against others.
Moreover, in stating his own preferences, Trump is in a tradition as old as the Republic.
The original Colonies did not want Catholics here. Ben Franklin feared Pennsylvania was being overrun by stupid Germans:
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
Just as anti-immigrant parties have arisen in Europe to stem the flood of refugees from the Mideast and Africa, an American Party (“Know-Nothings”) was formed to halt the surge of Irish immigrants during the Potato Famine of 1845-1849.
Lincoln wanted slaves repatriated to Africa. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we had Chinese and Japanese exclusion acts.
“Californians have properly objected” to Japanese migrants, said V.P. nominee FDR “on the sound basic ground that … the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”
After the Great Migration of Italians, Poles, Jєωs and East Europeans, from 1890 to 1920, the Immigration Act of 1925 established quotas based on the national origins of the American people in 1890, thus favoring Brits, Scots-Irish, Irish and Germans.
Civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, a major figure in Dr. King’s March on Washington, said of the Harding-Coolidge restrictive quotas:
“We favor reducing immigration to nothing … shutting out the Germans … Italians … Hindus … Chinese and even the Negroes from the West Indies. The country is suffering from immigration indigestion.”
The Senate floor leader of the 1965 Immigration Act addressed what were then regarded as valid concerns about the future racial and ethnic composition of the country. Sen. Edward Kennedy pledged:
“Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually … the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. … S. 500 will not inundate America with immigrants from … the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”
What Kennedy assured America would not happen, did happen.
Today, issues of immigration and race are tearing countries and continents apart. There are anti-immigrant parties in every nation in Europe. Turkey is being bribed to keep Syrian refugees out of Europe.
Boatloads of Africans from Libya are being turned back in the Med. After building a wall to keep them out, Bibi Netanyahu has told “illegal aliens” from Africa: Get out of Israel by March, or go to jail.
Angela Merkel’s Party may have suffered irreparable damage when she let a million Mideast refugees in. The larger concentrations of Arabs, Africans and Turks in Britain, France and Germany are not assimilating. Central European nations are sealing borders.
Europe fears a future in which the continent, with its shrinking numbers of native-born, is swamped by peoples from the Third World.
Yet the future alarmed Europeans are resisting is a future U.S. elites have embraced. Among the reasons, endless mass migration here means the demographic death of the GOP.
In U.S. presidential elections, persons of color whose roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4-1 Democratic, and against the candidates favored by American’s vanishing white majority. Not for the first time, liberal ideology comports precisely with liberal interests.
Mass immigration means an America in 2050 with no core majority, made up of minorities of every race, color, religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica of the wonderful diversity we see today in the U.N. General Assembly.
Such a country has never existed before. Are we on the Yellow Brick Road to the new Utopia — or on the path to national ѕυιcιdє?


Share Pat's Columns!

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-immigration-debate-race-matters-128528

I predict that by 2050 America will resemble Haiti and by that time will have ceased as a world power.
All because the Democrats want votes to win every election.

Is Democracy on the Way Down?
Tuesday - January 23, 2018 at 12:09 am


Votes: 5.00 Stars!
Share Pat's Columns!

By Patrick J. Buchanan
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country,” mocked China’s official new agency.
“However, what’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.”
There is a worldwide audience for what Beijing had to say about the shutdown of the U.S. government, for there is truth in it.
According to Freedom House, democracy has been in decline for a dozen years. Less and less do nations look to the world’s greatest democracy, the United States, as a model of the system to best preserve and protect what is most precious to them.
China may be a single-party Communist state that restricts freedom of speech, religion and the press, the defining marks of democracy. Yet Beijing has delivered what makes the Chinese people proud — a superpower nation to rival the mighty United States.
Chinese citizens appear willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, the price of national greatness no modern Chinese generation had ever known.
The same appears true of the Russian people.
After the humiliation of the Boris Yeltsin era, Russians rallied to Vladimir Putin, an autocrat 18 years in power, for having retrieved Crimea and restored Russia to a great power that can stand up to the Americans.

Consider those “illiberal” democracies of Central and Eastern Europe — the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Hungary.
To preserve their national character and identity, all have chosen to refuse refugees from Africa and the Middle East. And if this does not comport with the liberal democratic values of the EU, so be it.
President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that if the French had voted at the time Britain did, for Brexit, France, too, might have voted to get out of the European Union.
Why? One reason, and, no, it’s not the economy, stupid.
It is the tribe. As the English wished to remain English, and voted to regain control of their borders, so the French wish to remain who they were and are — whether ruled by a Louis XIV, Napoleon, General de Gaulle or the Fifth Republic.
In these countries, the common denominator is that the nation comes first, and that political system is best which best protects and preserves the unique character of the nation.
Nationalism trumps democratism.
Recall. Donald Trump was not elected because he promised to make America more democratic, but to “make America great again.”
As for the sacred First Amendment right to democratic protest, Trump got a roaring ovation for declaring that NFL players who “take a knee” during the national anthem should be kicked off the field and off the team.
Circling back to the government shutdown, what, at root, was that all about, if not national identity.
The Democrats who refused to vote to keep the government open did not object to anything in the Republican bill. They objected to what was not in the bill: amnesty for the illegal immigrants known as “dreamers.” It was all about who gets to become an American.
And what is the divisive issue of “open borders” immigration all about, if not the future ethnic composition of the United States?
Consider a few of the issues that have convulsed our country in recent months. White cops. The NFL players’ protests. Desecration and removal of statues of Columbus, Lee, Jackson. The Charlottesville battle of antifa versus the “alt-right.” The “s—-hole countries” crack of the president. The weeklong TV tirade of rants against the “racist” Trump.
Are they not all really issues of race, culture and identity?
On campuses, leftist students and faculty protest the presence of right-wing speakers, whom they identify as fascists, racists and homophobes. To radicals, there is no right to preach hate, as they see it, for to permit that is to ensure that hate spreads and flourishes.
What the left is saying is this. Our idea of a moral society is one of maximum ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, and, in the burying of the old wicked America, and the creation of a new better America, we will not accord evil ideas equal rights.
In the old rendering, “Error has no rights!”
That fifth of mankind that is Islamic follows a similar logic.
As there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, why would we allow inside our societies and nations the propagation of false faiths like Christianity that must inevitably lead to the damnation of many of our children?
“The best test of truth,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
But in our world, more and more people believe, and rightly so, that truth exists independent of whether people accept or reject it.
And there are matters, like the preservation of a unique people and nation, that are too important to be left to temporary majorities to decide.

Share Pat's Columns!

I read these

interesting

A Never-Trump Press in Near Panic
Thursday - February 1, 2018 at 7:26 pm

This post was viewed 78 times.
Votes: 5.00 Stars!
Share Pat's Columns!

By Patrick J. Buchanan
“All the News That’s Fit to Print” proclaims the masthead of The New York Times. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” echoes The Washington Post.
“The people have a right to know,” the professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hammered into us in 1962. “Trust the people,” we were admonished.
Explain then this hysteria, this panic in the press over the release of a four-page memo detailing one congressional committee’s rendering of how Trump-hate spawned an FBI investigation of Republican candidate and President Donald Trump.
What is the press corps afraid of? For it has not ceased keening and caterwauling that this memo must not see the light of day.
Do the media not trust the people? Can Americans not handle the truth?
Is this the same press corps that celebrates “The Post,” lionizing Kay Graham for publishing the Pentagon Papers, top-secret docuмents charging the “Best and the Brightest” of the JFK-LBJ era with lying us into Vietnam?
Why are the media demanding a “safe space” for us all, so we will not be harmed by reading or hearing what the memo says?
Security secrets will be compromised, we are warned.
Really? Would the House Intelligence Committee majority vote to expose secrets that merit protection? Would Speaker Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, who have read and approved the release of the memo, go along with that?
Is Gen. Kelly not a proven patriot, many times over?
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff, who earlier warned of a threat to national security, now seems ready to settle for equal time. If the majority memo is released, says Schiff, the minority version of events should be released.
Schiff is right. It should be, along with the backup behind both.
This week, however, FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein slipped into the White House to plead with Kelly to keep the Republican memo secret. Wednesday, both went public to warn the White House against doing what Trump said he was going to do.
This is defiant insubordination. And it is not unfair to ask if Rosenstein and Wray are more alarmed about some threat to the national security than they are about the exposure of misconduct in their own agencies.
The memo is to be released Friday. Leaks suggest what it contends:
That the Russiagate investigation of Trump was propelled by a “dossier” of lies and unproven allegations of squalid conduct in Moscow and Trumpian collusion with Russia.
Who prepared the dossier?
The leading dirt-diver hired by the Clinton campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele. In accuмulating his Russian dirt, Steele was spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin’s security apparatus.
Not only did the FBI use this dirt to launch a full investigation of Trump, the bureau apparently used it to convince a FISA court judge to give the FBI a warrant to surveil and wiretap the Trump campaign.
If true, the highest levels of the FBI colluded with a British spy digging dirt for Hillary to ruin the opposition candidate, and, having failed, to bring down an elected president.
Is this not something we have a right to know? Should it be covered up to protect those at the FBI who may have engaged in something like this?
“Now they are investigating the investigators!” comes the wail of the media. Well, yes, they are, and, from the evidence, about time.
In this divided capital, there are warring narratives.
The first is that Trump was compromised by the Russians and colluded with them to hack the DNC and Clinton campaign to destroy her candidacy. After 18 months, the FBI and Robert Mueller probes have failed to demonstrate this.
The second narrative is now ascendant. It is this:
In mid-2016, James Comey and an FBI cabal, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, lead investigator Peter Strzok and his FBI paramour Lisa Page, decided Clinton must not be indicted in the server scandal, as that would make Trump president.
So they colluded and put the fix in.
This alleged conspiracy is being investigated by the FBI inspector general. His findings may explain last week’s sudden resignation of McCabe and last summer’s ouster of Strzok from the Mueller probe.
If true, this conspiracy to give Hillary a pass on her “gross negligence” in handling secrets, and take down Trump based on dirt dug up by hirelings of the Clinton campaign would make the Watergate break-in appear by comparison to be a prank.
Here we may have hit the reason for the panic in the media.
Trump-haters in the press may be terrified that the memo may credibly demonstrate that the “Deplorables” were right, that the elite media have been had, that they were exploited and used by the “deep state,” that they let their detestation of Trump so blind them to reality that they made fools of themselves, and that they credited with high nobility a major conspiracy to overthrow an elected president of the United States.
Share Pat's Columns!

http://buchanan.org/blog/never-trump-press-near-panic-128652

8
February 2018 Trump — Middle American Radical
Trump — Middle American Radical
Thursday - February 8, 2018 at 1:18 pm

Share Pat's Columns!


By Patrick J. Buchanan

President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party.

Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley.

In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart.

Who, then, and what is Donald Trump?

In a Federalist essay, “Trump Isn’t a Conservative — And That’s a Good Thing,” Frank Cannon comes close to the mark.

Trump, he writes, “would more accurately be described as a ‘radical anti-progressive'” who is “at war with the progressives who have co-opted American civil society.” Moreover, Trump “is willing to go further than any other previous conservative to defeat them.”

Many “elite conservatives,” writes Cannon, believe the “bedrock institutions” they treasure are “not subject to the same infectious politicization to which the rest of society has succuмbed.”

This belief is naive, says Cannon, “ridiculous on its face.”

“Radical anti-progressives” recognize that many institutions — the academy, media, entertainment and the courts — have been co-opted and corrupted by the left. And as these institutions are not what they once were, they no longer deserve the respect they once had.

Yet most conservatives will only go so far in criticizing these institutions. We see this in how cradle Catholics find it difficult to criticize the Church in which they were birthed and raised, despite scandals and alterations in the liturgy and doctrine.

Trump sees many institutions as fortresses lately captured by radical progressives that must be attacked and besieged if they are to be recaptured and liberated. Cannon deals with three such politicized institutions: the media, the NFL and the courts.

Trump does not attack freedom of the press but rather the moral authority and legitimacy of co-opted media institutions. It is what CNN has become, not what CNN was, that Trump disrespects.



These people are political enemies posturing as journalists who create “fake news” to destroy me, says Trump. Enraged media, responding, reveal themselves to be not far removed from what Trump says they are.

And, since Trump, media credibility has plummeted.

Before 2016, the NFL was an untouchable. When the league demanded that North Carolina accept the radical transgender agenda or face NFL sanctions, the Tar Heel State capitulated. When Arizona declined to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday in 1990, the NFL took away the Super Bowl. The Sun State caved.

This year, the league demanded respect for the beliefs and behavior of NFL players insulting Old Glory by “taking a knee” during the national anthem.

Many conservative politicians and commentators, fearing the NFL’s almost mythic popularity in Middle America, remained mute.

But believing instinctively America would side with him, Trump delivered a full-throated defense of the flag and called for kicking the kneelers off the field, out of the game, and off the team.

“Fire them!” Trump bellowed.

And Trump triumphed. The NFL lost fans and viewers. The players ended the protests. No one took a knee at the Super Bowl.

Before Trump, the FBI was sacrosanct. But Trump savaged an insiders’ cabal at the top of the FBI he saw as having plotted to defeat him.

Trump has not attacked an independent judiciary, but courts like the Ninth Circuit, controlled by progressives and abusing their offices to advance progressive goals, and federal judges using lifetime tenure and political immunity to usurp powers that belong to the president — on immigration, for example.

Among the reasons Congress is disrespected is that it let the Supreme Court seize its power over social policy and convert itself into a judicial dictatorship — above Congress.

Trump is no Beltway conservative, writes Cannon.

“Trump doesn’t play by these ridiculous rules designed to keep conservatives stuck in a perpetual state of losing — a made-for-CNN version of the undefeated Harlem Globetrotters versus the winless Washington Generals. Trump instead seeks to fight and delegitimize any institution the Left has captured, and rebuild it from the ground up.”

The Trump supporters who most relish the wars he is waging are the “Middle American Radicals,” of whom my columnist-colleague and late friend Sam Francis used to write.

There was a time such as today before in America.

After World War II, as it became clear our long-ruling liberal elites had blundered horribly in trusting Stalin, patriots arose to cleanse our institutions of treason and its fellow travelers.

The Hollywood Ten were exposed and went to jail. Nixon nailed Alger Hiss. Truman used the Smith Act to shut down Stalin’s subsidiary, the Communist Party USA. Spies in the atom bomb program were run down. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair.

Liberals call it the “Red Scare.” And they are right to do so.

For when the patriots of the Greatest Generation like Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy came home from the war and went after them, the nation’s Reds had never been so scared in their entire lives.


Share Pat's Columns!

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-middle-american-radical-128704