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The New American, by Selwyn Duke — January 1, 2019

Excerpt:

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Just as WWI was billed as “The War to End All Wars,” our democracy-über-alles foreign policy endeavors have been attended by a certain naiveté on the part of true believers. Consider: Why did we hellp create the monster that is modern China (it got rich on our backs) and embark upon nation-building, assuming that Western-style republics would flower in Muslim lands?

Among those sincere about the Westernization program, these follies were predicated on the notion that not only is our political system universally applicable, but that our “values,” to use that favored term of those who’ve forgotten virtues, would be universally accepted. Of course China would become like us. Why wouldn’t she? But the men who founded Western civilization and, specifically, those forging the United States, were under no such illusions.

For example, President John Adams noted in 1798 that our “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Did he have in mind when thus warning, tribalistic Afghanistan where the moral foundation is not the Ten Commandments but Sharia? Can China, if it remains the world’s most atheistic country, make work a system based on the principle of God-given rights?

“Democracy” is not a cure (and our system is a republic, actually), but a system fit for those who have been cured. As to this, if we’d long ago sent missionaries to such nations and could have evangelized them successfully, they might have the foundation of which Adams spoke. Of course, such endeavors are now considered old-fashioned, intolerant, impositional, and paternalistic. No, we’d never seek to impose Christianity.

Just democracy.

We try imposing a system of beliefs — “democratism,” if you will — without even realizing it’s merely the newest evangelization. This isn’t to say evangelization is bad or that our conception of government is ideal or flawed, only that our idealists’ blindness to what they’re actually doing is matched by their blindness to why it’s actually failing.

Evident here is a kind of ideological chauvinism and what leftist moderns once called “ethnocentrism.” Why would everyone else accept our “values”? Because they’re so obviously true? Even if so, man’s history isn’t one of hungry receptiveness to Truth, but moral-corruption-driven resistance to it.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/31066-is-the-liberal-international-order-2018-s-biggest-loser

Spitting and sputtering as they fade into history

The American Spectator, by David Catron — 12/31/2018

Excerpt:

Many longtime liberals find themselves bewildered at the continued antics of the Democrats at a time when they have a real, albeit small, window of opportunity to demonstrate that they have some acquaintance with the art of responsible governance. Thoughtful people like law professors Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, who understand that the nation’s polity will be far healthier if both major parties approach real issues seriously, are unable to understand why so few Democrats see that the perpetuation of puerile nihilism driven by unabated hatred of President Trump will end in disaster. Turley puts it thus:

In this age of rage, voters seem to have no patience, let alone need, for leaders speaking of abstract principles. They want immediate unequivocal action.… For Democrats, that all consuming purpose has led to the abandonment of core unifying values, including many that first drew me to the Democratic Party.

The explanation for this loss of the party’s soul to an unquenchable and wholly emotional desire to destroy Trump is captured in a one-sentence observation by Cicero with which Turley is certainly familiar: “Those who do not know history will forever remain children.” There is very little chance that the kindergartners of the Democratic resistance would recognize Turley’s allusion to the fabled “Days of Rage.” Nor do they grasp that their collective tantrum and lurch to the left is reminiscent of that which eventually produced the suicidal Democratic nomination of George McGovern and President Nixon’s 1972 landslide.

Thus, like so many angry children, nothing less than Donald Trump’s head on a platter will mollify them. It doesn’t matter to this bumptious brood that someone has to produce at least a plausible case proving his guilt of the “crimes and misdemeanors” without which no majority in the House of Representatives will try to impeach the President. This is what Alan Dershowitz, who leans farther to the left than Turley, has been trying to tell anyone who will listen, but that’s an ever shrinking audience in the media. Most want to hear that Trump is going down. ……………………

View the complete article including image and links at:

https://spectator.org/the-divine-right-of-democrats-to-drool/

American Greatness
By Nicholas L. Waddy| December 29th, 2018

Excerpt:

The media and the political establishment’s excoriation of President Donald Trump for his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the battlefield of eastern Syria has been blistering, as usual. Our exit from the Syrian Civil War is, in fact, well-timed and sensible. President Trump deserves praise for bucking the conventional Beltway wisdom to save the American people and, more importantly, American servicemen from this bloody quagmire.

It pays to recall how we became involved in Syria in the first place. In 2011, in the midst of the chaotic but hopeful “Arab Spring,” a number of global and regional powers, including the United States, decided that now was the perfect time to destabilize the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accordingly, the Obama Administration encouraged a popular rebellion, while denying the rebels the means to succeed in their revolt.

The result was a strategic and human nightmare. A civil conflict raged that wrecked the Syrian economy, obliterated cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and turned millions into desperate refugees. True, Assad is no angel, but the sufferings of the Syrian people since a host of outsiders, including the sage experts in the Obama White House, decided to “rescue” them have far outstripped any indignities that the Assad family could devise.

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View the complete article including image at:

Good Riddance, Syrian Civil War!

• Trump lashed out against Democrats again on Friday in a series of tweets in which he threatened to close the U.S.-border with Mexico 
• Incoming chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said shortly after ‘I think he is’ serious
• In addition to a wall, he said he wants an immigration overhaul
• Tied the dispute to trade as he threatened to toss out existing agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico that has been redesigned but not passed 
• In tweets on Thursday the president harangued Democrats for ‘stupidity’ that he said was driving them to oppose his strategy for fighting illegal immigration 
• Trump also said most of the federal workers who are out of work because of the partial government shutdown are Democrats
• That, he claims, should motivate his adversaries in Congress to negotiate with him over funding for his long-promised border wall 
• Partial shutdown, which affects workers paid through agencies that administer one-quarter of the federal budget, is entering its seventh day 
• It will continue until early next week at least and is likely to last into 2019 

Daily Mail, by Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent For Dailymail.com — 12/28/2018

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump returned Friday to a threat to close the nation’s southern border if he doesn’t get his wall money from Congress. 

Trump warned as the weekend began that he’ll close every port of entry, if he doesn’t see progress not only on his wall, but on a total immigration overhaul. 

‘We build a Wall or close the Southern Border,’ he declared. 

He claimed in tweets in the last day that Democratic opposition to his wall is totally political in nature and is untethered from their assertions that his desired border barrier would be impractical. The president said they should work harder to end the current shutdown, because it mainly affects their voters.

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View the complete article including images, videos and links at:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6535535/Trump-says-forced-close-border-doesnt-wall-immigration-overhaul.html

File Photo: Kenyan Pres. Uhuru Kenyatta and Xi Jinping, 2013 (By Associated Press)

Nairobi fails to repay massive debts on shady loan for underperforming railway, Kenyan infrastructure ripe for the taking: reports

Taiwan News, By Duncan DeAeth,Taiwan News, Staff Writer – 12/27/2018

Excerpt:

African media reports that Kenya may soon be forced to relinquish control of its largest and most lucrative port in Mombasa to Chinese control.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – China may be preparing to seize some major assets in the African nation of Kenya, as a result of debt-trap diplomacy.

Other assets related to the inland shipment of goods from the port, including the Inland Container Depot in Nairobi, and the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), may also be compromised in the event of a Chinese port takeover.

Kenya has reportedly taken extremely large loans from the Communist government for the development of some major highways, and especially for the SGR, which forms a crucial transport link to and from Nairobi for the import and export of goods through Mombasa.

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View the complete article including image and links at:

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3605624

President Trump talks to reporters at the White House, November 29, 2018. (Jim Young/Reuters)

The attacks on him are piffle.

National Review
by Conrad Black
12/19/2018

Excerpt:

As the year ends, the Trump legal drama winds down towards its tawdry end. The immense fraudulent fantasy of a Benedict Arnold on steroids collaborating with a foreign enemy, a Manchurian Candidate “groomed for the presidency by his Russian controllers,” has come down to a squalid dispute between the president, his crooked former lawyer, and the publisher of the National Enquirer over the nature of incentivizing the pre-electoral silence of a porn star and a former Playboy bunny.

The slab-faced, trim and grim Robert Mueller, closing in like a heat-seeking missile on the start of the third year of the most ineffective and redundant investigation in history, could be a brilliant straight man, desperately serious and purposeful as he silently marches across our television screens every night in reruns of the same old news film in the elaborate pretense that he is doing something useful and important. It is the same pattern as the Clinton investigation, which began with the financial improprieties of Whitewater and meandered around to checking the president’s semen against a White House intern’s carefully preserved dress. The lust to tear down a president leads ostensibly serious and responsible people to act contemptibly, and ultimately to become absurd.

Many of the president’s enemies do not, cannot possibly, realize what is happening to them. It was well known long before he became president of the United States that Donald Trump was, by traditional standards, a somewhat déclassé character. As an impresario, he had sheared the hair off Vince McMahon, founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, before 90,000 people at the Pontiac Silverdome (but has compensated by making the temporarily glabrous McMahon’s wife the administrator of the Small Business Administration). His divorces and courtships prior to his relationship with Melania Trump were massively and often rather tastelessly publicized, and his entire public personality intentionally offends half the people, while amusing or pleasing the other half by his irreverence and disdain for the pompous, the indecisive, and the mealy-mouthed categories that enfold the majority of politicians. As president, Donald Trump has considerably moderated his formerly outlandish behavior. He often looks and sounds more like a president than George W. Bush referring to the country of “eye-rack” (Iraq), President Carter sitting in a cardigan beside a roaring fire in the White House fireplace telling the country to turn down its thermostats in the “national malaise” speech, some of the antics of Lyndon Johnson, or even Gerald Ford falling down the steps of Air Force One.
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View the complete article including image at:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/trump-victory-assured-robert-mueller-investigation/