I’m used to Australian commentary on the American election to be one-sided and Democrat, but the AFR piece this morning – These times call for a serious president, not a childish one like Donald Trump – reaches a new low in stupidity and ignorance. You would at least think that after eight years of Obama, he might be just a touch reticent about his own judgment in such things, but instead he can still write about the difference between outsiders entering the race when Obama did in comparison to now when the outsider is Trump:

In 2008, the challenger was The One. In 2016, it’s The Donald. Then, the themes of the day were hope and change. Now, the themes are anger and retreat.

If he can still write “The One” and the words “hope and change” without feeling the irony and disappointment, then this is one commentator who can with the greatest safety be ignored. I wonder why he thinks all this is taking place after eight years of Obama:

Every day, the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challengers have stepped into it. The West is drooping. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So his solution: more of the same. So let us have a look at who will be president if it is not Donald Trump. This is from Instapundit:

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

Not the Nine O’Clock News, or the news anywhere. And this is one that comes to our attention. How many others just like it are there?

Which really does make this article more than odd which is A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends on why he won’t vote for Hillary. Why is such an article even necessary? How can anyone who is even remotely Republican think of voting for her?

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

• Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

• Increase the defense budget.

• Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

• Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

• Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

• Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

• Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

It is hard to understand, almost as hard as to understand why people on the left also want to vote for Hillary.

I’m used to Australian commentary on the American election to be one-sided and Democrat, but the AFR piece this morning – These times call for a serious president, not a childish one like Donald Trump – reaches a new low in stupidity and ignorance. You would at least think that after eight years of Obama, he might be just a touch reticent about his own judgment in such things, but instead he writes about the difference between outsiders entering the race when Obama did in comparison to now when it is Trump:

In 2008, the challenger was The One. In 2016, it’s The Donald. Then, the themes of the day were hope and change. Now, the themes are anger and retreat.

If he can still write “The One” without feeling the irony and disappointment, then this is one commentator who can with the greatest safety be ignored. I wonder why he thinks all this is taking place after eight years of Obama:

Every day, the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challengers have stepped into it. The West is drooping. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So his solution: more of the same. So let us have a look at who will be president if it is not Donald Trump. This is from Instapundit:

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

Not the Nine O’Clock News, or the news anywhere. And this is one that comes to our attention. How many others just like it are there?And that wasn’t even what I thought was the worst of it. So let me add this from the Daily Caller link:

It wasn’t the first time Clinton consorted with mining moguls. In the waning hours of his presidency in 2001, Clinton pardoned Glencore International mining and oil magnate Marc Rich after his wife, Denise, made generous donations to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and his Clinton Library.

Clinton’s pardon erased a 65-count indictment against Rich for trading with Iran against the oil embargo. Rich did the Iranian oil sales while Americans were held captive in the country by the Mullahs.

Just how deep and far does it go? Which really does make this article more than odd which is A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends on why he won’t vote for Hillary. Why is such an article even necessary? How can anyone who is even remotely Republican think of voting for her?

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

• Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

• Increase the defense budget.

• Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

• Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

• Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

• Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

• Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

It is hard to understand, almost as hard as to understand why people on the left also want to vote for Hillary.

Whether he knows it yet or not, Paul Miringoff at at Powerline will vote for Donald Trump. There are nerves to settle and plenty of time to do it. But in his quite informative column discussing his uncertainties he brings two other columnists into it who are both deeply anti. You really do have to think these people ought to have their keyboards taken away from them for their own safety. The first is Michael Gerson:

Gerson contends that Trump is unfit to be president:

It is not enough for GOP partisans to assert Trump’s superiority to Clinton on this issue or that. They must justify that Trump has the experience, knowledge, temperament, judgment and character to be president of the United States.

Gerson argues that Trump fails this test because of his positions on illegal immigration and Muslim entry into the U.S., and because a New York Times piece showed Trump to be a “cave-man” when it comes to women.

The second article is by Robert Kagan:

He argues that Trump will bring fascism to America. . . . Kagan has announced that he supports Hillary (some attribute this decision to an affinity with the Democrat on foreign policy issues).

It’s not just an over-heated brain. The man is a moron with pretentions to insight. My wife gets mad at me for not explaining myself when I kick such stupidity out the door without discussion. But there are morons everywhere and you cannot parse their idiocies to the end of time.

Paul, you gotta stop reading these guys and worrying about their opinions. Steve Hayward is trying to explain things to you on your own blogsite: THE ENDLESS ENIGMA OF DONALD TRUMP. This is where things are heading, and you should be heading there along with everyone else: New Poll: Republicans Are Increasingly Positive About Donald Trump.

With Obama still president, the only person more mindful that Obama still has another seven months of havoc creation time available is Obama himself. Here is Victor Davis Hanson discussing How Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy De-Stabilized the World. But with time running out on Obama, as Hanson notes, this is prime time for troublemaking while Obama is still around:

Aggressors are not sure whether Hillary Clinton, if elected, will govern more like a traditional Democratic president committed to leading the Western alliance. And if Donald Trump were to be elected, no aggressor would know exactly why, when, or how he might strike back at them.

Given those uncertainties, it may seem wise in the waning months of 2016 for aggressors to go for broke against the predictable Obama administration before the game is declared over in 2017. For that reason, the next few months may prove the most dangerous since World War II.

Being published on the same day as we read all of this on Drudge:

CHINA WARNS USA: MILITARY READY ‘IF PROVOKED’
China Ready to Launch Nuke Subs…
NATO finalises military build-up to counter [more unpredictable] Russia
HUNGARY: US WANTS TO FILL EUROPE WITH MUSLIM MIGRANTS
Iran Is Demanding Reparations From US for 63 Years of ‘Spiritual and Material Damage’
EGYPTAIR PLANE DISAPPEARS FROM RADAR…

And what is Obama up to? Here is the latest news from Washington: Guard Charged With Assault After Confronting Transgender Woman Using Women’s Restroom, Police Say.

Those of you in Perth might be interested in seeing David Archibald, who is the author of the book Australia’s Defence (Connor Court), discuss all of this:

Free Public Lecture
Australia’s Defence
By David Archibald
Wednesday 25th May 2016
7:00pm at the Irish Club
61 Townshend Road, Subiaco
(between Hay St and Churchill Avenue)
Doors open at 6:30pm

The lecture includes 126 slides and will take one and a half hours. For a copy of the slide presentation, email him at: davidarchibald@australianliberty.org. I note that David is an ALA candidate in West Australia, but this should not in any way be seen as an endorsement for the ALA.

This is one of the most insightful articles on American politics I have come across in quite a while. The title is “Anti-Americanism is the Foreign Policy of Fools”, but it’s his sub-title that more closely explains the text: Anti-Americanism is the only foreign policy that the American Left needs. The point is that the left has no foreign policy other than to oppose Republicans. It is simply a vehicle for domestic political advantage. The actual outcomes across the world are of no consequence other than in terms of whether or not it allows Democrats to win elections. But what makes this policy so profoundly striking is that at the centre of the political views of the left, and what gives it whatever consistency it has, is a deep and unabiding anti-Americanism. The article begins with an observation on Ben Rhodes, who by now should need no introduction.

Ben Rhodes knows next to nothing about foreign policy. He has no idea whether Iran will get nukes and couldn’t care less whether it’s moderate or not. He’s a failed fiction writer whose goal is “radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely”. . . .

Rhodes sneers at the reporters whom he manipulated as knowing nothing. And he’s right. But he also doesn’t know anything. The condition is typical of an American left which has no foreign policy. It only has an anti-American domestic policy which it projects internationally without regard to its relevance.

What has brought Rhodes to prominence is his involvement in selling Obama’s capitulation to Iran.

The Iran deal had to happen to defeat “neo-conservatives”, the “war lobby” and whatever other leftist boogeyman was lurking around the premises. The men and women doing the defeating, like Rhodes, had zero interest in what was actually happening in Iran or what its leaders might do with nuclear weapons. They would tell any lie to help sell the deal because they were fighting a domestic battle of narratives. Iran wasn’t a real place. It was a fictional counter in a domestic ideological battle.

He provides another example from the previous Democrat administration:

Bill Clinton had no foreign policy. Like Obama, he viewed foreign policy in terms of his domestic conflicts with Republicans. He tried to engage diplomatically while retreating militarily. His botched intervention in Yugoslavia had strong similarities to Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya.

The argument is that American foreign policy is, so far as the Democrats are concerned, merely domestic policy. The consistent theme is opposition to traditional American values which means opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Anti-Americanism, like most prejudices, is a license for ignorance. By embracing a prejudice against their own country, Democrats have lost any skill at foreign policy that they once had. Instead of learning anything about the world, they resort to the easy answer of turning away from the confusing problems of other countries to blame them all on us. Anti-Americanism is the only foreign policy that they need.

Until now, the Democrats could maintain this position without actually damaging America itself although the damage elsewhere has been immense. That is no longer so. Either the policy will have to go or America will. It will be impossible for both to exist long term.