Frank H. Buckley and the Republican Workers’ Party

About Canada and NAFTA but lessons for Australia as well.

About Canada: Justin Trudeau “is the world’s laughing stock”. “It should be embarrassing for Canadians.”

CF Mexico: “quietly got the deal” on NAFTA.

His new book: The Republican Workers Party.

The Republican Workers Party is the future of American presidential politics, says F.H. Buckley. It’s a socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road party, offering a way back to the land of opportunity where our children will have it better than we did. That is the American Dream, and Donald Trump’s promise to restore it is what brought him to the White House.

As a Trump speechwriter and key transition advisor, Buckley has an inside view on what “Make America Great Again” really means–how it represents a program to restore the American Dream as well as a defense of nationalism rooted in a sense of fraternity with all fellow Americans.

The call to greatness was a repudiation of the cruel hypocrisy of America’s New Class, the dominant 10 percent who deploy the language of egalitarianism while jealously guarding their own privileges. The New Class talks like Jacobins but behaves like Bourbons. Its members claim to support equality and social mobility, but resist the very policies that promote mobility and equality: a choice of good schools for everyone’s children, not just the well-to-do; a sensible immigration policy that doesn’t benefit elites at the expense of average Americans; and regulatory reform to trim back the impediments that frustrate competitive enterprise. It isn’t complicated. What’s been lacking is political will.

This book pulls no punches in describing how liberals and conservatives had become indifferent to those left behind. On the left, identity politics offered an excuse to hate an ideological enemy. On the right, a tired conservatism defined itself through policies that callously ignored the welfare of the bottom 90 percent. Trump told us that both Left and Right had betrayed the American people, and his Republican Workers Party promises to renew the American Dream. Buckley shows how it will do so.

What’s wrong with these people?

Here’s the conclusion to: Is Chaos an Impeachable Offense?

So we are left only with “Trump did it,” and therefore he should be impeached, declared insane, sued, forced to resign, or face an intervention from “loyal” patriot aides because of his impulsiveness and lack of “first principles” that had given us the above status quo. Even the recent anonymous New York Times op-ed author offered no real explanations of what exactly Trump has done wrong that would warrant anti-democratic removal other than to concede that Trump has done things that most felt were long overdue. And he made changes in a rude and uncouth manner that the establishment did not like — just as a nude emperor in invisible clothes does not like it when an outsider observes that he is naked.

You can read it all but you know most of it already. What no one knows is how the other half can be made to work with us in achieving the kinds of outcomes you would have thought they would want as much as we do.

Other than the Swedes who cares about the Swedish election?

From Swedish election: deadlock as far right makes gains.

  • Sweden faces a period of political uncertainty after an election that did not leave either main parliamentary bloc with a majority
  • With more than 99% of the vote counted, the centre-left bloc is sitting on 40.6% and the centre-right on 40.2%
  • Analysts predict long negotiations, potentially taking weeks, will be needed to create a majority or a plausible minority government
  • The populist, anti-immigrant party Sweden Democrats won 17.6% of the vote, up on the 12.9% it scored in 2014, but well below the 25% predicted in some polls.
  • The governing Social Democrats, led by prime minister Stefan Löfven, saw their score fall to 28.4%, the lowest for a century but maintained their record of finishing first in every election since 1917
  • Löfven said he would not be resigning, and urged cross-bloc cooperation. He also said the Sweden Democrats “can never, and will never, offer anything that will help society. They will only increase division and hate.”

In fact, part of the biggest story of our times.

Does this man really have a constituency?

Is political judgement so inane that this will actually gather votes for the Democrats: Obama, on campaign swing, urges ‘sanity in our politics’. I, too, urge sanity, but to vote the Dems back in is the last thing that would ever occur to me.

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Former President Barack Obama said Saturday that November midterm elections would give Americans “a chance to restore some sanity in our politics,” taking another swipe at his successor as he raises his profile campaigning for fellow Democrats to regain control of the House.

Obama didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name during a 20-minute speech in the key Southern California battleground of Orange County but the allusions were clear….

His appearance — one day after a strongly worded critique of Trump at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — touched on themes of retirement security, climate change and education.

“If we don’t step up, things can get worse,” the former president told the audience at the Anaheim Convention Center. “In two months, we have the chance to restore some sanity to our politics. We have the chance to flip the House of Representatives and make sure there are real checks and balances in Washington.”

I’m not sure what it would take to make some people shift away from the fantasists of the left, but it is truly beyond me that any American is not happy to have seen the last of him.

Found at Drudge, who does seem to be drifting away from PDT in how and what he posts.

PDT v BHO

Sanctimony in action. Unbelievably shallow.

PDT’s reply.

Yet the media, most of the academic world, large slices of the American voting population would go back to the most incompetent presidency in history. Eight years of decline and not a single accomplishment I can think of during all of the years he was in office. Now he even wants to claim the recovery is due to him. And in a sense it is, since DJT could only have become president because Obama had preceded him.

This is why Trump won

The AFR have republished the anonymous “Senior White House Official” oped from the New York Times.

This paragraph stood out for me.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Yes. Indeed. That is why the electorate voted for person whose motto was “drain the swamp”.

SK ADD-ON: I didn’t want to start a second thread on this same topic, but I was going to link to the NYT article in the AFR, but also mention the AFR’s editorial titled, “ScoMo must have a crack at real economic reform”. So let me just note that there is a “resistance” here in Australia as well, some of it in the public service, if you will pardon the expression, and some even within the Liberals’ own party room. The words “economic reform” are a platitude; even the folks in Venezuela began with the promise of “economic reform”. The “resistance” in PDT’s administration are holdovers from Obama, who never once had the economy reach even three percent growth. So let me just add this from Breitbart.

For the first time since those passenger planes hit the World Trade Center 17 long years ago, Trump has at long last returned America to peace and prosperity… Something so rare, no one under the age of 30 even remembers what it’s like.

Well, let me tell you, I remember peace and prosperity, I recognize it when I see it, I see it now, and it is glorious and long overdue and hard-earned, and the guy who deserves the most credit for delivering it — all I can say is God bless his style, and goddamn the hysterics trying to gaslight me into caring about anything other than the substance his style delivers.

I have the same attitude to Scott Morrison. He seems to have the right instincts and would like to do the kinds of things I want done here. But there is resistance at every turn. For all that, he likes coal-driven energy, wants to limit the power of unions, seeks to balance the budget and add momentum to private sector activity by cutting regulations and other artificial impedements. You wouldn’t get any of that from our erstwhile PM and you certainly won’t get it if Labor wins the next election.

Keeping up with the outrage du jour

It’s hard to keep up with the stream of left perfidy and gross stupidity. Where we are today is the New York Times with their article from some deep state malcontent slagging off on the Trump administration while pretending to work on the elected president’s agenda. First from the President himself:

You can read the article here. A self-confessed deep state operative who is attempting to subvert the elected will of the nation. For more, treat yourself to these:

WASH POST: FRANTIC HUNT FOR LEAKERS...
TUCKER CARLSON: Pretty Good Idea Who Wrote Op-Ed...
TRUMP DEMANDS SOURCE...
HUNDREDS FIT 'SENIOR' LABEL...
Bookies place odds...
Tweet Gives Author Gender Clue?
WORD SLEUTHING...
MAG: Reveal yourselves!
GREENWALD: Unelected Cabal... 

None of this is to be confused with the book from notorious media collector of anonymous and therefore unvarifiable sources, Bob Woodward, who released excerpts from his forthcoming tome the day before. Hardly anything about it today since the NYT has crowded it out. However, here is a contrary view, which you will not be able to find on Google – Deep State interviewer instead, as is the way of the world, but it is Sarah Sanders so all is good:

 

And then the day before that, and I suppose still continuing, there is the confirmation hearings for the next Supreme Court justice. From Instapundit:

THEY KEEP TELLING US TRUMP IS CRAZY, AND THEN . . . ACTING CRAZY: The Democrats’ No Good, Frivolous, Ridiculous Day. “It strikes me that the Democratic Party crossed a Rubicon of sorts today. They abandoned all norms not just of civility–something they purported to yearn for just a few days ago!–but of sanity. They deliberately turned a Senate confirmation hearing into a farce. There was no distinction between the howling left-wing mob that infiltrated the hearing room and the Senate Democrats. Not long ago, some Democrats resisted the crazier fringes of their party. No longer. There is no daylight among the violent fascist group Antifa, the crazed Democratic activists bleating about impeachment, and the establishment Democratic Party. They are now one and the same. So, disgusting as today’s hearing was, it at least achieved some clarity. There is no longer any wing of the Democratic Party that can be described as sane.”

And of course there was John McCain’s funeral orations already almost a week ago, discussed here:

Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.

Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at “the pointedly un-invited President Trump,” as the New Yorker noted, calling the event “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”

It’s really a madness. No one, but no one could do what this president is doing. And with success at every turn, still they come. They are truly insane. They must think prosperity and a safe environment are just natural phenomena requiring no political direction at all. Fools every one, but dangerous fools.

The American media cannot stop lying

Below you may find the entire text of 11 Craziest Revelations From Bob Woodward’s Book on Trump’s ‘Nervous Breakdown’ Presidency, which is trying to explain just how wonderful Woodward’s worthless book is.

But before you read that, you should read this: Trump Unleashes on Woodward, Accuses Him of Making Up Quotes and Being a ‘Dem Operative’. From which:

mattis statement

The rest is a summary of Bob Woodward‘s book about the Trump administration, Fear taken directly from the 11 Craziest Revelations. But if you want to apply the word “crazy”, it is to the people who first write and then hunger for stuff like this.

The book, as the Washington Post reports, naturally and as a matter of course “paints a harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency, based on in-depth interviews with administration officials and other principals.” These are the traitorous monsters who actually spoke to Woodward, the kind of people who produce a movie about the first landing on the moon but leave out the planting of the American flag on the moon’s surface. They hate America. These then are the “revelations”, not one of which is a matter of any kind of policy issue, even if they were true.

As the article portrays it, “here are the most stunning moments from Fear: Trump in the White House, set for release on Sept. 11″. You will no doubt all be stunned that anyone would think any of this matters even in the slightest.

1. Defense Secretary James Mattis is “exasperated” by Trump acting like a fifth grader

Woodward writes that in one National Security Council meeting from January, Trump questioned why the U.S. was spending money maintaining a presence in the Korean Peninsula. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” James Mattis told him, per Woodward.

After the meeting, Mattis “was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’”

2. Chief of Staff John Kelly rips Trump

Woodward’s quotes from John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, are stunning. He called the president “unhinged,” and apparently uttered this magnificent stream of consciousness in a group meeting:

“He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

3. Reince Priebus called Trump’s bedroom “the devil’s workshop”

But not for the reason you might think… Per the Post:

Woodward writes that Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop,” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

Trump, for his part, described Priebus “like a little rat. He just scurries around.”

4. Trump mocked H.R. McMaster’s suits and said he looks like a beer salesman

Per the Post:

He often mocked former national security adviser H.R. McMaster behind his back, puffing up his chest and exaggerating his breathing as he impersonated the retired Army general, and once said McMaster dresses in cheap suits, “like a beer salesman.”

5. Trump called Attorney General Jeff Sessions a “traitor” and “mentally retarded”

Woodward writes that Trump called Sessions, a frequent target of his public ire, a “traitor” for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

“This guy is mentally retarded,” he reportedly said. “He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

6. Trump demeaned Rudy Giuliani by describing him as a baby that got his diaper changed on live television

After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 campaign, in which Trump bragged about groping women, Rudy Giuliani was one of the few surrogates that went on TV to defend him.

“Rudy, you’re a baby,” Trump said after Giuliani’s TV hit. “I’ve never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?”

7. After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attack, Trump demanded Mattis assassinate him

Per the Post:

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

8. Senior aides steal documents off Trump’s desk

Gary Cohn, Trump’s former top economic adviser, took documents off Trump’s desk to thwart his attempts to pull out of trade agreements, per Woodward:

Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

Cohen pulled a similar move when Trump was threatening to pull out of NAFTA.

9. Trump said his reluctant condemnation of white supremacists after Charlottesville was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made”

Per the Post:

Trump was sharply criticized for initially saying that “both sides” were to blame. At the urging of advisers, he then condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis, but almost immediately told aides, “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made” and the “worst speech I’ve ever given,” according to Woodward’s account.

10. Cohn threatened to resign over Trump’s response to the Charlottesville rally, which Trump called “treason”

When Cohn gave Trump his resignation letter, the president accused him of “treason”, and convinced him to stick around.

Kelly had similar sentiments to Cohn. “I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times,” Woodward reports Kelly told Cohn.

11. Trump’s legal team desperately tried to convince Mueller that the president can’t sit through an interview without lying

John Dowd, Trump’s former lawyer, really did not want the president to testify to Mueller under oath.

According to CNN’s report on Fear, Woodward reports that Trump’s lawyers held a mock interview with Mueller to see how the president would fare.

Trump failed, and Dowd concluded he could not sit for an interview under oath with Mueller without committing perjury.

Per CNN, Dowd took that information to Mueller:

Then, in an even more remarkable move, Dowd and Trump’s current personal attorney Jay Sekulow went to Mueller’s office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn’t possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

“He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd said to Mueller.

Washington Post reports Dowd told Mueller the interview would also make the U.S. president “look like an idiot”:

“I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’”

“John, I understand,” Mueller reportedly replied.

To Trump, Dowd put it bluntly: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

Trump disagreed, assuring Dowd: “I’ll be a real good witness.” Dowd disagreed, and resigned the next day, per the Post.

Sit down and be counted

Former Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad Tweets Support for
Colin Kaepernick
Breitbart Sports, by Dylan Gwinn    Original Article
 
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to Twitter on Monday, to lend support to anthem-protesting former quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Ahmadinejad wrote: The #NFL season will start this week, unfortunately once again @Kaepernick7 is not on a NFL roster. Even though he is one of the best Quarterbacks in the league.#ColinKaepernick #NFL — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (@Ahmadinejad1956) September 3, 2018 Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s president from 2005-2013. During that time he ruthlessly suppressed all political opposition. Most notably in 2009, when he oversaw the murder and incarceration of
Did Nike make a huge NFL-like
mistake embracing Colin Kaepernick?
American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson    Original Article
 
Is there business logic for Nike embracing Colin Kaepernick? I think there is, for the NFL and athletic shoe business are very different. In the conservative blogosphere, on Fox News, and among my friends, the name of Nike has been forever damaged by the brand’s embrace of Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the widespread disrespect for our flag by NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem. (snip) Nike has recently been losing ground to Adidas. The endorsement power of Michael Jordan for the Air Jordan line of shoes had been hugely profitable, but that power is fading: (Tweets) Charles Robinson, NFL reporter for Yahoo

Nike shares drop amid backlash
over new Kaepernick ad
Reuters, by Staff    Original Article
Shares of Nike fell 3 percent on Tuesday as calls for a boycott of the sportswear giant gained traction on social media following its choice of Colin Kaepernick as a face for the 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” slogan. Former San Francisco quarterback Kaepernick, the first NFL player to kneel during the national anthem as a protest against racism, posted a black-and-white close-up of himself on social media on Monday featuring the Nike logo and “Just do it” along with the quote, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Over 30,000 people were tweeting with the hashtag #NikeBoycott on Tuesday

There is then, of course, this:

Nike’s Kaepernick Ad Has Cost The Company Over $4 Billion So Far