National Conversation

Democrats keep insisting, “We need to have a national conversation”  ... apparently except when Senator Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the New York Times.

OK, I’ll give it a try ... how about this for a stater? — ‘“Black Lives Matter except when killed by blacks.”

Afterward: And here is another voice that needs to be silenced: Candice Owens.

Hill of Beans

Dr. Fiona  Hill, the former Brit who now loves America and hates Trump ... and who condemned Trump for his Ukrainian “quid pro quo” in the Schiff impeachment hearings ... and claimed the delaying military aid there was costing American security and Ukrainian lives. She was a media hero of these hearings for her courageous pro-aid stance and professorial deriding of Trump. Watch the above video of her obsequious opening statement.

Well, dear reader, when this pedantic heroine worked at the Brookings Institute, she took exactly the opposite stance: We should NOT provide military aid to the Ukraine! In fact in 2015 she wrote an impassioned Op-Ed in the Washington Post espousing this very position ... see: Breitbart Story. (Sorry this link doesn’t go directly to the Washington Post ... because it’s behind a paywall.) And, maybe due to her influence, the Obama administration withheld ANY AND ALL military aid to the Ukraine ... throwing this country to the Russian wolves (Obama's then-pals.)

Dr. Hill is full of beans. Her overweening bias and hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a jihadi’s machete. This woman is duplicitous, dangerous and detestable.

Free Speech on Campus

My wife was taken aback and so am I with a recent op-ed in the Boston Globe advocating a return to free speech codes at colleges and universities ... surprisingly written by none other than Janet Napolitano, the current president of the California University System ... see: Boston Globe Story. Our former head of Homeland Security and a clear Liberal, Ms. Napolitano is to be commended for her bold stance ... even though she is not the first recently to return to this long-held American principle. That nod goes to the University of Chicago ... see: New York Times Story for a thoughtful and well-stated avowal of kicking all this current silly Liberal newspeak to the curb.

My question therefore is: Where are all our so-called bastions of liberal thought and learning, the Ivy League schools, on this critical pedagogical issue?

[Sound of crickets] ...

Split Personality

Peggy Noonan has chiseled another Op-Ed diamond in the Wall Street Journal. It is about the gulf that has arisen between the lofty ideals exhibited by those espousing virtually unlimited Middle-East immigration (Merkel, Obummer, Hellary, Kerry, etc.) and those who actually end up paying the price for those elites' charity -- the middle and lower-class communities who are required to foot the societal adjustments and monetary bills  ... two different and distinct groups ... and never the twain shall meet ... see:  WSJ Op-Ed.

But what struck me about this well-sharpened Occam's Razor was that Ms. Noonan did not see the disconnect between this spot-on observation and why Donald Trump is resonating with so many Americans. Yes, the same Donald Trump for whom her pen pal, Maureen Dowd, fashioned a new excretory organ just a few short days ago in one of her lesser Op-Ed zircons ... see: With Both Barrels.

Does Maureen Dowd's left brain not talk to Peggy Noonan's right brain? Can she not realize that plenty of middle-Americans see in Trump someone who will push back against these globalists, these trade-at-any-cost-ers, these government-knows-best-ers, these open-border-ites, these bleeding-heart progressives? It would have been nice if Ms. Noonan  suddenly had an epiphany contrasting these two opinion editorials ... but she seems too diplomatic to reference Dowd's Trump scatological reforming.

Or maybe her previous Trump hit piece was just because Dowd was off her meds?

Brooking No Quarter

David Brooks, the New York Times' erudite, measured "conservative" columnist who has had an eight year love affair with Obummer, let go with both barrels in a series of recent op-ed pieces against Donald Trump ... see: Not Trump and The Great Betrayer for some juicy quotes. One of the most cited passages from Brooksie (he was my kids' summer camp counselor and that's what they called him) was:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. 

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

Does this sound in the slightest bit erudite, measured and conservative? Donald Trump has obviously aroused Brooksie's inner child. This series of screeds against Trump clearly have some merit ... too bad that Brooksie did not find the time and the words to investigate and profile Obummer in the same manner back in 2008. Substitute the word Obummer for Trump in the above quote and it still holds true.

Now pilgrim, if you wish not to be shunned at your next suburban cocktail party, you would do well to memorize some of these Brooksie phrases ... or, better yet the entire quote, and confidently regurgitate it with gusto. You will be the hit of the party.

Shorthand

David Brooks has an opinion piece in this morning's New York Times contrasting two types of columnists ... "engaged" versus "detached" ... read it first at: New York Times.  I hope I am not being too "engaged" when I shorthand his op-ed into one simple sentence: "A detached columnists (such as me) is preferable to an engaged columnist (such as Maureen Dowd)."