Editorials on Free Press

Today hundreds of newspapers carried articles defending the free press and criticizing Trump's characterization of the press as "fake news." The New York Times ran its own editorial and excerpts from others around the country.  In quotes from Thomas Jefferson, the Times laid out the tension between politicians and the press.  Jefferson loved the press while out of office, and distrusted it while in office. 

I agree that we need a free press and that the press should be free to say pretty much whatever it wants.  However, I think that in news reporting the press should stick to the facts and not editorialize, although it is free to editorialize on its editorial page.  I think that recently the press has lost this distinction between opinion and fact.  If Trump says more people attended his inauguration than any other, they should correct him.  However, they should be more careful about not convicting him of treason before he is found guilty.  They regularly reserve judgment for ordinary cases, referring to a murderer found standing over his victim as the "alleged" murderer.  Trump has not been convicted by Mueller, but you would think he has been.

The New York Times, for example, has ceased to be the old "Gray Lady" with "all the news that's fit to print."  It has become more of a tabloid carrying sensational stories about the Trump administration.  If there is something scandalous or some evidence of stupidity, they print it over and over.   Reprinting year-old news is almost like editorializing. 

The cable TV networks are worse -- CNN and MSNBC on the Democratic side and Fox on the Republican side.  The PBS News Hour is joining the Democratic side. 

There is no doubt that Trump has justification for criticizing the media, whether he calls it "fake news" or something else.  I am inclined to call it racist news because of the predominance of Jews attacking Trump in the pro-Democratic media.  The NYT's op-ed page is almost entirely Jewish, although I think David Brooks is an excellent columnist.  I can's say the same for most of the others.  

Illegal Immigration

Today the alt-right or white power demonstration in Washington was a failure.  I thought, "What's the big deal?"  Ordinary white people don't protest.  There were huge protests when I was in college in the 1960s, but it was because boys were being drafted and sent to Vietnam.  People were protesting mainly because they did not want to risk getting killed in Vietnam in a war that was not about the survival of the United States.  Today, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are about as non-essential to the survival of the US, but because there is no draft there are no protests. And soldiers are not being killed by the thousands as they were in Vietnam. 

Today, the counter-protest against the alt-right demonstration totally dwarfed the demonstration itself, and from the video coverage it looked like there was more violence on the side of the Antifa counter-protesters, but the commentators did not talk about it.  Many of the counter-protesters had bandanas over their faces so that they could not be easily identified if they resorted to violence.  

So, the blacks, Hispanics and white hoodlums intimidated the white power protesters.  What of it?  The counter-protesters were espousing criminality.  The huge influx of aliens into the US has been illegal, in violation of immigration laws.  The laws could have been changed to eliminate all immigration restrictions, but the Congress has not done it.  So, the Democratic Party is encouraging people to break the law, so that it can develop a non-white power base.  The Democratic Party wants to destroy the America that won World War II and replace it with some Afro-Hispanic conglomeration dominated by the Jews.  Most white people do not respond to such attacks with violence.  Even in Charlottesville, it was overwhelming presence of Antifa counter-demonstrators that lit the match leading to violence. 

Trump is the first President since the 1950s to worry about illegal immigration, causing the Jews (at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.) to vigorously oppose him using their domination of the media.  No wonder Trump is dismayed by "fake news"'; it's enemy propaganda squarely directed at him.  He has faults, but trying to enforce immigration law is not one of them.  It's interesting that federal courts have nullified immigration law in order to oppose Trump.  Courts refuse to enforce the law. 

Roman Empire, here we come, following you down the drain.

Trump and Putin

I am not upset by the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki.  I am upset by Mueller and the media.  Mueller's decision to release the indictment of the 12 Russian spies appears to have been politically motivated to make the Putin meeting more difficult for Trump.  It's the most overt indication I have seen that Mueller is not being even-handed and unbiased.  This action seemed clearly to benefit the Democrats and to make it impossible for Trump to have the friendly summit with Putin that he wanted. 

I think it is good that Trump likes Putin and wants to form a good relationship with him.  The US and Russia still have the two most destructive nuclear arsenals in the world.  It's good that they don't want to use them on each other. While everybody in Washington is saying Putin is a terrible dictator, he is not saying things like Khrushchev's, "We will bury you."  I don't think any American journalists asked any questions at the joint press conference about nuclear weapons.  If so, the media ignored them.  The entire focus was on Russian meddling in the US election, in part because of Mueller's release of the indictments.  In essence the press said, "We don't care about nuclear annihilation, we only care about election hacking." 

The thing is: Russia did hack some stuff during the election; I'm not sure what or exactly who did it.  Putin may have been personally involved, or maybe not.  We know he dislikes Hillary because Hillary had tried to remove him from office.  He probably also doesn't like Hillary because her husband, Bill, was instrumental in expanding NATO up to the very borders of Russia, which Putin saw as an existential threat.  George W. Bush carried on the expansion.  To me, the Baltic countries -- Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia -- are just a nuclear tripwire.  They are on the Russian border.  If Russia attacks them they back up to the Baltic ocean and are only a few miles wide.  NATO defense against a massive Russian invasion looks almost impossible to me.  So the only response by NATO and us "as if the attack had been on the US mainland," is nuclear.  The US will have to launch a nuclear war against Russia in response.  After a massive nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of people will be dead on both sides.  But the press does not care about that possibility; it only cares about election hacking.  The press is willing for a hundred million people to die, if it means no more hacking.  I don't think they have their priorities right. 

Maybe Trump did let Putin off the hook as far as accusing him of hacking the election.  But does anyone really believe Putin would admit he did it?  It's pointless to try to get him to confess.  Trump was trying to form a working relationship with Putin.  The press was insisting that Trump treat the hacking as if Putin had an ugly wart on his face and Trump had to tell Putin he was so ugly that it made people sick to look at him.  The press was basically yelling at Trump to spit in Putin's face, and when he didn't they called him a coward and a traitor. 

Watching the antics of the impassioned American press at the press conference, I am sure Putin thought, "Thank goodness I don't have a free press and don't have to deal with hate-filled maniacs like this."  The American press did not cover itself with glory.   Do they really believe that nuclear war is the best response to election hacking?  People need to calm down.  

Trump's Character

Trump and Obama are almost like polar opposites.  Obama was an outstanding representative of his black race, while Trump is a pretty sad representative of his white race.  The Obama family behaved itself impeccably in the White House.  Obama presided over the government with even-tempered moderation and spoke eloquently.  Trump has been tarnished by personal scandal and speaks more like a high-schooler than a college graduate. 

One of the biggest Republican complaints about Obama is the creation of ObamaCare, but much of ObamaCare was drafted by Congress which had to haggle over how to make it work.  If the crazies in the Democratic party had not been kept in control by Obama's moderation, it would have been much worse from a Republican viewpoint.  The biggest general criticism of Obama's foreign policy was probably his failure to enforce the "red line" against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  I support Obama's decision to work with the Russians to remove chemical weapons from Syria, rather than blow Syria to smithereens.  We could not have "won" the war in Syria, and getting Syria to dispose of almost all chemical weapons except for chlorine probably meant that there were many fewer deaths from chemical weapons than there would have been otherwise. 

I think Obama's negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was a significant accomplishment that reduced the risk of nuclear war in the Middle East.  Trump was very foolish to abandon the agreement.  He may try to get Iranian concession on non-nuclear issues, such as support for Hamas, but he should have left the nuclear deal in place and worked to expand limits on Iran's other activities. 

On the anniversary of Charlottesville, the main Trump issue that I support is immigration and support for white people, including the non-crazies who participated in Charlottesville because they opposed removing the Confederate monuments.  The protesters against removing the monuments should not have tried to look like Nazis, but those in favor of removing the monuments, who had already won on the main issue, should not have violently opposed the marchers.  Charlottesville now has the reputation as a place where free speech is unconstitutionally opposed by violence. 

Trump is right that immigration has significantly changed the United States for the worse, at least for the former white majority.  I support his efforts to get immigration under control.  I also support his efforts to deal with Putin on a friendly basis.  Russia's economy may be weak, but its nuclear weapons arsenal is second only ours.  On the other hand, I do not support his confrontations with our traditional friends in Canada and Western Europe.  And I don't like his bull-in-a-china-shop style. He threatens and blusters, but then (thankfully) often backs down to a more reasonable position. 

I don't blame him for opposing the Mueller investigation.  The Russian collusion investigation was started to try to declare Trump's election illegitimate, and has now morphed into trying to create a basis to impeach him.  It may not be a "witch hunt" but it is a virulent personal attack on him by Democrats led by the intelligencia, Jews, blacks and Hispanics.  It is racist to a significant degree. Trump may have played the race card first, but the response has also been extremely racist, so that the current tension is due to ill will on both sides, not just Trump's.   

Trump is amazing in that he does not let the violent attacks against him deter him.  Apparently they affect him, but mainly by making him angry.  Although Trump is a poor example of what would expect as a representative of the white (formerly) ruling class, no polite, gracious member of this class could or would withstand these withering attacks.  

So far, the Democrats' case seems so weak that it seems to depend mainly on Don Junior's meeting with the Russian lawyer in Trump Tower.  This is thin gruel for an impeachment, although impeachment is really a political act rather than a legal one.  If the Democrats take over the House, and if Mueller comes up with enough other material to convince some Republicans in the Senate, impeachment is possible.  I really don't want Pence to be President, but maybe if he just took on a caretaker role until the next election, the country could survive.  Right now the 2020 election does not look pretty.