Tuesday, November 22, 2016

PATRICK BUCHANAN: A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead - Rasmussen Reports™

A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead - Rasmussen Reports™

A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead

A Commentary By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical "Hamilton."   
As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play's end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence:   
"(W)e are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values."    
In March, the casting call that went out for actors for roles in this musical celebration of "American values" read:    
"Seeking NON-WHITE men and women."    
The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night, is what Americans regurgitated when they voted for Donald Trump.   
Yet the conduct of the "Hamilton" cast puts us on notice. The left neither accepts its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump's triumph.    
His presidency promises to be embattled from Day One.    
Already, two anti-Trump demonstrations are being ginned up in D.C., the first on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, by ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. A second, scheduled for Jan. 21, is a pro-Hillary "Million Woman March."   
While the pope this weekend deplored a "virus of polarization," even inside the church, on issues of nationality, race and religious beliefs, that, unfortunately, is America's reality. In a new Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans perceived their country as "Greatly Divided on the Most Important Values," with 7 in 8 Democrats concurring.   
On the campuses, anti-Trump protests have not ceased and the "crying rooms" remain open. Since Nov. 8, mobs have blocked streets and highways across America in a way that, had the Tea Party people done it, would have brought calls for the 82nd Airborne.   
In liberal Portland, rioters trashed downtown and battled cops.   
Mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Bill de Blasio of New York have declared their cities to be "sanctuary cities," pledging noncooperation with U.S. authorities seeking to deport those who broke into our country and remain here illegally.  
Says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, "I have asserted firmly that we are a sanctuary city." According to The Washington Post, after the meeting where this declaration had been extracted from Bowser, an activist blurted, "We're facing a fascist maniac."   
Such declarations of defiance of law have a venerable history in America. In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, in a "Southern Manifesto," rejected the Supreme Court's Brown decision ordering desegregation of the public schools.    
Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace all resisted court orders to integrate. U.S. marshals and troops, ordered in by Ike and JFK, insured the court orders were carried out.   
To see Rahm and de Blasio in effect invoking John C. Calhoun's doctrine of interposition and nullification is a beautiful thing to behold.   
Among the reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect give assurances to pacify what the Post says are "the millions of ... blacks and Latinos, gays and Lesbians, Muslims and Jews -- fearful of what might become of their country."   
Sunday, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Daniel Duane who said of his fellow Californians, "(N)early everyone I know would vote yes tomorrow if we could secede" from the United States.    
The major op-ed in Monday's Post, by editorial editor Fred Hiatt, was titled, "The Fight to Defend Democracy," implying American democracy is imperiled by a Trump presidency.    
The Post's lead editorial, "An un-American Registry," compares a suggestion of Trump aides to build a registry of Muslim immigrants to "Nazi Germany's ... singling out Jews" and FDR's wartime internment of 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens.   
The Post did not mention that the Japanese internment was a project of the beatified FDR, pushed by that California fascist, Gov. Earl Warren, and upheld in the Supreme Court's Korematsu decision, written by Roosevelt appointee and loyal Klansman, Justice Hugo Black.   
A time for truth. Despite the post-election, bring-us-together talk of unity, this country is hopelessly divided on cultural, moral and political issues, and increasingly along racial and ethnic lines.    
Many Trump voters believe Hillary Clinton belongs in a minimum-security facility, while Hillary Clinton told her LGBT supporters half of Trump's voters were racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots.   
Donald Trump's presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run.   
The battle of 2016 is over.   
The long war of the Trump presidency has only just begun.   


Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority." 

To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.


COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM



A Trump Doctrine -- 'America First'

A Commentary By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.   
Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor.   
Trump promised an "America First" foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia. The neocons insist that every Cold War and post-Cold War commitment be maintained, in perpetuity.  
On Sunday's "60 Minutes," Trump said: "You know, we've been fighting this war for 15 years. ... We've spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion -- we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels ... and our airports are ... obsolete."   
Yet the War Party has not had enough of war, not nearly.    
They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.   
They want to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down Syrian and Russian planes that violate it, acts of war Congress never authorized.   
They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.   
Other hardliners want to face down Beijing over its claims to the reefs and rocks of the South China Sea, though our Manila ally is talking of tightening ties to China and kicking us out of Subic Bay.   
In none of these places is there a U.S. vital interest so imperiled as to justify the kind of war the War Party would risk.   
Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.   
After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin's empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.    
In 1949, suddenly, he had the atom bomb, and China, the most populous nation on earth, had fallen to the armies of Mao Zedong.   
As our situation was new, Truman acted anew. He adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun.   
At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his New World Order. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and preached a global crusade for democracy "to end tyranny in our world."    
A policy born of hubris.    
Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin's country.    
How did we expect Russian patriots to react?   
The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.    
What should Trump say?  
"As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.   
"For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.    
"While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.   
"The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.    
"No other nation's internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.    
"Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.    
"In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya."   
Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy, which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries' wars or pay other countries' bills.    
The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents his secretaries of state and defense.   
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM
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