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President Donald Trump has told the leaders of Europe that they must divvy up more from their own budgets to pay for the coöperative military organization that is the North American Treaty Organization (NATO).
"NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations," Trump said in his Brussels speech. NATO members agreed to increase their defense spending in 2014, but have not delivered on that pledge.
Bravo, Mr. President.
Finally, after the initial slew of executive orders that he signed upon first entering the Oval Office and all the turmoil that followed in which almost nothing has gone according to plan (thanks to all the sinister forces arrayed against him), Mr. Trump has fulfilled another major campaign promise. The Donald is back.
President Trump reminded these heads of Europe that the United States of America currently picks up 70 percent of the bill for what most of them regard as OTAN. (For instance, in French, it's L'Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord.)
The American President pointed out in his speech that 23 out of 28 member countries are not paying their full dues and that the U.S. will not carry them anymore as it "is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States."
Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Paolo Gentiloni, Mark Rutte and others assembled at headquarters also heard Trump announce the need for greater action to be taken with regard to terrorism by the alliance. "You have thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries and spreading throughout, and in many cases we have no idea who they are. The NATO of the future must include a great focus on terrorism and immigration," said Mr. Trump.
I have held the position for nearly twenty-five years now—since my college years—that NATO is an anachronism. Furthermore, Turkey should never have been allowed into the alliance given its historical instability and the presence of an Ottoman dictator wannabe like Erdoğan, a reality that could have been predicted even during the Dulles Doctrine heyday of the 1950s. Lastly, it is nothing short of disgraceful that we did not listen to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin when, during the early '90s, he beseeched the West, the U.S. in particular, not to pursue expansion of NATO, lest we insult and appear to distrust the Russian bear. You want to know why we have to deal with the authoritarian likes of comrade Vladimir Putin, folks? Yeltsin warned us; we did not listen.
Alas and alack, the deep state and the neocon sable-rattlers have won the battle for NATO's survival. The least the President can do is insist that the organization sticks to its fee requirements, and Mr. Trump has done just that.
Frau Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, has reacted by announcing that Germany and the European Union must now stand on their own as they cannot rely on the United States nor the United Kingdom anymore. With Trump's hardcore stance against carrying the financial weight of NATO, and Prime Minister Theresa May standing firm on Brexit and pushing back against the pathetic bullies of the E.U. by not letting them dictate the terms of a deal, Merkel has decided to grab her ball and go home.
The reason Europe is shocked—shocked, I tell ya'—that the United States under Donald Trump will demand greater expenditures toward NATO from it is because for the longest time, it has gotten away with riding the gravy train. It practially became an unwritten rule that the leading nations of Europe, the same ingrates who last decade defiantly declared, hey hey, ho ho, to Iraq we will not go, should be given a free ride because Europe is special, Europe is cultural, Europe knows better than the redneck rubes in the U.S. Therefore, these continental Lords Temporal were entitled to be permanent recipients of American welfare. Well, Americans will not pay for their champagne nor their caviar anymore.
I have a feeling that when Germany, and France, and all the other deadbeats of Europe, start paying their fair share for their precious alliance, maybe then they will be forced to acknowledge the true cost of their policy regarding migrants and the welfare state. When Uncle Sam is no longer there to bail them out, they will have to cut back. We might—I stress, might—finally witness a Europe that will come to its senses because it was forced to do so by an nationalist American president.
All part of the MAGA agenda. I highly approve.
I'm not going to defend thuggery, dear reader. Having said that, I can't help but feel that reporter Ben Jacobs, who writes for the über-liberal British publication The Guardian, got exactly what he deserved. Would it were that all progressive "reporters" everywhere take notice.
We all know that Republican Greg Gianforte won the special election to be the U.S. Representative for the Montana at-large district, but prior to his victory, he was in a very close race with Democrat opponent Rob Quist. Things were especially tight the night before the election took place, placing Gianforte under immense pressure.
Add to the mix the fact that liberal reporters, like Ben Jacobs, had already more than scrupulously hounded the man on the issue of the new health-care bill that recently passed in the House of Representatives and is currently under scrutiny in the Senate. "What about the 23 million Americans who will be uninsured?" was a lie propogandist talking point query Gianforte must have heard in his ear only about 420,500 times.
Now imagine you are in your war room, your private bunker with only your closest advisers, formulating last-minute strategy to win the race. All of a sudden, one of these same reporters barges into your office and practically shoves his microphone in your face and demands to know, for the 420,501st time, what your take on the House bill is.
Understandably, you lose it. You call this dweeb of a reporter out, hollering about how much you've had it with their ceaseless hounding of you, and you pick him up and slam him to the ground, breaking the reporter's glasses in the process. After that, you tell him, several times and in no uncertain terms, to get out.
Greg Gianforte did commit assault. In society, and under the law, we have to have standards and uphold them. So, unfortunately, Gianforte will have to pay the price of his lost temper and he has already been handed a citation for misdemeanor assault, and Gianforte apologized to Jacobs during his victory speech. Jacobs, meanwhile, had an ambulance respond to him and informed the police of the incident, telling all and sundry about his broken glasses. You don't get more hard-nosed than intrepid reporter Jacobs.
I can't help but think, though, perhaps—just maybe—if these liberal reporters weren't so aggressive and relentless and didn't ask hysterical questions about the same subject over and over and over again, and didn't assume the right to just saunter into private, closed-door rooms, then the sort of tension that had built up in Representative Gianforte would not have boiled over.
* * *
Why is it that only liberals are giving House Speaker Paul Ryan pieces of their minds, assuming they have any to spare?
"RINO" Ryan was dressed down by middle school students from South Orange, New Jersey who had attended a press conference during their trip to Washington, D.C. and refused to have their picture taken with him. Ryan was then ridiculed by the 13- to 14-year-olds on Instagram after the conference.
This is far from the only time Ryan has faced the wrath of progressive-minded flotsam of any age. He was verbally assaulted in Harlem and called a coward in Rhode Island.
All because of a new health-care bill that he really didn't have anything to do with. Ryan wanted to give Americans a weak, slightly watered-down version of Obamacare before its humiliating defeat without a vote in the House forced him to accept a tougher, more free market-based version.
You would think that Ryan's status as a real thorn in the side of President Trump, and the fact that he had no trouble passing Obama's budgets without question, and being a complete shill for the open-border advocates, would have earned him points among Lefties. I guess Ryan's crime is that he has not endorsed Black Lives Matter (Only When White People Are Involved) and spoken of his Caucasian-based privilege.
Conservatives have spoken up against him at least once, with Trump supporters heckling him at an event in Wisconsin last October.
But this is hardly enough. Why are we letting extremist liberals fashion a negative view of Ryan when there is plenty to criticize him from a center-Right perspective?
I have had it with so-called conservatives who continue to praise Ryan based on his rising star status in 1998 or because of some Congressional vote in 2001 that pleased them. If you look at Conservative Review's Liberty Scorecard, you will see that Paul Ryan scores 51 percent. An "F" grade by any measure. So, as a conservative, I'm supposed to admire this guy and be grateful for his Speakership why?
This ass-clown is one of the biggest weasels out there, a total sell-out. Time to stop pretending otherwise. Maybe someday soon, the House will have a real leader. After Eric Cantor, after John Boehner, after Paul Ryan, it would be about damn time.
* * *
I know I should have something to say about the massacre at the Manchester Arena, in which a jihadist piece of garbage killed 22 people, most of whom were girls aged 12 or under. One of my co-workers lost a friend to the slaughter that took place after Arianna Grande's concert on May 22. But I'm becoming so used to it that I'm running out of things to say.
British authorities were aware of Salman Abedi's activities. This so-called refugee traveled to Libya several times while residing in Britain and was never questioned as to why he kept taking trips there. If you are a refugee, presumably that means you have claimed that it is unsafe to head back to where you came from. Abedi obviously harbored no such worries.
Just the usual story of how political correctness has crippled our security operations and law enforcement. No-one can do a thing about these killers among us because that would be racist, don't you know.
The same people who won't protect us because they are too terrified of certain communities in order to do so are also the ones telling us, "Keep going about your normal business. Don't let them win."
Here's the thing: THEY HAVE WON. Maybe if we actually woke up and realized this, we could begin to do something concrete about the terror problem instead of preaching the usual "keep calm and carry on" bullshit platitudes. I don't know how many times I will have to keep making that point on this blog, but I fear it will be several times more.
Twenty-two dead, most of them little girls. And all we instantly think about is, "Oh no, Islamophobia could be on the rise. We mustn't upset Muslims."
We get moved to the point of stupidity by images of Alan Kurdi floating dead on a Turkish shore and babies in Syria in the wake of a chemical attack. The whole world stops for these children. Where's the outrage for the Western children of the Manchester attack? Will Don Lemon or The New York Times or Slate.com pontificate on the horror of children in what is technically supposed to be a Christian country being blown apart?
I think the sensible among us know the answer to that question.
Imagine you take a vacation to an Eastern European country, a land that was formerly under the auspices of the Soviet Union via the Eastern Bloc. In 1989, in the wake of the Berlin Wall's collapse, this nation's Communist leadership decided to give its people the vote, including a choice for democracy. Because they were hungry for blue jeans and rock'n'roll and toilet paper and most of the other nice things Westerners had, the citizens voted for democracy and the free market.
The only problem with this is that this newly established way of life did not remove the nepotism deeply embedded within the country, nor the corruption. The result is that the police stayed untrustworthy and the establishment of an organized crime syndicate grew to proportions that would have and could have never existed under the former Communist government. The Communist sense of authority and braggadocio remained under a new ruling class.
This country is Bulgaria.
The nation isn't the basket case it used to be, granted. But I had my suspicions about the place even before leaving the U.K. It was like a foreshadowing of sorts.
I won't go into specifics about our vacation there, but on the third day, as we were enjoying the indoor jacuzzi, a man walked into the spa complex. Right away, my senses were on alert. His shaven head and square face pointed to an obvious lack of intelligence necessitating the need to be part of a gang, even though he was alone with his 2-year-old child.
He immediately discovered that we were wearing flip-flops in the jacuzzi. My wife had slipped while bare-footed in the hot-tub two days prior and we were told by spa reception that flip-flops had to be worn. They did not tell us that they couldn't be worn inside the jacuzzi, which we thought was protocol.
When the shaven-haired goon gave up complaining to us, in Bulgarian, which we don't speak, over his allegation that we had dirtied the jacuzzi with our flip-flops, he fetched the receptionist who also informed us to remove them.
Here's where it gets "good": Once she left, my wife swears that he said "fuck you" to us. I didn't hear that, but I did hear him address me: "You are stupid. This is a baby."
When I stared back at him upon this insult, he widened his eyes and demanded, "Problem?!"
I rolled my eyes and looked away, at which point he descended into the main pool with his little bastard, loudly muttering, "Motherfucker." Suddenly, this asshat can speak English.
This is what you go on holiday for, right, dear reader?
Now then, this is behavior I would not have tolerated for one moment in either of my home countries of America or Britain. But this is Eastern Europe, this is the Balkans, this is Bulgaria. It was obvious to me that this inbred was mafioso in some way.
If I'd risen to his challenge, I could imagine him saying, "We'll settle this after I get dressed," and while in the changing room, make a cell-phone call to his "associates." And if it had been there and then, both of us grappling in our trunks, the police would have been called and, well, God help me. The man could have said anything in Bulgarian to the police who would very likely be persuaded that my Anglo-American (and Brexit-supporting) ass was the source of trouble-making, because I don't believe for one moment in the concept of civil rights being applicable in that place. I am not keen to spend even a second in a Bulgarian jail.
Silence and avoiding further confrontation was the only option and definitely the better part of valor.
I will also add that though it was not the main hotel's fault, as they have no direct jurisdiction over the spa complex, the receptionist at the spa clearly had no intention of making the thug pay for his threatening behavior. In fact, we believe she knows who he is, but—in the manner of a true denizen of the Balkans—she will look after her own. We got the money back that we paid to use the spa, but that was it.
On a thread from a few years ago on the Just Landed forum, entitled "Mafia in Bulgaria! How bad is it?", one reader responded:
In Bulgaria you cannot have big mouth to somebody, cause guaranted you can be beaten and that goes even to Bulgarians themselves—due to mentality, temperament and old historical background of the people.
You see any big ugly men with muscles, shaved heads, no matter if they wear suits or not, don't stare at them too much. Avoid getting into arguments with them because unlike the West where a murder is usually planned and with a motivation, in the Balkans it tends to be more impulsive since the people have shorter tempers, the mentality is different which means the two most unlikely people to get into a fight with each other are the ones who will end up doing it, depending on the situation.
Sounds pretty accurate given our recent experience. Anyone else want to question why I endorsed and voted for the Leave campaign last year? The Bulgarians are in the E.U.
Then there's this gem from Wikitravel: "There have been several cases of tourists being assaulted by the mafia for improper behavior, such as the brutal beating of an Icelandic teenage girl in the summer of 2007."
I know that people who can bully others with impunity, because they know damn well that they will get away with it and that they cannot lose, are cowards. But damn, these people are real bottom-scrapers.
Well, listen to me, you chalga bouncer faggot and any other brainless hayseed bohunk reading this, try pulling this bullshit in London and see what you will get and where it will land you. Here, we have standards. And here, I will not back down.
Fuck me? No, fuck you.
Oh, how I wish President Trump would get it.
What are the Obama holdovers still doing in posts for which they could not ever be truly qualified? Why hasn't there been a thorough cleaning of house of White House staff? Glenn Beck and other Trump vilifiers assert that Russia toyed with our elections. Evidence to back this up is not necessary you see, because it's what the good old Establishment and the deep state and the fifth columnists that are the media have proclaimed.
Will Trump launch an investigation and appoint a special prosecutor to look into Seth Rich's murder? Will his computer ever be tapped, assuming it hasn't already been destroyed? Is Trump ever going to call out the media and the Democrats whose sole purpose is to remove him from office? He needs to hold a major press conference and set the record straight. Who the hell is advising this president?
Oh, yeah, and Jerusalem—including the Wailing Wall—is open to negotiation as to whether it is actually in Israel according to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and, that obvious Rhodes scholar, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. No wall, no enaction of a tax plan yet, no repeal and replace of Obamacare and now we can add betrayal of Israel to the list. Is Trump going to demand a deal from Netanyahu so we don't offend the Jewish state's less-than-genteel neighbor countries? How many times can the U.S.A. pursue the nonsense that is a "two-state solution"?
Anyway, I was doing some spring cleaning and I came across a copy of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times that I had brought home with me from South Florida eleven years ago. The June 29-July 5, 2006 copy of the publication contains letters written in response to a feature piece written by Trevor Aaronson called "Chump Tower," criticizing the construction of Trump International Hotel and Tower, a condominium hotel in Fort Lauderdale.
One reader wrote, "Aaronson's 'Chump Tower' ... gets right to the heart of 'golden calfism' in South Florida. I should know: I live in Holly-Mara-Wood ... [where] our 'let them eat cake' administration bows down to Baal or McDonald Chump or Zyscovich or whatever misbegotten 'rainmaker' strolls into town."
I'm guessing this concerned citizen voted for Bernie in '16, don't you think?
Then there's a gentleman named Rick from Fort Lauderdale itself who wrote:
[T]he sheer one-sided story you recently published regarding the Trump International Project truly gets under my skin ...
Trump's presence on Fort Lauderdale Beach is part of a revitalization of not a pile of dirt but a city, from the sleepy portside town into an international destination. So perhaps you may like peanut butter and jelly and drinking beer from a can wrapped in a paper bag, but many people like caviar.
Building a world-class beachfront takes money and lots of it. Trump does know more than you do; that's why he's Trump and you're who? Regardless of his net worth, whatever the number may or may not be, Trump has built, and rebuilt, himself into one of the most recognizable corporate figures in the world.
Rick, you deplorable, you.
These letters are revealing in exposing the fact that long before he ran for the presidency, Donald J. Trump was a man of controversy.
You know, Trump does know more than us. Obama completely shattered the maxim that presidents are wise and have the country's interests at heart. Trump has restored it.
With the sole exception thus far of James Comey, one wonders where his propensity for firing miscreants and losers went. Has the swamp in which he's currently drowning removed that from him?
It's as if they wanted to shut me up.
Over two weeks ago, news broke that the new head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, was targeting WikiLeaks. The same website that did what our "valuable" mainstream media absolutely didn't do, present Hillary Clinton for what she did and what she was to the world: A low-life, amoral criminal committing treasonous acts.
I was prepared to say that, yes, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange had done a bad thing with the whole sordid Bradley Manning affair (I refuse to address that traitorous boy solider by his "new" identity; I don't care if he officially changed his name or not.) We can all agree, that was terrible and the secrets revealed put lives at risk. Awful stuff.
But consider the flip-side. WikiLeaks also gave us most of everything we could ever want to know regarding Hillary Clinton's e-mails, the underhandedness of the Democratic National Committee under the leadership of Debbie Wasser-woman Schultz, the cheating of Donna Brazile, the killing of Seth Rich—all of that got exposed. Were we ever going to know any of this controversial material if we left it in the hands of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward acolytes? The New York Times or The Washington Post? In fact, the whole Russia narrative against Trump falls completely apart thanks to what WikiLeaks has turned up. And Pompeo seeks to prosecute Assange and ruin perhaps the only truth-telling organisation out there?
I wanted to address Trump himself: Mr. President, I would have beseeched, don't think that I'll let you off the hook for a CIA that continues to overstep its bounds just because you're the guy in charge. I elected you so that you would rein in these governmental/surveillance/deep-state bodies.
Not long after drafting this entry, I got pummeled, a real back-alley beating, and had a chunk torn from me. No lie. From the entire last week of April until just a few days ago—and I'm still convalescing—I'd never been so ill. Fever, delerium, hallucinations, pains in muscles I didn't even know I possessed. The whole nine yards. Polonium poisoning! The Trump-Putin cabal got to me!
Actually, it was influenza. But I digress.
Well, it's amazing what simply lying on your back for two weeks can do. That is, what turnabout in the news can bring when you haven't been paying attention.
On October 21, 2016 , I wrote: "Maybe, once that stratosphere-reaching idiot James Comey is tossed out along with his size 17 shoes, we'll once again have a Federal Bureau of Investigations that will do its job by following up on leads and capturing and prosecuting proven terrorists that are known to them."
Looks like I got my wish.
James Comey, a fool in so many ways that I could write a separate entry on the subject, dragged in Mafia wiseguys but ignored Islamic terror, or at the very least, dropped the ball on it too many times. (Comey had previously said that American citizens, despite having fought for ISIS, are "entitled" to come back into the country.) He was more concerned about running a political organization that sought to indict the President on grounds of "collusion" with Russia, for which no proof exists, than to safeguard American freedoms or go after the real scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells in the government itself, such as what was uncovered by WikiLeaks, for instance.
Comey apparently does not, or does not care to, acknowledge the Fourth Amendment.
Trump's connections can be analyzed forwards, backwards and sideways, but Clinton got off because Comey could cite no intent, even though intent was not part of the statute. He did re-open the case in October, only to close it again days later, once again reporting that no intent was evident. Liberals blame Comey for sinking Clinton's campaign at that stage, but conservatives like myself wondered what his real motives were. "Hillary Clinton, innocent again," says the FBI chief. That's what I saw when he re-closed the case against her.
James Comey is an arrogant goon who only a month ago said that he was there to stay for his term and that he would not be going anywhere. And it irritated me to no end, because as I wrote on April 2:
"Comey has made it clear, in Senate testimony, that he will not pursue possible proof of wiretapping by Deep State officials on Obama's order, the source of the leaks against him and his administration, but he will continue to investigate these ridiculous assertions of collusion with Russia—a duplicitous strategy designed to damage Trump's presidency and add fuel to the fire of Democrats calling for his impeachment. What is Trump planning to do about Comey? Damned if I know. Instead of calling him to the carpet as he should, he's letting this traitorous idiot continue with his investigation of his own presidency!"
I agree with Sean Hannity when he recently opined on his FOX News show:
Comey has failed you, the American people, on a spectacular level. And at every single turn, the FBI director disrespected the Constitution. He has shown he does not care about the equal opportunity application of the rule or of law being applied equally to every American. [W]orst of all, he has created in this country now a two-tiered justice system. One for Hillary and Bill Clinton, and one for the rest of America. It’s become a travesty.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders recently told Tucker Carlson, "Director Comey had lost the confidence of the rank and file within the FBI."
Of course, because liberals are profoundly stupid, and the fact that nothing has been found to justify the Trump-Russia angle is obviously being ignored by them, the firing of Comey has Democrats likely to be calling for the establishment of a special investigation on Russia upon Comey's departure. Senator Elizabeth Warren has already jump-started the predictable party line by asserting that "Comey was fired because of the Russians." The airhead "serving" Massachusetts is typifying the liberal Democrat reaction by refusing to let the whole deception over Russia drop by calling for a special prosecutor and whining, "Donald Trump doesn't want anyone coming any place close to an active investigation into the relationship between the Russians, the Trump campaign, and Donald Trump himself."
President Trump saw an opening, a "window" as astronauts call it, to jettison Comey without the baggage that would have come with the move if he had done it earlier. With Sally Yates and James Clapper disgracing themselves in front of Congress, in which they alleged that protections are in place to prevent "unmasking," but cannot for the life of them explain how Mike Flynn's name was given to The New York Times, the time was right.
As Joel B. Pollak recently wrote, "If Trump had fired Comey while there were still serious questions about Russia, then it would have been more plausible to accuse him of trying to interfere in the investigation or cover up whatever happened. It is now clear that nothing, in fact, happened. Monday’s hearing with Clapper and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was meant to reveal a 'smoking gun,' and produced nothing but viral videos of Sen. Ted Cruz." Perhaps this President is a lot more politically shrewd than I've given him credit for. At least he's listening to his brilliant attorney general and he needs to do a lot more of that. "MAGA" may yet come to pass if Trump continues to follow Sessions's leads.
Chuck Schumer can warn the President that he is making "a big mistake" in booting Comey out. Do these Democrats not realize that Comey would have been shown the door on day one of a Madame Hillary presidency?
"If Hillary Clinton had won, Director Comey would have been fired immediately, and these same Democrats would be dancing in the streets," Sanders told Carlson.
Just Democrats being Democrats, nothing new there.
Comey apparently laughed in front of other FBI agents when he first found out that he had been fired by the President. He believed it was an elaborate joke. It's no joke, Comey. Sling your pack and go. Nobody likes you. This is no longer a country whose operations will harbor incompetent stooges like yourself for any longer.
