However, Trump’s immigration speech last Wednesday might mark the turning point of the general election. In two televised events—a visit with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and a speech in Phoenix later in the day—Trump managed to break through the Great Wall of media bias and speak to the American voter. Trump’s immigration speech was a strong recovery for his campaign and will likely signal his victory in November.
Writers such as Mike Cernovich and Scott Adams have emphasized that a large part of Trump’s success comes from his ability to persuade and influence others. While numerous conservative presidential candidates have tried to win the public over with facts and figures, Trump has sold his nationalist platform through his charisma and charm, using the same strategies that he’s utilized in his business career.
In the case of his immigration speech, Trump set the stage perfectly by meeting Peña Nieto earlier in the day. His willingness to speak one-on-one with Mexico’s president—the country on whose border he wants to build a wall—defuses the left’s narrative of him being a crazy, irrational bigot. In particular, the optics of Trump shaking hands with Peña Nieto, who is both smaller than Trump and was unable to make eye contact with him, made him look presidential. Contrast this with Hillary’s increasing unwillingness to make public appearances and her continued refusal to give a press conference.
The speech itself was noteworthy for Trump’s use of rhetorical techniques to drive home the threat illegal immigration poses to Americans. The centerpiece was the Donald introducing the “Angel Moms,” mothers whose children have been murdered by illegal aliens. While many people might have a hard time processing statistics about the ruin that illegal aliens bring to America, the image of mothers grieving their dead children is one that hits almost everyone in the gut:
Leftists were unusually triggered by Trump’s speech, singling out the Angel Moms for particular derision:
This was Trump's most hateful speech. As a US Jew, I'm shaking not just from anger for the state of our nation, but from legitimate fear.
For the first time in recent memory, large numbers of Americans
are openly questioning their country’s grand strategy. An April
2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that
the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others
deal with theirs the best they can.” On the campaign trail, both the
Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Republican Donald Trump found
receptive audiences whenever they questioned the United States’
penchant for promoting democracy, subsidizing allies’ defense, and
intervening militarily—leaving only the likely Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton to defend the status quo.
Americans’ distaste for the prevailing grand strategy should come
as no surprise, given its abysmal record over the past quarter century.
In Asia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are expanding their nuclear
arsenals, and China is challenging the status quo in regional waters.
In Europe, Russia has annexed Crimea, and U.S. relations with Moscow
have sunk to new lows since the Cold War. U.S. forces are still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no victory in sight. Despite losing most of its original leaders, al Qaeda has metastasized across the region.
The Arab world has fallen into turmoil—in good part due to the
United States’ decisions to effect regime change in Iraq and Libya and
its modest efforts to do the same in Syria—and the Islamic State, or
isis, has emerged out of the chaos. Repeated U.S. attempts to broker
Israeli-Palestinian peace have failed, leaving a two-state solution further away than ever. Meanwhile, democracy has been in retreat worldwide, and the United States’ use of torture, targeted killings, and other morally dubious practices has tarnished its image as a defender of human rights and international law.
The United States does not bear sole responsibility for all these costly debacles, but it has had a hand in most of them. The setbacks are the natural consequence of the misguided grand strategy of liberal hegemony that Democrats and Republicans have pursued for years. This approach holds that the United States must use its power not only to solve global problems but also to promote a world order based on international institutions, representative governments, open markets, and respect for human rights. As “the indispensable nation,” the logic goes, the United States has the right, responsibility, and wisdom to manage local politics almost everywhere. At its core, liberal hegemony is a revisionist grand strategy: instead of calling on the United States to merely uphold the balance of power in key regions, it commits American might to promoting democracy everywhere and defending human rights whenever they are threatened. Read on.
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* Michelle was in Maxim’s 100 Sexiest Women as well as People’s Most Beautiful People list, probably others as well. Even North Korean media can’t be more shamelessly in the bag for the ruling party than that.
* They call Serena Williams “beautiful” and “sexy,” so why not Michelle Obama?
* Sample question from the Federal Ministry of Truth Qualifying Exam for the Humor/Satire Endorsement to the Basic Journalism/Public Speaking License:
Which of the following is unacceptable as the basis for a satirical remark?
(a) Bush I: “Read my lips…”
(b) Clinton: “I did not have sex…”
(c) Bush II: “America is a nation with a mission…”
(d) Obama: “If you like your plan…”
(e) Both (b) and (d).
Answer: (d). Practice note: (b) forms the basis for mocking right-wing obsessions with invading personal privacy to prosecute normal healthy sexual practices, even to launching comically-unjustified impeachment proceedings.
* Reporting from the parochial backwater of the UK I can say that I have never seen Obama ridiculed, satirised or used as the butt of a single joke by any British comedian or comedy vehicle whether as prez or before.
By which I mean anywhere in the MSM. Not online or in some niche publication. I’ve never seen a stand-up mock him any way either.
* The SNL house brand for 40 years has been silliness for the sake of silliness. Lorne Michaels has explained many times that his goal is to hook adolescents who are just old enough to stay up late with their friends for the first time.
So, aiming the show at what 14 year olds think is funny, which isn’t hugely different from what 10 year olds think is funny, is the goal. Thus, Dana Carvey’s impression of the elder Bush was very funny in a silly way and thus is the most famous SNL presidential impression, along with Chevy Chase falling down.
* If Obama is such a funny fellow, one would think that within his two memoirs there would be any number of well known jokes or witticisms.
Yet I can’t recall a single one.
Why might that be?
* The single funniest thing I ever heard a president say was when W was sternly reading off a list of terrorists during a big speech and he stumbled on the name Ramzi Yousef and then said, “Sorry about that, Ramzi.”
* Obama is a self absorbed narcissist. His interpersonal life is centered around engorging himself with narcissistic supply, and just as importantly, protecting himself from narcissistic injury. I.e., his genuine mediocrity becomes exposed.
Obama gets his supply from his countless cheap grace political stunts like fronting for men in dresses to use women’s facilities so his sycophantic lackeys in the MSM mindlessly applaud his “courage”.
Obama’s “humor” such as it is, is almost entirely a deprecating form of crude narcissistic self-defense. I.e., he glibly attacks those who are not sufficiently deferential to the “smartest person in the room”. So his “humorous” comments equating Vladimir Putin to a bored schoolboy. Putin does not suck up to Obama, so Obama the narcissist hates him for it.
BTW, narcissistic avoidance is why Obama consciously ignores the hard issues like the imploding Obamacare. No supply and plenty of potential injury…
President Obama’s attributes have been inexhaustibly detailed by both his admirers and detractors. Not much, however, is much said about his sense of humor. The reason is painfully obvious: there is little humor in the man to detect. In this regard he bears resemblance to Jimmy Carter, the grim, parson-scold who lectured the nation about malaise in the 1970s. The humor that does emanate from the President is usually in the form of ridicule laced with sarcasm, humor at its meanest and nastiest. One is hard pressed to find anything funny or witty in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. The reader takes away from these pages a picture of an angry, alienated young man immersed in self-pity and resentment.
This absence of such a fundamental human quality one might suppose derives from at least three of Barack Obama’s qualities of personality and character.
First, one cannot help be struck by the extreme vanity of this President and an almost pathological need for self-worship. With such astronomical levels of vanity and conceit come thin skin and hypersensitivity and little room for a large and wonderful source of humor — self-deprecation. Devoid of modesty, he believes himself to be a person of unparalleled wisdom and rectitude – “the One, as he self-proclaimed – a fact that is evidenced by his relentless quest to impose himself, his wisdom, his superiority, pontifically…
Ironically, from the countless speeches he has given over the years with the constant, predictable self-referencing and self-righteous posturing, almost nothing insightful, witty or poignant can be extracted. Nothing he has said is particularly memorable, quotable, enduring, or funny. His teleprompter deliveries with their unintended Bobble Head doll effect in some way or other almost always tend to be about his favorite subject, himself, and how much better we will all be because of him. The one public forum for which he appears to have an aversion is the press conference. In his few forays into this venue it seems that aspects of his wisdom on occasion are questioned by members of the normally docile White House press corps, an impertinence that clearly annoys him.
Second, the absence of humor is a conspicuous mark of a jealous ideologue. An ideologue can neither be contradicted nor questioned, and Obama, as we have come to know, cannot bear to have his wisdom disputed or challenged. But humor, above all, contradicts – humor turns the strong into the weak, the serious into the silly and makes the somber appear ridiculous. Ideologues when stripped of their pretentious facades are fragile and sensitive often wrapped in multiple sheaths of vanity and conceit. Humor is the enemy of the pretentious, and ideologues are a pretentious, arrogant lot given to the constant exaggeration of their moral and cognitive superiority and their unquestioned indispensability to make the lives of the unwashed better. Thus, we observe the personality profile of our Ideologue-President who was given during his first campaign to the promise of such undertakings as “healing the planet,” “changing America and the world” and “slowing the rise of the oceans.” In these grandiose sallies he was generously assisted by the smitten members of the Fourth Estate who proclaimed his divinity — “a sort of god standing above us” and other similar declarations of apotheosis. (Evan Thomas, Newsweek)
Third, humor, particularly in a political context, is a coded way of speaking the truth. Humor exposes the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the powerful, and Obama, sad to say, is a profoundly dishonest man. His 2008 campaign of Hope and Change was a brilliant but deeply cynical ploy calculated to convince the a-political middle road American electorate that the former street organizer, tutored by an America-loathing pastor, was a sincere, wholesome wunderkind who would end the polarized politics of the Bush era. But the post-racial, bi-partisan, transparency campaign pledges were completely feigned. They had never been nor would ever be any part of his governing philosophy. The real Obama emerged after his election with such bi-partisan olive branches as, “if they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun,” and, as he told an audience in a Univision interview in 2010: “were gonna punish out enemies and reward our friends.” Here, succinctly stated is a distillation of Obama’s social instincts and the essence of his political style, very much Latin America-Caudillo, a toxic mix of garish personality cult, punish-the-rich demagoguery and union cronyism. Obama’s politics can be summed up as the “rule of the three Cs” – Coercion, Corruption, Collusion. His 2012 campaign was nothing like the first. Hope and Change succumbed to defamation and demolition.
Comments: * “[Joe] Biden is definitely the greatest VP for saying — in public, in apparently prepared remarks — that Jews control the media and are to be credited with leftist advances in this country such as abortion and, especially, homosexual marriage. He, a liberal, meant it as praise, but you know what Jews say: a philosemite is an antisemite who likes Jews. Thanks for speaking the truth, Mr. Veep! No Republican had the guts to do that.”
Jennifer Epstein reported for Politico May 21, 2013:
Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country’s founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights.
“The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it’s fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage,” he said. “The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.”
“You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates,” he said. “So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000 years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness, decency, justice, charity. These are all as you say, as I learned early on as a Catholic being educated by my friends, this tzedakah.”
“The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.
“You can’t talk about the civil rights movement in this country without talking about Jewish freedom riders and Jack Greenberg,” he said, telling a story about seeing a group of Jewish activists at a segregated movie theater in Delaware. “You can’t talk about the women’s movement without talking about Betty Friedan” or American advances in science and technology without mentioning Einstein and Carl Sagan, or music and Gershwin, Bob Dylan and “so, so, so many other people.”
“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.”
“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage,” Biden said.
“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said.
Jews have also been key to the evolution of American jurisprudence, he continued, namedropping Brandeis, Fortas, Frankfurter, Cardozo, Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan. “You literally can’t. You can’t talk about the recognition of … rights in the Constitution without looking at these incredible jurists that we’ve had.”
“Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that’s a fact,” he said.
“We talk about it in terms of the incredible accomplishments and contributions” of Jews in America,” Biden added, “but it’s deeper “because the values, the values are so deep and so engrained in American culture, in our Constitution.”
“So I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact you’ve had on the development of this nation. We owe you, we owe generations who came before you,” he said.
Thirteen Jewish groups, among them organizations representing the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative streams, were among the 25 joining the amicus brief the ADL filed in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The preeminence of Jewish groups among those backing the litigants was not a surprise. In recent decades, much of the Jewish establishment has embraced gay marriage as a right equivalent to the others it has advocated, including racial equality, religious freedoms and rights for women.
Multiple groups, in their statements, cited the passage in Genesis that states humans were created “in the image of God,” which has for decades been used by Jewish civil rights groups to explain their activism.
“Jewish tradition reminds us that we were all created equally, b’tzelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27), and also shows us that marriage is a sacred responsibility, not only between the partners, but also between the couple and the larger community,” the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly said in a statement.
Groups also were looking to next steps in advancing LGBT rights, including in the workplace.
“You can now legally marry in all 50 states and put your wedding on your desk and be fired and have no recourse in the federal courts,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who directs the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, told JTA in an interview.
“We hope this will energize and inspire a bipartisan effort to end discrimination in the work place,” he said, specifying the “T” in LGBT – the transgendered. “People should not be discriminated in the workplace because of expression of gender.”
If same-sex marriage is such a Jewish value, how come it was unknown in Jewish life prior to the 1990s? How come the Jewish state of Israel does not celebrate gay marriage? If being transgendered is cool, how come the Torah prohibits a man from wearing a woman’s clothing?
If elites can convince much of the Western world to celebrate same-sex marriage, then is there nothing they can’t do in subverting traditional moral values.
* My favorite factoid about VP Johnson: “After his wife’s death, Johnson began an intimate relationship with another family slave. When she left him for another man, Johnson had her picked up and sold at auction.” (Courtesy of Wikipedia.)
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Comment: “Jews often say they’re for open borders because, after all, their grandparents were allowed to come here. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, suggested that such people be told that if we had known that letting Jews in would mean that in the future we would never be permitted to have a rational immigration policy, we wouldn’t have let Jews in.”
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
