Conrad Black: Trump continues to beat a media determined to bring him down

The traditional media, whose Trump-hating excrescences are inflicted on Canadian readers and viewers have, to their towering chagrin, almost no influence in the U.S.

by Conrad Black at  National Post:

The Globe and Mail’s commentators on political events in Washington have, like the rest of the Canadian media, completely missed the story. So have most of the American media, which the Canadian media witlessly parrot, but Trump ran against the American media and won. He demonstrated that they were complicit in all the economic and strategic blunders of the George W. Bush and Obama years: the Great Recession, the endless Mideast wars and humanitarian disasters, 20 million illegal and unskilled immigrants and a flat-lined “new normal” economy. GDP growth per capita declined from 4.5 per cent in the Reagan years to one per cent under Obama. This president ran against every part of the political establishment of both parties including especially the national media, whom he has rendered almost irrelevant by using social media and dominating the talk-radio circuit. The traditional media, whose Trump-hating excrescences are inflicted on Canadian readers and viewers have, to their towering chagrin, almost no influence in the U.S. Trump has outmanoeuvred them. Most of the American national media is now an embittered, rabid, unclothed emperor, but their Canadian analogues spout their bilious nonsense anyway.

Illustrative of the Globe and Mail’s purblind leadership of our thoroughly misinformed country was Sarah Kendzior’s piece late last month, where she wrote of President Trump’s son and son-in-law as “apparently complicit in foreign interference in a U.S. election,” referred to Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn simply as a “criminal,” and accused the U.S. attorney general, William Barr, of “misleading” the public with “a deceitful summary” of the findings of the Mueller report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. She blamed Mueller and his team for not exploring “Trump’s possible involvement with organized crime … and shady finances … He did not want to indict anyone, even when their offences were blatant.” She grimly concluded that all this “could mean that Americans lose their own free will in the years to come.” All of this is just nonsense; an exhaustive investigation found no proof that anyone in Trump’s inner circle colluded with the Russians or any foreigners. Flynn was mouse-trapped without counsel. There was no obstruction. Trump handed over all documents requested, allowed all staff and collaborators to give sworn evidence, never invoked executive privilege and never interfered in any way with the investigation, as Mueller affirmed, under oath at the House judiciary committee.

All of this is just nonsense; an exhaustive investigation found no proof that anyone in Trump’s inner circle colluded with the Russians or any foreigners

The outrages that did occur were that senior elements of the CIA and FBI co-operated with the Clinton campaign before the election and after, to publicize the spurious Steele dossier, a pastiche of lies and defamations ultimately funded by Hillary Clinton’s camp. The Justice department’s highest officials then used the same dossier as part of the basis for applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court (FISA), to authorize espionage against the Trump campaign and transition team. The justice and intelligence apparatus of the U.S. was unconstitutionally politicized, the closest the United States has ever come to a presidential election rigged or undone by unlawful official interference. When all else failed, the canard of Russian collusion was dredged up, and although as FBI agent Peter Strzok acknowledged to his FBI girlfriend by text (he said he felt “concern there’s no there there”), this farce was kept going for two years in the hope that Trump would blow up and fire Mueller, as Nixon did Archibald Cox in 1973, so some sort of obstruction charge could be cobbled together to force an impeachment trial.

It was a formidable bit of skulduggery. There has never been the slightest credible suggestion of any connection between Trump and organized crime, and the Internal Revenue Service has audited him constantly for decades and has never gone beyond contested reassessments. The only shade occurs where he has exercised his absolute constitutional right not to release his tax returns to the public. He also happens to be the only president in history who has made billions of dollars.

The Kendzior piece was a mere sorbet for the treatment of the Washington scene by my cordial acquaintance of 40 years, Lawrence Martin, in the Globe and Mail this week. He stays clear of the Russian collusion nonsense, presumably recognizing that it was a fraud, and focuses on the vagaries of Trump’s personality. There is room for pause on some of Trump’s stylistic eccentricities. But he did not call all Baltimore “disgusting (and) rodent-infested,” only the district of Congressman Elijah Cummings after Cummings shouted outrageously at the acting Homeland Security secretary in a congressional hearing. He did say four congresswomen should go back where they came from after they (Ms.’s Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar and Tlaib) had variously described life in the U.S. as “garbage,” trivialized the 9/11 atrocities, spewed out anti-Semitic screeds, compared southern border detention centres to Nazi death camps, and other such exalted apercus. The fact that two of them were Muslim, one Puerto Rican and one African-American (as is Elijah Cummings), had nothing to do with it. Trump would have said something similar if all of them and all of the 20 million unskilled people who have entered the country illegally were Caucasian Presbyterians.

There has never been the slightest credible suggestion of any connection between Trump and organized crime

Poor Lawrence denounced Trump for stock market losses — averages have risen almost 50 per cent since his election — and debunked in advance Trump’s thoughtful reaction to the terrible shootings in El Paso and Dayton, and ridiculed Trump’s denunciation of white nationalism. There is no evidence that Trump has ever had racial or religious prejudices. This is the latest refuge of those who spent the past three years trying to portray him as a Russian dupe. Lawrence never understood why Americans preferred Ronald Reagan to the hapless Jimmy Carter, and although he has a better grasp of U.S. history than most journalists, he has never understood any of the Trump story. To wish to have a border is not to hate foreigners. For 50 years Democrats have wanted the Latin vote and Republican employers have wanted their cheap labour. It is a cynical bipartisan outrage as these poor people have flooded in, overloading the social services and schools and police and keeping working-class incomes down. Trump will continue to admit a million immigrants legally, but will stop this invasion of undocumented people who cannot be easily absorbed. All he seeks is to emulate the Canadian system of merit-based immigration.

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The post-Reagan bipartisan consensus of soft-left passivity and decline, as the Bushes and Clintons passed the great offices back and forth, is over. (For 32 years, 1981-2013, a Bush or Clinton was president, vice-president, or secretary of state.) The United States is now in a political contest between the Democratic atomizers who inflame and pander to every conceivable group of aggrieved people, and the Trump movement that rallies everyone to the flag through full employment, reducing the taxes of 83 per cent of taxpayers, ending illegal immigration, being cautious over unproved claims about climate change while protecting the environment, reviving the promotion of nuclear non-proliferation, where predecessors and allies had surrendered to Iran and North Korea, and in finally standing up to China, where even the Democrats and all China’s neighbours except Russia and North Korea support Trump. Why doesn’t anyone in the media of this country, except in the National Post, get it?

Lawrence Martin despairs that the American public isn’t reacting correctly; he does not notice that in that slender ribbon of America between Pittsburgh and Phoenix, Boise and Miami, and Milwaukee and Houston, where most Americans reside, they are reacting appropriately: to false charges of treason, bigotry, and corruption in office, whatever they think of Trump’s voluminous personality.

 

Conrad Black: Trump continues to beat a media determined to bring him down

Our High School Reunion at age 85!

Except for one or two among us,  the  400-plus  high school graduates of St. Paul’s Central High School  of 1952 were born in 1934……. the year of the lowest birthrate in the nation’s history.  It was our Depression in America  time and then suddenly  World War time before America itself  became Great economically,  morally, culturally, and financially until  the 1960s.

I was one of those 1934 babies.  Graduation had been celebrated every five years after until this “off” year.  Too many of us  are dying in far greater numbers than in the past….a natural condition, of course,  but not popular among yesterday’s high school stars, may God Bless Them!

They  decided to gather us together this coming August 27th….for our collective 85th birthday gathering.

Since the 1960s we know there  has been  rise  in our once Godfearing America,  a fascistic, atheistic   collective USA  led by a new generation of  fascistics,  ‘scholastics’, feminists, and socialists……a wave of millions of college unlearneds, all gathering  to do good by destroying   that  religious  American dream for democratic freedom for all of our citizens  initiated by those male patriots of 1776.

Americans  used to be  taught to worship seeking  TRUTH in the public schools I attended.

I was born to  be energetic and curious.  I felt it from early on.    I wanted to know everything outside of  engineering, building buildings, and sweeping.

At age eight I became a person in wartime to be in  charge of a quarter acre  “Victory Garden” across the alley from our “five room bungalow” where I was raised.  It was a part of the World War effort to help feed the neighborhood since so many millions of men were over seas.

I became the garden’s planter, it’s caretaker, weeder,  insect controller, waterer, harvester.  The city provided plowing that first year of “the Victory Garden”.   I learned to love plants, to be outdoors, to be gardening, even weeding.    I was born to be curious.

I was also dyslexic.   I couldn’t read books…..novels especially.   But, I was gifted by having visual memory.   What I could see, wanted to see, and until a few years ago, needed to see, I visually stored things, actions, events.  I was lucky to live long enough to discover and appreciate the issue.

I was born curious to a fault.   “Mom, why  are you doing that?”…..”Dad, what’s this for?”  And, at age 8,  until the end of Summer, 1945 I loved that Victory Garden.   I was into my own precious world.   I could see and enjoy my produce.   I was ‘bombing’ evil insects as if I were helping the war effort.

The War made me love maps.   I could read cutlines attached to the pictures of the rotogravure Sunday newspaper section of the St. Paul Pioneer Press already in June, 1942 covering the Battle at Midway.   I can still see by memory its layouts, maps, pictures, headlines of the war action.    What I saw, I’d remember….especially trees, shrubs, flowers, birds, rodents.   I wanted to know every things’ names.

It drove my Mother nuts…so she’d send me out doors to get rid of me….even before the War began….even in Winter where, during the War, I’d build igloo type structures in the Victory Garden and then I’d bomb them with ice chunks, pretending I was helping the War effort…..After all the Japanese had invaded some of our American  Attu islands of Alaska!

I loved learning at school.  But,  I couldn’t read.   Teachers knew it…I did not, consciously.  I wanted so to do what adults  asked of me throughout my school life.   I loved algebra….working those quadratics was like putting 2,000 piece picture puzzles of beautiful American gardens of those days together with my mom.  The Joy of Finishing the Visual Problem!!

I didn’t socialize much with my St. Paul Central school mates.   I had  a paper route to ‘pay my way’ of the day.   At school I  mostly had great teachers.   My favorite was a Mabel Wicker for Freshman English, 4’11” at age 68 going on 100 in her last year before retiring.   I learned years later that she is the person who allowed me to be permitted to enter college after high school graduation.    She taught Shakespeare!

How in hell was I going to read, learn anything Shakespeare?   I knew there was going to be trouble.  And it began the first day of class that September!   We were ordered  to read and study “Merchant of Venice” beginning immediately.   By then I could read most newspaper articles, but never a novel, and NOW I had to read a play?

No sweat….It turned out, after handing out a book to me and my classmates…which we had to pay 15 cents for that first day of class….that Mabel Wicker, being the great old made school teacher she was….and despite  wearing her red wig, she began her rule over the class by  reading  most of the play itself, underscoring, ever tastefully acting out some of  the most beautiful, the most important passages herself.

I remember going home after school that day so excited.   I knew the words and caught their purpose…and almost immediately  I knew I could read the entire play….and that is what I did when I got home….after my paper route, of course.

I got a failing grade the first marking period, nevertheless.   It didn’t happen again!

Thirty eight freshman kids, mostly boys, sat in that red-wigged  Wicker’s classroom in God’s world, 1948-49, and in my presence, NEVER MADE A SLUR OR INSULTING REMARK ABOUT THAT TEACHER AND HER RED WIG.

Three years later when I was supposed to read something William Thackeray, another English teacher, again an excellent one of the College Prep Program, suspected I was having  some reading problems.  She asked me who my Freshman English teacher was…..”Oh, Miss Wicker!”, and then followed with “Good for you!”

Miss Wicker, she told me,  was THE  teacher deciding which  freshman students  who read poorly might still be placed into the College Prep stream at the school.

Miss Wicker failed me with a red ink F in big print on my report card that first marking period  so everyone who’d come close to the card would notice I was in trouble!  Her’s was the first class of my day.    It also would be open broadly for every one of my teachers  see the  RED “F” I had earned.

I was so very lucky to have lived in that St. Paul school district which still hired such great teachers when seeking Truth mattered.

They aren’t around anymore, folks.   Feminism, fascism, antiAmericanism and other drugs  reign.