Trump Directs his SOTU to the PEOPLE

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Conservatism, Constitution, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, Media, President Donald J. Trump, race and culture, Republican Party establishment, SOTU2019

Source: @RepAnnieKuster/twitter.

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

On paper the State of the Union Address has been from the President, the Chief Executive, to the other branches of Government, telling them how the country was faring.

The People, the object of the Constitution, (don’t forget) only learned what the President had to say about the State of the Union through the Media, who, for most of those years, served as a go-between the People the Government. A quaint notion, I’m sure.

For the longest time, into my lifetime, the print media, newspapers, were the sole means of communicating to the People what the President said.

Then came radio (1920s) and now television, since the 1950s.

I can’t say when the SOTU became little more than a banquet speech by the company president to his board of directors, but for the most part it was rarely directed to the People as a vehicle to either encourage, persuade, or fire them up. Ronald Reagan stands out in this regard because in his eight years in the White House, every thing he achieved with Congress’ help was done with the opposition wing in charge of the Congress. Reagan’s only ally was the People, and he encouraged them to encourage, or threaten, their Congressional representatives to give the President what he asked.

It largely worked, for it took the Democrats 20 years to undo most of what Reagan accomplished, while it took Trump only two years to undo the bulk of Obama’s handiwork.

In retrospect, Reagan’s was a kinder, gentler time.

I haven’t watched a SOTU live in thirty years, since Reagan, although I have seen many of the snippets of past presidents. I had no intention to watch this one, except my son encouraged me to because he thought something big might happen, you know, like a 5-car pileup at Richmond Raceway. With casualties[…]

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Target: Not the President, but the Presidency

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2018 election, Art II US Constitution, Bureaucracy, Buzzfeed, CNN, Democrat Party, law, Media

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

The argument is often made that First Amendment protections means we can’t do anything about the Media.

Well, yes and no.

You see, the Media is a Thing, just as a corporation is a Thing, the FBI is a Thing. You know what I’m saying. Liars, traitors, criminals of every stripe, are people…with names and faces, and dozens of personal weaknesses, even addictions.

And this ‘Thing’ is protected by the First Amendment.

You can sue a corporation, but you can’t put it in jail. You can bring criminal charges against a corporation, but then you have to dig way deep to find the individual “trigger finger” that did it. Then you have to make sure you can prove your case and not convict a fall-guy, which large organizations are filled with.

Finding the genuinely guilty is often very difficult to prove and teams of lawyers are there to try to blight your path every step of the way.

And for the Media, the First Amendment is there to blight your path almost every step of the way, generally beginning in 1971.

These days, the most difficult task is to simply know what is actually a crime, or civilly, an actionable injury, or tort, since the law makes so many exemptions, especially for the Media.

In the 1971, New York Times v United States, (the famous Pentagon Papers trial) the Supreme Court ruled that the NYT was protected by the First Amendment.

All that was sought in that case was an injunction, stopping the publication of a “classified” history of the United States involvement in SE Asia going back to the Eisenhower Days.

Virtually no one even knows what that history revealed, probably more damaging to the Democrats than the Republicans on the history end, but more damaging to The Republicans politically since, by 1971, Vietnam was Nixon’s War, and the leftwing media wanted to hang that war around his and the GOP’s neck, which they effectively did. Most Millennials believe he started it, and lost it.

In 1971, CNN was still almost a decade away from being born, and the founders of Buzzfeed’s fathers were still in college, their sons but gleams in their eyes. Besides the Pentagon Papers case said nothing about Fake News, or the malicious intent to do injury. No lies were involved in the passing by Daniel Ellsburg of the Papers to an NYT reporter named Neil Shaheen.

Ellsburg was indicted under the federal law for giving Shaheen the Papers in 1973, but his case was dismissed for misconduct by the Nixon DOJ five months later, and three years after SCOTUS allowed the NYT to publish the Papers[…]

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How the Government Shutdown is Playing on Main Street

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Bureaucracy, Elitism and Class, future Democratic voters, government shutdown, Illegal Immigration, Media, National Security, Progressives war on America, Progressives War on Donald Trump, The Wall

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

I’ve been working on a piece about how regular America actually get their news, and what is it that is important to them.

The first thing that comes to mind is border security. After all, that is the main plank that Donald Trump ran on in 2016. Only, what the pundits, politicos and pollsters missed from the beginning: Donald Trump did not sell this idea to the people, the people told Donald Trump this is what they want from their president.

This is why border security transcends “traditional politics” and moves into “existential politics” again a thing the political establishment misses altogether.

It is probably the only national news the vast majority of the American people pay attention to, and despite Media reporting that is largely anti-Wall support for the Wall continues to grow, now over 90% of Americans believe illegal immigration to be a real problem.

If anything, anti-Wall sentiment by the Media has spurred this pro-Wall sentiment even among people who don’t follow news as you who are reading this do. They do read blogs, or go to the internet, Tweet or Facebook (unless it’s a grandbaby or cat), but just driving to work in the morning or home in the evening they can’t avoid that News on the Fives, or top of the Hour Headlines, from the local radio station, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, local radio newsrooms have been convinced (or ordered) to believe that 1) negative news about Trump, 2) Trump shutting down the government over the Wall and 3) it’s Trump’s fault the government is what listeners need, not want to hear.

The same is true of daytime television, which is supposed to hold viewers until the Nightly network News comes on[…]

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“Alleged”, a brief History

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Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, Judge Sullivan, law, Media, Michael Cohen, President Donald J. Trump, Progressives

Unified Patriots by Vassarbushmills

To younger students, one of the reasons it’s nice to keep old people around is we can tell you the origins of things that are common in your world, only how it got here, you may have missed, but which might be relevant in the deeper lessons of life you’re always instructing us in. (Insert Ocasio-Cortez joke here.)

I never thought of this as ancient history, but I was a high school senior, in the school auditorium for a pep rally…state high school championship, and I was the starting left end…when the vice principal walked in and took the podium and quietly said “the President has been shot”.

Just as my parents knew exactly where they were on December 7, 1941 my generation knew exactly where we were when we heard that JFK had been shot, November 22, 1963.

The good news is that 77 years later the whole nation still pauses to remember that awful day in 1941, even better, while no longer blaming any Japanese person living today for it. But November 22nd scarcely gets a second thought, much less a moment of silence, even though most of the young people who were alive then and worshipped JFK most, are still alive today.

This is because the thrill with JFK has long since passed.

A good man nonetheless, today his party gets embarrassed when we remind them that once upon a time their party also had a president who was patriotic, loved America, was a war hero, and a free-market advocate.

But then again, once upon a time, that wasn’t anything special for any American.

So, I’m quite certain that when the last person dies who can remember where he/she was on November 22, 1963, John F Kennedy and the whole Kennedy name will quietly slip below the waves of cultural memory and sink, without any help from historians, media or social commentary. Unlike the last Confederate veteran who died in 1951, there will be no one to plat “Taps” in his memory, or to reflect that even the “woman in black”, who laid flowers at Rudolph Valentino’s grave until she died in 1984, stayed her course longer. Even the eternal flame that a worshipful Nation laid at JFK’s grave in 1967 will eventually go out, then maybe not be relit, since no one will recall why it was lit in the first place[…]

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The Caravan; Options

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2018 election, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, Honduras caravan, Media, Mexico, President Donald J. Trump, race and culture, skunk

Bil’in Riot, Jan 2011 Source: Israel Defense Forces-Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

In 2013 when Obama was still president, I offered a piece entitled Ellis Island del Norte, Ellis C0rral deu Sur laying how we could open an orderly, relatively fast portal coming into the United States, much like Ellis Island stationed just off New York City, where millions would pass through, but also many quarantined and returned. Then some distance from this peaceful portal, we could build a giant corral where the accommodations would be less pleasant, and the journey back South less appealing for those who had been captured here while trying to sneak in.

You may have forgotten that another caravan from Central America, about 1500, approached the United States via Mexico in April, and the Media followed them all the way to Tijuana, with the belief was that many would apply for asylum, then be processed and returned. Then the story  evaporated. “Fizzled” is a better word.

What we learned then was that Mexico was at best a feckless partner in keeping these well-funded caravans away from a border show-down.

So, yes, it’s not just Honduras’ fault, but Mexico’s, that these people are once again on the march and nearing our borders.

Mexico is in a pickle, because the current president, Nieto, is scheduled to leave office Dec 1, just 45 days from now, when the new Mexican president Obrador,  will  move in. Nieto, a young, good looking man, is remembered unfavorably for the corruption of his administration, and of the PRI, the ruling party of  Mexico for most of the period since 1934, while Obrador represents a new Party that has never been in power. A blank slate and while they have spoken on the phone, they have never met.

This makes it difficult for President Trump to put his foot down on the toes of a man who won’t be in office long, and if history tells us anything, from a party who could care less[…]

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The Media’s Worst Nightmare

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Bureaucracy, Communist media complex, mainsteam media, Media, Nuremberg trials

Vassar Bushmills

This is not so much my fervent wish than my best guess.

It will take a few years to play out as the case load will be heavy, a select stream of a star-studded cast of men and women who have already earned stars on the Establishment Politic’s Boulevard-of-Fame.

Out of sight, alongside them, will be a much larger group from deeper inside the catacombs of the bureaucracy, names as anonymous as Peter Strozk and Lisa Page once were, or names like Papadopolous or Halper, each now known because of a media leak of a confidential source. They will accept a variety of plea-offers in exchange for evidence, and will also face their day in court, only with less fanfare.

Dozens, perhaps even hundreds more, will resign or retire, some maybe with full benefits, depending on their  relative guilt and their contributions to the prosecution.

Still, tens of thousands more in the federal government already go to bed each night fearing that tomorrow their name might appear in a media report about one of their colleagues they just happened to bump into at an office picnic.

As for duration, these trials will be more like Nuremberg than anything seen in America in recent years, which held 12 trials over 3 years, against 185 defendants, convicting 147.  So they were not tried individually, even the most heinous of the criminals standing 18 abreast.

So don’t tell me an American government doesn’t know how to pull off such a mass shindig successfully[…]

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