Monday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
 The Events of the Week -- Featuring: 
 
Moral Supremacy and Mr. Putin
by Patrick Buchanan
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 Stop Saying Stupid Sh-t ... Please 
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By Mark Alexander: In an off-the-record remark to his adoring media on an Air Force One junket two years ago, Barack liar-nObama summarized his foreign policy: "Don't do stupid sh-t." This past weekend, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Donald Trump's mind-numbing response to a foreign policy question took the bar for careless and stupid remarks to a new low.
          Referencing questions about Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin, O'Reilly remarked that Putin is a "killer." Trump responded, "There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?" Giving Trump a chance to think about what he was saying, O'Reilly said, "I don't know of any government leaders that are killers." But it wasn't long enough. Trump shot back, "Well, take a look at what we've done, too. We made a lot of mistakes. I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning." O'Reilly again tried to intervene: "Yes, mistakes are different than..." But Trump interjected, "We made a lot of mistakes, OK, but a lot of people were killed. So, a lot of killers around, believe me."
          According to fellow Tennessean David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and an astute foreign policy analyst, "[Trump] is not only obscuring the truth, he's injecting nonsensical moral relativism into American foreign policy — a relativism that can undermine national resolve in the face of an increasing Russian threat."
          Yes, Trump is new to the office and doesn't have an ounce of political polish, which can be one of his more attractive attributes. And his administration nominees rival the pedigrees of those nominated by even Ronald Reagan. But Trump is most assuredly not the "great communicator" President Reagan was, and he no longer controls the script like he did with his successful reality TV show. You can't do retakes in live interviews.
          As conservative columnist Salena Zito advised last year regarding some of Trump's remarks and social media posts, "take him seriously, but not literally." But some of his remarks are so literally absurd that it is too much to ask that even his most ardent supporters take him seriously. Trump's foreign policy is going to be more effective than that of Barack liar-nObama, but he does not help his case by saying "stupid sh-t."  ~The Patriot Post
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Trump Travel Ban Unconstitutional? But liar-nObama,
Bush, Carter Travel Bans Constitutional?
by C. Mitchell Shaw
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{thenewamerican.com} ~ Other presidents have suspended immigration without having their orders derailed by the courts. Why is Trump's executive order being treated differently?... On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals kept to its activist ways by refusing to allow President Trump’s executive order suspending the controversial U.S. refugee program to be in effect as it continues to wind its way through the courts. The three-judge panel that denied the administration’s request to lift the temporary restraining order on the executive order was unanimous in its decision. In plain English, that means that the three-judge panel decided that the restraining order against Trump’s executive order is unlikely to be overturned by a higher court, so it sees no reason to lift the restraining order as this case works its way through the labyrinth of legal red tape it faces. Of course, the point that is largely overlooked in all of this is that each of these judges was appointed by presidents who also had policies “restricting an individual’s ability to travel.”... https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/25358-trump-travel-ban-unconstitutional-but-carter-bush-obama-travel-bans-constitutional?utm_source=iContactPro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TNA+Top+Daily+Headlines&utm
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China’s Defense Ministry Confirms
Multi-Warhead Missile Test
by Bill Gertz
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{freebeacon.com} ~ The recent Chinese missile launch with 10 warheads was a normal "scientific" test and not targeted at any foreign nation, according to China's Defense Ministry... The ministry was responding to a report in the Washington Free Beacon revealing a Chinese DF-5C missile was flight tested last month with 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. The test represented an increase in China's multiple-warhead nuclear missiles. The Chinese ministry commented on the missile test in a statement to China's state-run Shenzhen television on Feb. 6 that was widely quoted in other news outlets, including the People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper. The Chinese claimed reports of the test were aimed at "hyping" China's  strategic and conventional military buildup...Do we really believe that?
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Democratic Obstruction on
Trump Cabinet Reaches Historic Levels
by Brent Scher
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{freebeacon.com} ~ Not since President George Washington's initial formation of a cabinet in 1789 has an American president's cabinet picks been approved as slowly as the Senate is approving President Donald Trump's nominees... Trump has now been president for a full three weeks, and the number of approved members in his cabinet stands at seven—a number that was boosted by three contested confirmations last week that were opposed by almost the entire Democratic caucus. Senate Democrats, vowing to use "everything" they can to stop Trump's nominees, have used procedural tricks like boycotting committee meetings to slow the confirmation process to a historically slow pace...
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Illegal Alien Who Voted in
Five Elections Sentenced to Prison
by Trey Sanchez
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{truthrevolt.org} ~ Democrats swear it’s not a thing, but an illegal alien living in Texas has been sentenced to eight years in prison for voting in five elections between 2004 and 2014... According to Law Newz, Rosa Maria Ortega lives in Grand Prairie and was found guilty of just two counts of illegal voting despite the Texas Attorney General Office having proof she voted in five. Ortega testified she wasn’t aware there was a difference in rights for citizens and illegals. Besides committing voter fraud, Ortega regularly lied about her citizenship. She told investigators she tried to start the citizenship process, but the attorney general’s office could find no evidence...
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Hundreds of Thousands Chant 'Death to America'
on Anniversary of Iranian Revolution
by Mark Tapson
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{truthrevolt.org} ~ To commemorate the anniversary of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Iranians rallied across the country Friday chanting "Death to America" and carrying effigies of President Donald Trump... The UK Daily Mail reports that huge crowds responded to a call from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to show up in defiance of Trump putting the Islamic Republic "on notice" for its missile test on January 29. Iran also is one of seven Middle Eastern countries on Trump's current "travel ban" list. He joined hundreds of thousands at an anniversary march through the capital. State television reported that millions turned out nationwide at rallies in all the main cities. There was all the usual anti-US and anti-Israel slogans and the burning of American flags...And liar-nObama made a deal with them, what a lie.  http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/iran-hundreds-thousands-chant-death-america-anniversary-iranian-revolution
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Moral Supremacy and Mr. Putin
by Patrick Buchanan
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{freedomsback.com} ~ Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?

Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.

During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar Assad alone.

With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”

Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.

O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.

If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a “killer.”

Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.

Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”

Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.

When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?

Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong — that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?

While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long march” together.

John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a murderer, and a killer.”

Yet, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest who engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with Russian tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose to general secretary of the Communist Party, Ronald Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk to every Soviet leader.

Why? Because Reagan believed the truly moral thing he could do was negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

He finally met Gorbachev in 1985, when the USSR was occupying Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghan patriots.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.

Undeniably, we were on God’s side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?

Was it not at least morally problematic what we did to Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted and burned to death?

How many innocent Iraqis have perished in the 13 years of war we began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

In Russia, there have been murders of journalists and dissidents. Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine ally, has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug dealers and users since last summer.

The Philippine Catholic Church calls it “a reign of terror.”

Should we sever our treaty ties to the Duterte regime?

Have there been any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected government?

Has our Turkish ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, killed no innocents in his sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted coup?

Some of us remember a Cold War in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and when the Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3) organization.

Sen. Rubio notwithstanding, the CIA has not been a complete stranger to “wet” operations or “terminating with extreme prejudice.”

Was it not LBJ who said of the Kennedys, who had arranged multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had been “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”?

If Trump’s talking to Putin can help end the bloodshed in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.
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