No statesman is in a position to indicate ten years in advance what he is going to do later; on the pathless fields of politics one cannot proceed by schedule like an engineer. Konrad Heiden (1944)
George Rebane
Labor Day is past and we are now in the pre-debate phase of the campaigns. Trump has indeed toned down his delivery, if not his message. He now sounds more composed, deliberate, and therefore presidential as he modifies his policies for the final run to November with the help of advisors, notes, and even the teleprompter. But no matter his tone, he continues to be the political maverick, as he must if he’s to have a snowball’s chance in hell for the Oval Office – his public demands it. And that public is growing according to polls, some of these now show him even or even ahead a point or two. I see the effects of retired general Mike Flynn on both his military policy and coordinating support from retired flags to counter Hillary’s chorus of the Obama-compliant officers. But we have yet to see the obvious marks of Christie and Gingrich, maybe they are currently tutoring his debate performance.
Meanwhile Hillary continues to pile lie upon lie while bolstering the ones that already underpin her character with the thinly-informed. Her email scandals do nothing but grow as the election approaches, and now we all await the October Surprise (or the “Ides of October” as one reader has dramatically labeled it). That she remains unindicted is a terrible sadness upon our republic, giving overwhelming evidence that our justice and judicial institutions suffer from a deep corruption.
RR called out Comey for his defection from decency the moment he walked away from the podium after finding no evidence with which a court could convict Clinton (here). The lamestream hailed the finding, and the alternate media remained more or less circumspect as it tsk-tsked the state of affairs over the following weeks. Finally, the travesty of justice has reached a level the Wall Street Journal today wrote ‘The FBI’s Blind Clinton Trust’, a blistering summary of the FBI’s efforts to whitewash Hillary, surmising that Comey was in the tank for Obama/Hillary even before the investigation started.
[9sep16 update] It is beyond clear that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp have an irritating hair up their private parts about this year’s presidential candidates. Both of their flagship properties – WSJ and Fox News – are doing an equal number on Hillary and Trump. What’s newsworthy is their constant attack on The Donald’s campaign. There they have adopted Hillary’s talking points and provide as much substantive backing to their slights as do the Democrats. FN in its “fair and balanced” manner sounds more like MSNBC by the day as it covers Trump’s campaign. The editorial stance of Paul Gigot and his team at the WSJ have long been vehemently anti-Trump. Both outlets oddly put off their consumers by frothing about what Trump might or might not do as president vs what Hillary has already demonstrated she can’t do added to the deplorable things she has already done.
As an example, I draw your attention to a recently typical WSJ editorial – ‘The Commander-in-Chief Choice’ – such as the one that leads today’s (9sep16) editorial page. After a relatively mild slap on Hillary’s wrist about her bad foreign policy decisions and impossibly unfunded domestic program proposals, the WSJ then devotes twice the real estate to taking down Trump.
For openers Trump “shows so little knowledge about the world that it’s impossible to know how he would react as he learns on the job.” That naked charge is presented without any supporting back-up. There is no evidence that the previous three presidents knew anything more about the world when they stepped into the Oval Office. And most certainly Hillary has demonstrated herself on the topic to be a slow learner beyond belief given her existential record as senator and SecState.
Next Trump is accused of “indulging his apparent Napoleon complex” re his knowledge of the Islamic State vs the generals. On the face of that claim 1) we know and can discount that as being campaign driven bombast as he has subsequently demonstrated, and 2) NO ONE inside the Beltway can claim to be an expert on ISIS given their record of dealing with ragheads and predicting their global influence. And Trump has been spot on when he called Obama’s recent fracturing the flag officer corps as having it “reduced to rubble.” If anything, rubble is a generous characterization of a military leadership that has quietly succumbed to feeding our troops piecemeal into a conflict conducted with no visible strategy for its resolution nor for building/sustaining a military that can stand up to the bad actors it has induced worldwide. The officers who could no longer accept such tragic incompetence (or worse) have simply left the service through resignations and/or early retirements. After years of this under Obama, how would you describe what remains in the Pentagon?
The Left and News Corp also continue to rag on Trump’s “secret plan” to defeat ISIS, and that he has not told everyone his plan. What he has said is that as President he will ask his generals to develop and present such a plan to him which he will consider and possibly revamp/integrate with his own approach. Given the continuing deadlocked failure in the Mideast, that certainly is the most reasonable thing any presidential candidate can and should say at this stage of the campaign. Only certifiable idiots spell out to the world and the enemy their intended means to defeat it months in advance of any such plan being put into effect. On the other side Hillary has stated that she would “never put our boots on the ground” again in the Mideast to defeat ISIS, thereby confirming she has no clue that we already had over 4,000 troops on the ground there with another 300 arriving this weekend. Now there’s an experienced CinC for you.
And as for Trump’s “weird admiration for Mr Putin” the WSJ attempts to prove this by Trump’s claim that Putin has “been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader” while acknowledging that happening in “a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system”. Characterizing a stark comparison as “admiration” is about as insidious of a political slam as you would expect Hillary to make, yet it comes from a so-called conservative news outlet.
My message to Mr Rupert and his gang at FN and WSJ is to get over it. Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, and the only game in town that can prevent the next crooked and corrupt Clinton from accelerating the established downward spiral of our country as part and parcel of the “fundamental change” her former boss promised, has already delivered, and seeks to double down on before he leaves office. And now that The Donald is well into the ‘presidential phase’ of his campaign with improving poll numbers to boot, now is the time to support his candidacy instead of continuing to pile on load after load of ‘fair and balanced’ snark about what they imagine he may or not do when in office. We already know what the foul-mouthed, pay-for-play liar will do when she gets in.
rebanesruminations.com 
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