Intellectuals of the Republican Party (see here and here) are showing the utmost stupidity in deploring and opposing that amazing phenomenon named Trump, instead of putting all their resources – all the money they can raise, all the influence they can bring to bear – behind him. That would be the surest way of keeping treasonous, corrupt, crooked Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

However, some intellectuals – the ones who can really think – understand how lucky America is to have a political superstar loom up to save it at this desperate moment in its history.

The British historian Paul Johnson writes at Forbes:

The mental infection known as “political correctness” is one of the most dangerous intellectual afflictions ever to attack mankind. The fact that we began by laughing at it – and to some extent, still do – doesn’t diminish its venom one bit. …

Nowhere has PC been more triumphant than in the U.S. This is remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech. From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything – until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.

For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous.

We admire all that about him too.

He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless , pusillanimous and under-deserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination. The fact that he was elected President – not once, but twice – shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

Under Obama the U.S. – by far the richest and most productive nation on earth – has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.

None of the Republican candidates trailing Trump has the character to reverse this deplorable declension.

The Democratic nomination seems likely to go to the relic of the Clinton era, herself a patiently assembled model of political correctness, who is carefully instructing America’s most powerful pressure groups in what they want to hear and whose strongest card is the simplistic notion that the U.S. has never had a woman President and ought to have one now, merit being a secondary consideration.

It can be of no consideration at all in Hillary’s case. She has no merit whatsoever.

The world is disorderly and needs its leading nation to take charge and scare it back into decency. Donald Trump fits the bill.Other formidable figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, have performed a similar service in the past. But each President is unique and cast in his own mold. Trump is a man of excess–and today a man of excess is what’s needed.

Yessss!

Sunday being their day of rest, it is probably the best day of the week to talk to our numerous Christian readers about their religion.

Today we talk about the man who named himself (quite late in his life) Paul, and is known to history as Saint Paul.

We compare St. Paul, whose followers are now estimated at 2.2 billion – making his invention, Christianity, the biggest religion in the world – with Muhammad, whose followers are now estimated at 1.6 billion – making his invention, Islam, the second biggest religion in the world.

There are close similarities between St. Paul and Muhammad:

Both invented a god and claimed a unique relationship with him.

To each of them this god expounded exclusive information; in St. Paul’s case directly, in Muhammad’s through an intermediary.

Both claimed that his god gave him unique authority to expound his truth to the world.

Both declared that his god demanded mankind’s submission to the divine will.

Both desired his faith to become the single religion of the entire world. Though this dream has not been realized in either case, each launched an ideological movement that became enormously successful. In this they are peers, and no other individual comes near to matching their achievement in terms not only of numbers of followers but of endurance through time. (Christianity has lasted some 2,000 years, Islam about 1,500.)

Both preached the subjugation of women.

Both preached the obedience of slaves.

Both anathematized homosexuality.

Both preached predestination.

Both taught martyrdom as a model way to die.

Each held himself up as a model of the perfect man.

Each took the idea of monotheism from the Jews; laid claim to their mythology and historical legends; picked some of their commandments and rules, and adapted all of it to his special needs.

Each hoped to convert the Jews and when he failed, stuck it to them.

Differences between the two persons and their respective ministries:

Muhammad was illiterate, St. Paul was literate.

Muhammad spread his religion by the sword, St. Paul by the word. (Later Christians and Muslims used both.)

Allah and Christ – the tethered and the free-range gods:

Muhammad attached his god to himself so tightly that there could be no Allah without Muhammad. It cannot be said that St. Paul cut Christ loose, but he did give him quite a lot of slack.

A theocracy versus separation of powers:  

No secular authority can share power with Islam. There’s no part or detail of life, no action, no speech, no custom, no thought that is not regulated by Sharia, the law of Islam. The Christian churches share authority with secular powers, though there is almost always a line drawn between their respective provinces.

The main difference between the moral teachings of the two religions:

St. Paul’s Christianity teaches its adherents to be pacific, altruistic, forgiving and self-sacrificing. Muhammad’s Islam teaches its adherents to be bellicose, acquisitive, unforgiving and merciless.

To what extent are these contrasting doctrines obeyed by Christians on the one side and Muslims on the other? The Muhammad doctrine has been more faithfully followed through the history of Islam than the St. Paul doctrine through the history of Christianity. Europe, the first Christian continent, is more secular than religious now, but Christian doctrine has so soaked the culture that pacifism, altruism, and self-sacrifice is moving the Europeans to submit to the hordes of Muslims pouring onto their continent, carrying out rapine and slaughter, and demanding dominion. Islam – whose very name means “submission” – submits only to Allah.

So which side will win and which side lose looks like a foregone conclusion.

The great Pat Condell blows off steam, vituperatively, splendidly:

Paul Weston of Liberty GB deplores the election of Sadiq Khan, a blatant supporter of Islamic supremacy and the terrorist tactics of the jihadis, as Mayor of London.

“Do something”?

What can you do?

By the waters of the Thames sit down and weep.

It’s too late to save Britain.

The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, called on Donald Trump to unify the Republican Party if he wanted to earn his support.

If Paul Ryan gave his support to Donald Trump he would be unifying the Party.

He’s putting the cart before the horse.

A former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, reproached Ryan by pointing out –

Donald Trump may turn out to be the most effective anti-left leader in our lifetime. He is against political correctness. He is against bureaucracy. He places American nationalism first which I think we desperately need. I’m tired of being told we have to have phony agreements and phony efforts.

The Hill, in its report that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, declared his support for Trump, quotes McConnell as saying:

As the presumptive nominee, [Donald Trump] now has the opportunity and the obligation to unite our party around our goals.

The biggest goal, in McConnell’s eyes, is to defeat Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, and prevent what is largely expected to be a continuation of many of President Obama’s policies if she takes the Oval Office.

That goal is surely one that Trump and (most of?) the old guard of the Republican Party can and do agree on.

But in general: No, Senator McConnell, you have got it wrong. Donald Trump has the opportunity and the obligation to unite the party around his goals. If he drops everything he says he stands for, everything he proclaims as his intention, the very ideas that are drawing the approval of millions of voters throughout the country, in order just to fall in with your old, stale, failed ideas, those millions of voters will not vote for him in the general election and the Republican Party will not win the presidency.

You stalwarts of the old guard must put all your resources behind him, back him up with so much enthusiasm it actually looks like and may even become an amazing Republican novelty – passionate commitment.

It is up to you, Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan, to unify the party and satisfy the people by joining your obvious nominee, Donald Trump. That is your obligation.

We are bombarded with comments and emails telling us that we are wrong to support Donald Trump.

Millions are voting for him. He is the Republican nominee for the presidency. Yet most articles about him in the conservative media are emotionally hostile.

Breitbart is an exception.

A. J. Delgado writes at Breitbart:

America’s bullies – the sneering, “we know better than you” establishment classes – have made many cower in silence rather than proclaim that Trump is a tremendous presidential candidate and has earned their support.

It is a replay of the worst aspects of high school peer-pressure, about what’s OK and what isn’t, based on selfish interests and prejudices.

Well, enough of that. Trump is already changing America for the better – and is encouraging us to boldly stand up for our beliefs about what’s best for our nation and best for our fellow Americans.

So let’s get right to it. Shifting America back on course requires Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. Not only is he the only Republican candidate who could win the general election, but he is the only choice Republican voters should consider (and should consider themselves lucky to have on their side).

The author gives 20 good reasons for choosing Donald Trump.

Here are some of them:

His business accomplishments.  Shocker! Imagine having a president who has actually built and created things! Imagine having a president with a proven track record as an enormously successful businessman. But, silly me – why have that when we can have, for instance, a first-term senator, career-politician who’s never even passed any significant legislation or a governor whom, despite some laudable accomplishments, most of the nation, including Republicans, can’t stomach?

He’s pro-women. In the plot to take down Trump, one of the first tactics tried was to cast him as anti-women. But Trump has worked with many peers and sparred against many rivals – male and female alike – and thus actually shows he treats women as equals (e.g., Yes, he joked about Carly Fiorina – he also joked about Rand Paul. Get it?). Or are we, as women, demanding to be coddled and spared the same treatment as the gents? … 

A man of sound morals. For those who judge a man’s character based on whether he called someone a “loser” during a silly Twitter feud, well, there is no helping your stupidity so stop reading this. The rest of us, however, know to look at a man’s actions and his record in life. What is Trump’s? For one, he’s known for treating his workers well. Second, is there no ugly scandal or brush with the law – he seems to lead a fairly straight-arrow life. Then there’s his family life. Two divorces? Sure. Marriages sometimes don’t work out. Ask Newt Gingrich or even Ronald Reagan himself. He’s on friendly terms with both ex-wives, though. What does that tell you? And his children routinely express what a loving, supportive father he’s been. Point me to another businessman of Trump’s money with four adult children, all of whom have stayed away from scandal and disgrace despite growing up in the spotlight. We’d be hard pressed to find one – meaning, Trump clearly did something right. Heck, forget the “Art of the Deal” — Trump should write the “Art of Parenting”. …

His policies are spot-on, particularly immigration. For brevity, this article is not meant to discuss the nuances of Trump’s proposed policies and positions. But he’s right on pretty much every position he espouses, first and foremost that of immigration, the most critical issue facing America.

How about taxes? Trump is the only one willing to take on the hedge-fund managers and blast their ridiculously unfair tax rate. It’s the ideal position – someone with a conservative tax plan but who realizes attacking the hedge-funders’ sweet deal doesn’t make one a “liberal” – and simply shows an individual with an astute understanding of finance and a genuine sense of fairness.

How about a dedication to veterans? Check!

A strong but sensible foreign policy? Check!

Negotiation skills. Presidents have the benefit of being surrounded by highly talented experts in their respective fields – it’s the entire basis for the Cabinet appointments. But, what’s the one area on which a president is on his own? Negotiations. When our leader walks into an international forum, or that one-on-one meeting with the British PM, there is no adviser that can speak for him. It’s the one time the president sinks or swims on his own merits. As such, a stern – even arrogant — president with negotiating expertise is of paramount importance. Governors have keen negotiating skills, sure – so do CEO’s. Trump is so good at it, though, he – literally – wrote the ‘bible’ on it.

Many Latinos love him. … The media keeps insisting Latinos despise Trump. Except, we don’t. In fact, many of us love him. Myriam Wichter, the Columbian immigrant from the recent Las Vegas Trump rally, is not an anomaly. Hang-onto-your-horses for this whopper of a “revelation”: America’s Latinos have the same wants, needs, and concerns as other Americans! Our priorities are the same as “Anglos”: jobs, healthcare, and so on! A truly novel concept!

And here are some more comments made in the course of the article which we like:

The more the powers-that-be try to take Trump down with breathless: “Can you believe he said ____?!” the more the American public shrugs and says: “Eh, sorry, still love him” or, worse yet, as seems to be the case lately: “Hey, actually, we like him even more now! I’m glad someone finally said ___!”

Attempt after attempt on ‘Teflon Trump’ slides right off him and instead backfires and blows up in their collective faces. …

It’s make or break time – and drastic times call for, well, not drastic measures but certainly something different. …

Yes, Trump is different. Guess what? That’s a good thing. His ideas – e.g., a sound immigration policy, returning manufacturing jobs to America, negotiating better trade deals – are not at all radical, but do go against the Washington status-quo. You see, we’re supposed to select another perfectly malleable politician – a Republican not unlike a Democrat – who won’t shake things up too much while in office. Same ol’, same ol’. And you, little person, you are supposed to vote for more of the same and like it. But the American public has reached a tipping point – we’d rather gouge out our eyes than select another career politician or Washington insider.

An exaggeration that, no doubt, but it reflects the mood of those who support the man.

Read it all here.

Why is the West embracing the idea of its own extinction?

A very large number of human beings, the most enlightened, best informed, ever more productive, brilliantly entertained, comfortably accommodated – prosperous indeed beyond ancestral dreams – are choosing to give up existence. Is it simply because they cannot think of any reason to go on living? 

Seems so. They do not want to have children. Almost all Western countries – the great exception being the United States of America (fertility rate 2.06) – have fertility rates well below stability (2.1), which means they are dying out, each generation getting smaller. A strong indication that the present generation has no care for the future of the race.

Western intellectuals – in almost total unanimity in the academies – denigrate their civilization, find no value in it, even express disgust with it.

We have written about this annihilationist mood of Western intellectuals and elected leaders in a number of posts, among them these:

In “A vision of pure meaninglessness”  (December 14, 2008), we discuss the wish of environmentalists to protect the planet from human beings:

The environmentalists hold to the view, as little fact-based as all their views tend to be, that over-population is a threat, when in fact most countries, notably all of Europe and Japan, have precisely the opposite problem: birth-rates so low that the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish, the Portuguese (all predominantly Catholic countries, note) as well as the British, the Scandinavians, the Russians, the Japanese are literally dying out.

The environmentalist view is that human beings are messy creatures, doing more harm than good to the planet. The Green vision is of a clean, nay a pure planet. In truth, their ideal could only be realized by the total elimination of the filthy human species.

Fresh wild raw uninhabited world (January 2, 2012) deals with the same theme:  

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [in] its infamous report … alleged that human beings, just by bumbling about their daily business in spots here and there in the vast empty spaces of the continents, were having a deleterious – worse, a drastic – still worse, a disastrous effect on the climates of the planet. Its fans have had it up to here with the human species. If they could have their way they’d be rid of every last one of the squalid two-legged contaminators, and let the planet, finally cured of human infestation, spin on round the sun forever fresh, a wild, raw, goodness-packed organic world.

And in To be or not to be (January 10, 2016) …

A professor of philosophy named David Benatar published, some eight or nine years ago, a book titled: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. 

He makes the case that to live is to suffer and so it is best not to live. Just coming into existence is “a serious harm”. People should not have children. All babies should be killed in the womb. Humanity should become extinct.

He argues that the pain living beings endure is always much greater than the pleasure they enjoy. So they should not live. To avoid pain is a good thing; to miss pleasure is merely not a bad thing. The harm must always outweigh the joy.

It would not matter – he contends – if the human race ceased to exist: human existence has no value. 

No value to whom? The only possible answer is “to human beings”.

And we constantly write about European governments inviting vast numbers of Muslims into their countries from the Near, Middle and Far East, and Africa, to share their cosy welfare states – even those which are most rapidly subsiding into poverty. The Muslim immigrants will breed prolifically, become a majority, and impose sharia law on Europe as soon as they can.

Today, Giulio Meotti – writing at Gatestone – describes how what’s left of the nation-states of Western Europe are lowering their defenses, depleting their militaries, finding no reason to protect themselves with force even should they come under violent attack.

Actually, in some cases, because they are coming under violent attack:

On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed and 1,400 wounded in a series of terrorist attacks in Madrid. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was elected prime minister. Just 24 hours after being sworn in, Zapatero ordered Spanish troops to leave Iraq “as soon as possible”.

The directive was a monumental political victory for extremist Islam. Since then, Europe’s boots on the ground have not been dispatched outside Europe to fight jihadism; instead, they have been deployed inside the European countries to protect monuments and civilians.

“Opération Sentinelle” is the first new large-scale military operation within France. The army is now protecting synagogues, art galleries, schools, newspapers, public offices and underground stations. Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools. Meanwhile, French paralysis before ISIS is immortalized by the image of police running away from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during the massacre there.

You can find the same figure in Italy: 11,000 Italian soldiers are currently engaged in military operations and more than half of them are used in operation “Safe Streets”,  which, as its name reveals, keeps Italy’s cities safe. Italy’s army is also busy providing aid to migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

In 2003, Italy was one of the very few countries, along with Spain and Britain, which stood with the United States in its noble war in Iraq – a war that was successful until the infamous US pull-out on December 18, 2011.

Today, Italy, like Spain, runs away from its responsibility in the war against the Islamic State. Italy’s Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti ruled out the idea of Italy taking part in action against ISIS, after EU defense ministers unanimously backed a French request for help.

Italy’s soldiers, stationed in front of my newspaper’s office in Rome, provide a semblance of security, but the fact that half of Italy’s soldiers are engaged in domestic security, and not in offensive military strikes, should give us pause. These numbers shed a light not only on Europe’s internal terror frontlines, from the French banlieues to “Londonistan”.  These numbers also shed light on the great Western retreat.

US President Barack Obama has boasted that as part of his legacy, he has withdrawn American military forces from the Middle East. His shameful departure from Iraq has been the main reason that the Islamic State rose to power – and the reason Obama postponed a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. This US retreat can only be compared to the fall of Saigon, with the picture of a helicopter evacuating the U.S. embassy.

In Europe, armies are no longer even ready for war.

The German army is now useless, and Germany spends only 1.2% of GDP on defense. The German army today has the lowest number of staff at any time in its history.

In 2012, Germany’s highest court, breaking a 67-year-old taboo against using the military within Germany’s borders, allowed the military to be deployed in domestic operations. The post-Hitler nation’s fear that the army could develop again into a state-within-a-state that might impede democracy has paralyzed Europe’s largest and wealthiest country. Last January, it was revealed that German air force reconnaissance jets cannot even fly at night.

Many European states slumber in the same condition as Belgium, with its failed security apparatus. A senior U.S. intelligence officer even recently likened the Belgian security forces to “children”.

And Sweden’s commander-in-chief, Sverker Göranson, said his country could only fend off an invasion for a maximum of one week.

During the past ten years, the United Kingdom has also increasingly been seen by its allies – both in the US and in Europe – as a power in retreat, focusing only on its domestic agenda. The British have become increasingly insular – a littler England.

The former head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Nigel Essenigh, has spoken of “uncomfortable similarities” between the UK’s defenses now and those in the early 1930s, during the rise of Nazi Germany.

In Canada, military bases are now being used to host migrants from Middle East. Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian prime minister, first halted military strikes against ISIS, then refused to join the coalition against it. Terrorism has apparently never been a priority for Trudeau – not like “gender equality”,  global warming, euthanasia and injustices committed against Canada’s natives.

The bigger question is: Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations.

But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. …

Spain’s fertility has fallen the most – the lowest in Western Europe over twenty years and the most extreme demographic spiral observed anywhere. Similarly, fewer babies were born in Italy in 2015 than in any year since the state was founded 154 years ago. … Italy’s population shrank. Germany, likewise, is experiencing a demographic suicide.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one. It is Europe’s new Weimar moment, from the name of the first German Republic that was dramatically dismantled by the rise of Nazism. The Weimar Republic still represents a cultural muddle, a masterpiece of unarmed democracy devoted to a mutilated pacifism, a mixture of naïve cultural, political reformism and the first highly developed welfare state.

According to the historian Walter Laqueur, Weimar was the first case of the “life and death of a permissive society”. Will Europe’s new Weimar also be brought down, this time by Islamists?

By Islam, yes.

Because that’s what Europe wants – doesn’t it? How else explain what’s happening to it? What it is letting happen to it.

But why?

Now Cruz has gone. (Kasich was hardly ever there.) Trump is the Republican nominee for the presidency.

The Communist Party USA sees no difference between its own principles, policies and immediate aims and those of Bernie Sanders.

John Bachtell, national chair of the Communist Party USA, writes (February 25, 2016) in People’s World, which “enjoys a special relationship” with the CPUSA:

The 2016 elections have been dynamic and unpredictable. On the Democratic side, the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will likely remain competitive into the spring. On the GOP side, we face a threat to democracy most clearly posed by the candidacy of Donald Trump. The stakes in the election outcome have been dramatically raised.

The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders is making a unique contribution to defeating the Republican right and has the potential to galvanize long-term transformative change. The campaign is also a movement. Millions are fed up with the same old establishment politics tied to Wall Street and the 1 per cent. It’s reminiscent of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. Large numbers, particularly youth, are being activated and excited.

Political boundaries are being eclipsed and thinking reshaped. Seeds of change are being sown and foundations are being laid for deeper-going changes in the future. The Sanders campaign is giving hope to millions coping with long-term economic stagnation and vast wealth inequality, poverty and joblessness, student debt, climate crisis and institutionalized racism.

The campaign is expanding the collective political imagination and injecting radical ideas into the body politic. It has legitimized democratic socialism in the national conversation. Sanders is also influencing Hillary Clinton to adopt more progressive positions on a wide range of issues.

But Sanders understands if he is elected his radical economic and social agenda including breaking up the big banks, universal health care, tuition-free university, massive jobs creation, expanding Social Security, and repealing Citizen’s United will go nowhere given the vice grip the GOP and extreme right has on Congress.

The only way to realize a radical agenda is through a “political revolution”. This means drawing millions of people into the political process to overcome the power of Wall Street, obstruction of the GOP, and the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Sanders is helping the CPUSA to advance towards its objectives. His campaign is helpful but not sufficient. He understands this, and he himself wants more – a bigger movement towards realizing those objectives.

Sanders sees his campaign as part of a much bigger movement that must be built.

It starts with defeating the GOP at every level: presidency, congress and statehouses.  As Sanders said after his victory in New Hampshire, “Whether or not I win the nomination, we all must work together to unite the Democratic Party. We must come together to assure that the right wing does not capture the White House.”

If Sanders were to win, he would then be very useful to the CPUSA:

A decisive victory can open the door to passing progressive legislation, changing the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court and more radical changes down the road.

A political revolution rests on building a broad coalition comprising anyone opposing the extreme right; one that is multi-class, multi-racial, male and female, and multi-generational, which unites left and center currents and encompasses all the democratic movements.

It’s a coalition that fits this moment with the current balance of class and social forces. If the balance shifts in a more favorable direction resulting from victory, more radical reforms will be possible.

A political revolution can transform politics if labor, its allies and the broad left put their stamp on the multi-class alliance, shape its politics and frame the issues debated for the elections. The Sanders campaign is helping do this including strengthening the left and grassroots composition of the broad anti-ultra right coalition.

It will be transformative if the anti-right coalition is united and mobilized. Polls show that 86% of Clinton supporters will support Sanders in the general election if he is the nominee, and 79% of Sanders supporters will support Clinton if she wins. Sanders will need Clinton’s supporters in order to win.

Such a coalition must have an organized expression in every community, particularly working class communities. It must fight uncompromisingly against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attacks and all efforts to divide.

The CPUSA is old fashioned in Communist theory terms. It still clings to the Marxist idea that the proletariat is the revolutionary class that will “inevitably” (with lots of hard work by Communists) bring about the Revolution that will usher in a Communist utopia. The New Left, rising in the late 1960s, revised that notion. It looked to the Third World and “oppressed minorities”, such as women [!], the sexually abnormal, ethnic minorities, and whomever else could be worked up into a good lather of grievance.

It’s the darnedest thing that the proletariat in America is showing enormous enthusiasm for the Big Enemy of the Left, Donald Trump.

White working class communities are considered a key demographic for the GOP and are targets of the worst kinds of racist and reactionary ideas. A political revolution cannot abandon them to the embrace of the extreme right and its ideology of hate. Sanders’ vision of a political revolution calls for a 50-state strategy including turning red states and districts blue and defeating the GOP in its stronghold – the Deep South.

Well, sure, it’s a vision. However nightmarish it is to us, it’s beautiful to Sanders and the CPUSA. And the improbability of its becoming a reality doesn’t trouble those who envision it.

Though they know mighty forces are ranged against them.

If either Sanders or Clinton are [sic] elected, their administrations will face unrelenting obstruction from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, fossil fuel industry, right-wing think tanks and mass media and, of course, right-wing elements in the oligarchy (Koch brothers et al).

Voters must remain engaged at a high level after the election. When President Obama was elected in 2008 voters thought they had done their duty and went home. The void was filled by GOP obstruction and the Tea Party. Low voter turnout in 2010 and 2014 led to GOP control of Congress and state houses across the country.

A political revolution will be fueled by ongoing shifts in public attitudes. Majorities of Americans now favor taxing the rich, raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, abortion rights, marriage equality, criminal justice reform, and action to curb the climate crisis.

Majorities? It’s horribly possible. But the election itself will test that assertion.

New social movements are influencing millions at the grassroots including the Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, The Dreamers, reproductive rights, marriage equality, and climate justice activists.

A political revolution is based on the idea that majorities make change. It is not enough for majorities to believe in an idea, they must actively fight for it.

Some representatives of the Communist-approved “new social movements” are already actively fighting in the streets outside every Trump rally, spilling blood. But it’s unlikely that they represent “majorities”. That they will in time, however, is the persistent dream of the CPUSA.

Sanders’ political revolution envisions democratizing our political system.

Remember, Communists have their own definition of “democracy”: dictatorship by the Communist Party.

This includes removing money from politics, expanding the right to vote, and stimulating independent politics. Movements are acting both within and outside the Democratic Party and comprise many of the key forces in the anti-right alliance.

A political revolution will help establish the foundations for a real people’s party, whether it results in a breakaway from or a takeover of the Democratic Party.

Regardless of whether Sanders wins or not, the politics of the nation will never be the same and the fight for a political revolution will continue.

Oh yes, it will. We can be sure of it. Like taxes and death, the Communists’ continuing fight for a political revolution is a certainty.

The Bernie Sanders types who helped to bring about the revolution in Russia in 1917, were liquidated by the Bolsheviks when they acquired power. Sanders is lucky that the CPUSA is not likely to come to power in his lifetime.

Though of that one cannot be sure, of course.

When WMDs were not found in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, though they had been a compelling reason for the US invasion, the story coming through unofficial channels was that Saddam had hastily moved them to Syria, to be stored there for him until he had beaten back the President Bush-led onslaught.

Although the sources were unofficial, they had proved themselves to be generally trustworthy. So many of those who heard the story believed it. But the sources could not be cited.

When the story was largely confirmed to “defense reporters” by [then] Lt. Gen. James Clapper* in 2003, it was still not widely accepted.

Is it more likely to be accepted now? If so, it may be too late to be useful to those who have defended the invasion of Iraq, but not too late to be interesting to historians.

Today, May 2, 2016, Front Page is re-running an article by Bill Gertz that was first published in the Washington Times on October 29, 2003:  

Iraqi military officers destroyed or hid chemical, biological and nuclear weapons goods in the weeks before the war, the [US’s] top satellite spy director said yesterday.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria.

Other goods probably were sent throughout Iraq in small quantities and documents probably were stashed in the homes of weapons scientists, Gen. Clapper told defense reporters at a breakfast.

Gen. Clapper said he is not surprised that U.S. and allied forces have not found weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq because “it’s a big place.”

“Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence,” he said.

Congress is investigating whether U.S. intelligence agencies overstated information indicating that Iraq had hidden its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has defended the intelligence agencies on prewar reports that the weapons were there.

Iraqi government officials “below the Saddam Hussein and the sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to dispose, destroy and disperse [them]”,  he said.

So maybe it wasn’t Saddam himself who gave the order to transport the WMDs to Syria, but some authority did. (Was there an authority in Saddam’s Iraq other than Saddam himself?)

Gen. Clapper said he felt strongly that the satellite imagery of Iraq’s weapons facilities before the war was “accurate and balanced”. …

He also said the Iraqi government carried out operations after the fall of Baghdad in April to cover up the hidden weapons programs. The chaos following might have included both looting and “organized dispersal made to look like looting“,  he said. “So by the time that we got to a lot of these facilities, that we had previously identified as suspect facilities, there wasn’t that much there to look at,” he said.

Valuable documents on Iraq’s weapons were destroyed or lost in the chaos, which included burning of major government ministries.

Saddam began dispersing his weapons and sending elements of his chemical, biological and nuclear programs out of the country in the weeks before the war, he said.

The dispersal included moving both weapons and equipment as well as documents. …

As for shipping weapons out of Iraq, he said, there is “no question” that people and material were taken to Syria. …

Convoys of vehicles, mostly commercial trucks, were spotted going into Syria from Iraq shortly before the start of the war March 19 and during the conflict, he said.

It may be a sign of instinctive wisdom that people are inclined to believe what they overhear more than what they are told.

*James Clapper is now Director of National Intelligence.