The Patriot Post® · The Syrian Decision

Friday’s strike on Syrian chemical weapons sites reportedly came after the Pentagon presented three options to President Trump. He chose the least risky option in spite of fake news to the contrary.

As Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie explained Saturday morning, the targets were chosen in order to “significantly impact the Syrian regimes ability to develop, deploy and use chemical weapons in the future.”

President Trump has been clear that he does not want more men on the ground in Syria. Friday’s strikes were not intended to achieve regime change. They were limited to punishing Assad for using banned chemical weapons against civilians.

This strike came at a time when many in the United States, Israel and around the world have been remembering the Holocaust — an atrocity that happened because the nations of the world did nothing to confront a rising evil.

Nevertheless, that did not stop the Left from suggesting that President Trump lacked the authority for the strike. Nor did it stop some in the media from suggesting that the strike was done to distract from the Mueller investigation and James Comey’s interview.

Had he done nothing, those same voices would have criticized him for lacking moral authority and for being preoccupied with domestic scandals.

Listening to the president Friday night as he spoke to the American people, I was struck, as was Franklin Graham, that the president asked Americans to pray for our brave men and women serving in the military, for those suffering in Syria and for peace in the region.

Those prayers are urgently needed. There are storm clouds gathering in the Middle East. The Islamic State has been largely defeated. But the Islamic Republic of Iran, Assad’s main ally, is on the march, threatening Israel and U.S. Arab allies.

Comey’s Interview

Fired FBI Director James Comey’s prime-time interview, kicking off this week’s release of his book, A Higher Loyalty, aired Sunday night on ABC News. If you missed it, you weren’t alone. More Americans tuned in to the Country Music Awards on CBS.

A lot has been revealed in recent days about where Comey’s loyalty lies. His wife was devastated that Hillary Clinton lost. His daughters were all Clinton supporters. They are devoted members of the anti-Trump “resistance” who attended the radical Women’s March.

As we reported, Comey acknowledged that he looked at the polls and thought it was clear that Hillary would win. And he didn’t want the candidate his wife and daughters supported to enter office with a cloud hanging over her administration.

We’ve also seen how many of Comey’s top aides and those involved in the investigation were tainted by politics — McCabe and his wife, agents Strzok and Page, Bruce Ohr and his wife.

It is also revealing that Comey chose George Stephanopoulos to conduct his first interview. He could have chosen any anchor on any network, yet he picked Bill Clinton’s former press secretary.

Comey also seems to share Hillary’s view about “deplorable” Americans. When Stephanopoulos asked if Trump should be impeached, Comey replied:

I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people [Trump voters] off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they’re duty-bound to do directly.

In other words, you naughty voters picked a candidate Comey despises and you must atone for that “sin.”

By the way, Comey said repeatedly that Trump is not morally qualified to be president. Yet he is comfortable letting the Clinton crime family back into the White House.

The Clintons corrupted everything they touched. Hillary compromised national secrets. She exploited her office for financial gain. She covered for her husband’s multiple dalliances, including his activities in the Oval Office with a 20-year-old intern.

Thankfully, the American people didn’t share Comey’s loyalty to the Swamp. Sick and tired of politics as usual, they voted for an outsider to bring real change to Washington.

Creepy Christian Chicken?

The New Yorker magazine has a problem with Chick-fil-A. A recent column describes the opening of Manhattan’s fourth franchise as a “creepy infiltration” of “pervasive Christian traditionalism.”

Six years ago, Chick-fil-A’s CEO had the audacity to state his belief in the Biblical definition of marriage. And that leads a progressive writer at The New Yorker to feel like his city is being invaded? Somehow, I suspect The New Yorker never published a column about the “creepy infiltration” of radical Islam during the Ground Zero mosque controversy.

In all seriousness, do we now want to make it a normal practice to not engage in commerce with fellow Americans with whom we disagree? That’s what you do to an enemy — you impose embargos and sanctions.

You declare them so fundamentally opposed to your values that you can’t do business with them. That seems to be the Left’s mindset when it comes to America’s culture war and when it comes to dealing with the “deplorable and irredeemable.”

Chick-fil-A serves everybody. I am not aware of any incidents at a Chick-fil-A similar to what happened at a progressively owned Starbucks last week.

By the way, it’s not just one guy in Manhattan. When Dan Cathy defended traditional marriage, multiple progressive politicians berated him and threatened the company if it dared to open a store in their cities.

“Perversion of Priorities”

Puerto Rico is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria. One of the ways the island is attempting to adjust is by instituting school choice reforms. This is a good opportunity to do so given that nearly 39,000 students and their families left the island and plans are in place to close more than 230 schools as a result.

Teachers unions, however, are resisting reform and fighting for the status quo.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was “overheard Friday in the first-class car of an Acela train heading to New York” plotting his organization’s strategy to shut down Puerto Rico’s schools.

“We never use the word ‘strike,’” she said. “Let everyone call in for a personal day so they can’t open schools. Let them call in for a sick day… They are so anxiety-ridden about the schools.”

In a statement defending her school shutdown strategy, Weingarten called Puerto Rico’s school choice reform effort a “perversion of priorities.” I think the same could be said of her planned strike.

Puerto Rico is suffering from decades of liberal financial mismanagement and from a historic natural disaster. The last thing it needs now is left-wing unions using children as human shields to sabotage popular school choice reforms.