The Patriot Post® · The State of Our Union
It’s been a little over a year since a crazed leftist gunman attempted to murder multiple Republican congressmen on a Virginia baseball field. Had he succeeded, it would have been the worst political assassination in history. (By the way, the FBI couldn’t find evidence of bias in that case either.)
Last year, a Republican congressman was run off the road by an ObamaCare supporter. A Republican senator was brutally attacked by his left-wing neighbor.
These are not isolated incidents. Dozens of Republican members of Congress have been assaulted and threatened. In fact, threats against members of Congress have more than doubled since 2016.
This week, multiple spokesmen for the political Left and the media used the charge of “Nazism” to attack the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the border.
The facilities for illegal immigrant children run by the Department of Health and Human Services, which provide education, recreation and three meals a day, were compared to concentration camps where Jews were sent to be killed.
Last week, Nancy Pelosi seemed bewildered that there haven’t been “uprisings all over the country” against the president. This week, antifa published the personal information of ICE agents online.
Actor Peter Fonda went further, suggesting that left-wing extremists surround the schools of ICE agents’ children and that President Trump’s youngest son, Barron, be locked “in a cage with pedophiles.” The First Lady’s office contacted the Secret Service in response to this threat.
Tuesday night, the secretary of homeland security was driven out of a Washington, DC, restaurant by socialist protestors because she dared to hold a press conference explaining the facts at the border.
President Trump went to Capitol Hill Tuesday and was publicly harassed by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. For good measure, a congressional intern yelled expletives at him.
I guess last year’s attempted slaughter on the baseball field wasn’t enough for the Left. The effect of this kind of hate and vile rhetoric will cause unhinged people to do violent things.
We should all pray for the safety of the men and women who represent us as they try to restore our country, protect unborn children, secure our borders and grow our economy.
Promise Kept
In spite of all the hysterical headlines about the border, the Trump/Pence administration continues to courageously and methodically fulfill the promises it made during the campaign. One of those promises was to demand reforms at the United Nations, and especially at the UN’s Human Rights Council.
For the past year, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has pushed hard for changes, but nothing has changed. So late Tuesday afternoon, Haley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States was withdrawing its membership in the UN Human Rights Council.
To be clear, the Human Rights Council does not care about Human Rights. If it did, it wouldn’t include countries like Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Rwanda and Venezuela.
If it cared about human rights, it would not condemn Israel, a democratic nation with free speech, free elections and an independent judiciary, more than all other nations in the world combined.
Some on the Left are claiming that Tuesday’s action was taken because the head of the Human Rights Council criticized Trump’s immigration policies. That is fake news. As I noted, the administration has been demanding reforms at the council for over a year.
Leaving the UN Human Rights Council is the right thing to do. It has politicized the issue of human rights, and is using it as a cudgel to attack the one country in the Middle East that does the most to defend and promote human rights.
Pence Delivers
Last year, Vice President Mike Pence announced a major U.S. initiative to provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to Christians in the Middle East. The Trump administration made aid to persecuted Christians a priority because the UN usually hires locals to distribute aid. And in the Middle East that meant most foreign aid wasn’t getting to Christians.
But it was recently discovered that bureaucrats at the State Department and USAID were slow-walking reforms while Christians continued to suffer. Many conservative leaders, including me, worked with the administration to alert it to the seriousness of the problem and how it urgently needed to be corrected.
Vice President Pence took the bull by the horns, and things are changing for the better.
The Washington Post reports that Pence “was unhappy with the progress” and ordered Mark Green, a top State Department official, to go to Iraq and report directly back to him.
Pence also told Green that he would “support any personnel changes” Green felt necessary. According to the Post, “the head of USAID’s Middle East bureau, a career Foreign Service officer” was replaced “before the end of the day."
Think About This…
There are reports that President Trump may issue an executive order addressing concerns raised by the separation of children and their parents at the border. But given the limits of existing laws and court rulings, we could be right back to "catch and release” thanks to the Democrats’ obstructionism.
Once again, we are confronted by the reality that the Left will do absolutely nothing to secure our borders or stop the obscene levels of illegal immigration into the country. That is how committed the Left is to its radical open-borders agenda.
Here’s something else to think about: The same leftists who are weeping about the separation of children from their parents at the border are demanding that taxpayers foot the bill for abortions for illegal immigrants.
And I can’t help but wonder if Rachel Maddow has ever shed a tear for any of the American children — potentially more than 5,000 people — who have been killed by illegal immigrants.
Other News
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed during Tuesday’s hearing that he is investigating whether FBI agent Peter Strzok’s anti-Trump bias triggered the launch of the FBI’s Trump/Russia collusion probe. Strzok was the lead agent on both the Clinton email and Trump/Russia investigations.
Speaking of Strzok, the disgraced agent was reportedly escorted out of FBI headquarters last week amid an internal conduct review.
The Trump administration has finalized rules that will permit the sale of trade association health plans across state lines, bringing much needed relief from skyrocketing ObamaCare premiums.