You’ve got to hand it to the guy, Tim Walz knows how to speak the language of the average Democrat voter in middle America. Earlier this week, just hours after Kamala Harris had announced her decision to make him her running mate, Walz stood up in front of thousands of Americans and debuted his “golden rule” for all those Americans interested in preventing the slaughter of innocent unborn babies: “Mind your own damn business.” It’s a brilliant line. And it doesn’t just apply to what happens in Planned Parenthoods and abortion clinics in Walz’s home state of Minnesota, where he signed a bill into law last year making killing babies legal at all stages of pregnancy. His “golden rule” applies to IVF too. You see, the governor of Minnesota takes any argument that suggests that IVF may not be ethical as an attack against his family. “When my wife and I decided to have children, we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news. The pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked. So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope,” he told a crowd of supporters in Philadelphia. It isn’t the first time that Walz has accused the Republican ticket of being anti-IVF. Less than a month ago, he attacked JD Vance on X for voting against a bill that would have protected access to IVF: Even if you’ve never gone through the hell of infertility, someone you know has. When Gwen and I were having trouble getting pregnant, the anxiety and frustration blotted out the sun. JD Vance opposing the miracle of IVF is a direct attack on my family and so many others. https://t.co/tWhQEPjft2 — Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) July 25, 2024 As Politico pointed out, claiming that Republicans are opposed to IVF is a bit of a stretch. “Republicans have made it clear that they support IVF — the vast majority of Republicans have. There’s no effort to roll back IVF,” Mark Graul, a GOP strategist from Wisconsin told the news organization. Graul isn’t wrong. Most Republicans have openly expressed their support for the treatment. When Alabama’s Supreme Court found that frozen embryos should be considered children under state law, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump assured voters: “Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, conservatives, Christians and pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious little beautiful baby. I support it.” So, when Walz tells Republicans to “mind your own damn business,” many of them are eager to comply. There’s just one problem. The Republican Party has been the pro-life party for decades at this point, and it is becoming incredibly difficult to ignore the fact that IVF isn’t pro-life. As Politico points out, pro-life advocates have “made clear that securing personhood rights for fetuses and embryos is its next frontier … Already, more than a third of states consider fetuses or embryos to be people at some point during pregnancy, a potential problem for fertility care given that clinics during the IVF process typically create more embryos than someone plans to implant, with the rest donated, stored or destroyed.” When the Alabama court ruling stirred up the debate on IVF, Ellie Gardey Holmes wrote here at The American Spectator that, “Almost every child born by IVF in the United States has siblings who were either killed or frozen so that they could be born.” One journalist for the National Catholic Register estimated that, in 2021 alone, “more than two and a half million human beings were killed or frozen” as a result of IVF. Those pro-life advocates who are now campaigning and lobbying for the federal government to recognize the personhood of embryos, whether conceived naturally or in a lab, are right to do so. Pointing out the fact that millions of tiny Americans are being killed by the IVF industry isn’t a personal attack on Tim Walz or any other American who has had recourse to IVF to start a family. It’s also not to say that children born via IVF shouldn’t exist. They should. Every one of them is a beautiful human being infused with life and an eternal soul. They aren’t responsible for the circumstances of their birth. But it is to point out that there are grave moral issues with the practice. Walz would like us to mind our own business, to turn a blind eye to the plight of our defenseless countrymen. But, when an industry worth tens of billions of dollars is killing millions of innocent children, we can’t just ignore that evil or leave it to individual Americans to figure out, no matter how hard Walz tries to pull on our heartstrings. The post Tim Walz’s Message on Murdering Babies: ‘Mind Your Own Damn Business’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

So many prayers were answered last Tuesday when Kamala Harris made her first truly independent decision — all her own to make, no script to fall back on — since becoming the 2024 Democrat presidential nominee. She chose Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. It has been a season of miracles: President Trump miraculously turning his head to look at an illegal immigration chart, the shooter with a simple unobstructed rooftop view missing his target, Biden doddering himself into debate immortality live before millions, the very scheduling of that unprecedentedly early debate for the purpose of politically wiping out Trump but instead eviscerating Joe, all the Biden lawfare cases aimed at ruining Trump’s campaign down the homestretch instead falling apart at lightning speed, and overseas Israel knocking off the Hamas No. 4 and then the Hezbollah No. 2 and then the Hamas No. 1 in like a week. There is no way we can know now what will unfold by the end of Election Day. But if Trump and Vance win, perhaps the greatest miracle of all will be the political bullet we Americans have dodged as Harris, of her own free will, selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Thank G-d. First, as a Jew, I was hoping against hope that she would demonstrate to all America, especially Jews moving to the right, the growing anti-Semitic influence in the Democrat Party. It is there and rampant. No, I am not happy it is there, but it is there and has exploded out of control. The only thing worse for Jews than Nazism or Communism is when those exist but everyone around them fails to see it. If it must be, then see it, note it, and do something about it before it metastasizes so much that it no longer can be contained. If people had responded timely and promptly to and acted against Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others of that ilk, hundreds of millions could have been saved. Tragically, instead, people covered their eyes, made excuses, and downplayed the threats — until too late. Yes, I am a deeply conservative Republican. Still, I care about Jews and about all Americans, so can take no comfort in seeing pure Jew hatred now infiltrating and poisoning the Democrat Party that once welcomed my grandparents’ generation to America. It now is toxic. There is no room any longer on the national stage for Jews who stand proudly as Jews. Yes, in certain localities, some proud Jews still can take their stand, but even they now have to sell out core values to grasp onto a place among Democrats. A quarter-century ago, Joe Lieberman had been the leading voice in the United States Senate to move America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But when he got his shot on the national stage, selected to run as Al Gore’s 2000 teammate, he had to go on record forcefully opposing moving the embassy “at this time.” (Until President Trump, every time was “at this time.”) Lieberman, knowing full well the ways of the Jewish orthodoxy he had embraced, suddenly told radio interviewers, when asked whether Orthodox Jews promote endogamy — Jews marrying only other Jews — lied. He said no, he’d be fine with his child marrying out of the Jewish faith. (For obvious reasons, Orthodox Jews promote endogamy, so that they can rear their children in homes where the Shabbat is observed properly from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall, where the kitchen is maintained strictly kosher, and so much more.) To “make it in America” as an acceptable national candidate, Lieberman of blessed memory had to sell out, at least until Gore lost. Then he was back to calling for moving the embassy. Now you know why two of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the country remarkably have turned on Israel. Huh? What’s that about? One after another Jewish Democrat like Elliot Engel has been “primaried out” by leftist Jew haters appealing to the Democrats’ exteme-left base during primaries season, when only the most intense activists come out to vote. Sure, they would have been reelected by the larger electorate in November, but they got “cut off at the pass” by the “Squad” types in the spring primaries. Therefore, the few surviving Jewish Democrats in blue cities have had to cut bait. Three decades ago, liberal Democrat Jews comprised fully half the New York City congressional delegation. And then there was one. Believe it or not, Jerrold Nadler, the only member of Congress who attended yeshiva Jewish parochial school when growing up, is New York City’s last Jew standing. He once was an outspoken Israel supporter. He has seen the Democrats and his career prospects change. Watching all the other long-time Jewish New York City Democrats primaried out by the Squad and their ilk, he went into an apocalyptic panic. He now stands as one of the most vicious critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His latest maniacal quote: “[Netanyahu is] the worst leader in Jewish history since the Maccabean king who invited the Romans into Jerusalem over 2,100 years ago.” Uh-huh. That is the price for a Jew to survive in the New Harris–Walz Democrat era: turn against Israel before they accuse you, Jerrold Nadler, of eating all the food meant for Gaza. And Schumer. On the surface, it was incomprehensible — absolutely impossible to fathom — how the Senate majority leader of the United States would have had the temerity to stand on his podium of American legislative power to deliver a speech calling on the citizens of a foreign country — specifically, a robustly democratic country with regular free elections and peaceful transitions of government, and also one of America’s most reliable strategic allies for all 76 years of its existence — to rise up and overthrow their duly elected head of government. Yet there was Schumer, urging Israelis, as if they had nothing else to deal with, to overthrow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How explain? Now it is simple: The media may not see it, but Schumer is desperately fighting now for his political life. If the Democrats lose their Senate majority in three months — with a bunch of turnovers possible from West Virginia to Montana, from Pennsylvania to Maryland, and lots of elsewheres — remember you heard it first here: many Democrats almost surely will try to oust Schumer and replace him with Dick Durbin. They both know it. That’s why Durbin, who first attained national political power 42 years ago by defeating an anti-Israel 22-term Illinois congressman, Paul Findley, by promoting himself in 1982 as an outspoken Zionist, suddenly opted to boycott Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress. He knows where the New Democrat Party energy lies, with rabidly outspoken Israel haters like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen. By contrast, Schumer was stuck. He could not boycott Netanyahu because of his Jewish New York base, so he did the next best: he called for Netanyahu’s overthrow. Crazy? Not if you’re a Jewish Democrat on today’s national stage. “Genocide Chuck?” “Genocide Jerrold”? It therefore is a blessing, first from a Jewish perspective, for open-minded Jewish Democrats to get a good close look at what has become of their grandparents’ Democrat Party. Believe it or not, polling now shows that more New York Jews will be voting for Trump than for Harris in November. How do you like those matzo balls? Harris’s rejection of Shapiro in the face of unprecedented open Jew hatred in the Democrat Party brings home the bacon that she and Emhoff share. Amazingly, as Shapiro saw the Israel hatred closing in on him — “Genocide Shapiro,” really? — he himself began doing a Liberman and started weakening his support of Israel. He once had written — accurately — that Arafat had proven that the Arabs in Judea and Samaria are not interested in a lasting peace with Israel. Now, suddenly, the poor fellow was reduced to repudiating his own beliefs and mouthing plaudits for a bogus “Two State Solution” that he knows, deep in his soul, is a nonstarter. If there is one thing American Jews do not need is yet another left-wing Democrat — whether he believes it like Soros and Sanders, or simply mouths it to stay in power like Schumer and Nadler — on a national ticket. Thought it would mirror perfectly how Harris will be devoting the next three months to repudiating every vote she ever has cast and every policy she ever has advocated But the blessing is deeper for all of us Americans. We Americans are desperate — and this may be America’s last chance — to stop the Obama Transformation and save our society at the eleventh hour. Even more than we need Trump, we dare not fall into the hands of Harris, rated by the independent nonpartisan YouGov in 2020 — her last year before joining Biden’s ticket — as the single most extreme left senator among all 100, even more radical than Bernie Sanders. The year before, she was rated second-most extreme, barely behind Sanders. If she gets elected, G-d forbid, we Americans have far more to fear than Israelis do even on a bad day. Our border, our health care, our Medicare, our retirements, our incomes, crime and punishment, fuel and energy to fill our cars and heat our homes, educating our children, even our darned plastic straws. Pennsylvania is polling very tightly and is a critical electoral vote state. Maybe Trump can win without it, but maybe not. It is critical. If Harris had ignored the Jew haters and acted sensibly, Shapiro very probably could have put her over the top in the Keystone State. By G-d’s miracle, He guided her instead to pick the most extreme-left governor imaginable other than Gavin Newsom. Wait till Americans get to know him. Moreover, she wins Minnesota anyway. If she does not, the election is a walkaway. So Walz helps her win a state that is hers, the state of Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar, a state that he has opened widely to illegal immigrants and whose budget surplus he squandered. He has made it a sanctuary state for getting mutilating sex-change operations. When his cities went on fire in the George Floyd aftermath, his weird wife — emphasis on weird — opened her bedroom window so she could deeply inhale the sweet smell of the city on fire. Really. Got that? Now you know why Walz comes up with the word “weird” when describing a former president of the United States and a Yale Law School graduate who is a United States senator. When your wife says “Honey, can we leave the bedroom window open tonight so we can smell the city burning down?” the first word out of your mouth is “weird.” The next is: “Hun, would you like a fiddle?” The November election is hopeful, but not in the bag. Its trajectory will emerge after the Democrat National Convention plays out. Then, after the four-day scripted show and cynical encomia from job seekers, Harris will begin stumbling whenever she talks impromptu, in interviews or off the cuff at airports. Hundreds of millions will be spent to bypass the leftist mainstream media propaganda machine and buy social media and TV and radio advertising to educate Americans, with actual videos of Harris speaking, that Harris is the most radical-left person to seek the presidency since Gus Hall in the 1970s and Bernie Sanders. People will learn her record. And as she tries, more and more desperately to flee from her past and that record, even the atheists among us will thank G-d for inducing her to select Weird Walz over Genocide Josh from Pennsylvania. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest informative and inspiring classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. READ MORE: Hunting Where the Ducks Are Ranked-Choice Voting by Subterfuge Behold, Tampon Tim The post This Time, We ALL Have Dodged a Different Kind of Bullet appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“If the law is on your side, argue the law. If the law isn’t on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, yell loud and bang on the table,” goes an old adage among trial lawyers. The equivalent in politics is: “If you can’t run on your record, run on your policy proposals for the future. If you can’t run on your record or your policy proposals, call your opponents ‘weird’ and try to make the election about likability and racial identity.” That’s clearly what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are trying to do. It won’t be the first time in America politics that an election turned on personalities. Remember when Barack Obama said that Hillary was “likeable enough“? Brilliant move: damning with faint praise. Or consider George W. Bush. Born to a wealthy New England family that came over on the Mayflower, son of a president and grandson of a U.S. senator, Bush graduated from one of the country’s most exclusive prep schools, Phillips Andover, then attend Yale College (his father and grandfather’s alma mater) and Harvard Business School. He bought a pickup truck and moved to Texas and sold himself to the public as a “good ol’ boy.” Some Republicans claim that the American people are “smart enough to see through“ all this political theater. Our Founders were not so sure. They knew the writings of ancient political philosophers including Plato and Aristotle about “demagogues,” people who would appeal to people’s basest instincts: “a well-known class of politicians who obtain power through emotional appeals to prejudice, distrust, fear and vilification.” As a protection, they gave us not a “democracy” but a constitutional republic with checks and balances against the whims of the electorate. These included the election of senators not by the people but by state legislatures, a feature of the original Constitution overturned by the 17th Amendment. More importantly, the Founders provided that the voters would not elect the president and vice president. Rather, they would vote for electors, who in turn would select the president in an Electoral College. At the Constitutional convention, one of the wisest of the Founders, James Madison, described this system as “a multilayered system of “successive filtrations” … whereby the people or the people’s representatives in each state selected “electors” as their representatives to vote for these high-powered offices in closed-door, dispassionate state conventions.” Unfortunately, the Electoral College never worked the way it was intended, and today in most states, electors are required by law to vote for the candidate who got the most popular votes in their state, rather than to apply independent judgment. No, I am not advocating a return to our aristocratic roots with limited popular suffrage and governance by an elite of “Platonic guardians,” although I have observed that the Guardians bear a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the bureaucrats in the administrative state. On the contrary, I favor eliminating the Electoral College so that everyone’s vote would count equally with everyone else’s rather than a few thousand votes in swing states choosing the president for all of us. That could be done without a constitutional amendment if states merely changed their ordinary laws to require their electors to vote for the candidate who won the most popular votes nationwide rather than in their state, a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which has been approved by 15 states and the District of Columbia. What I do hope is that the voters in those swing states will choose wisely in the upcoming presidential election, which is one of the most important in our history for the direction of the country, rather than based on which of the candidates likes Diet Mountain Dew better, or whether vice presidential candidate Tim Walz did or did not carry his military weapon “in war.” I must confess that I am biased because JD Vance was a student of mine in a seminar at Yale Law School entitled “Conservative Critiques of the Administrative State.” In that course (which I am no longer allowed to offer), I tried to expose our left-leaning student body to the voices of conservative writers not otherwise often heard in academia today. I got out JD’s paper recently and reread it. Let’s just say that JD is a fast learner. READ MORE: For Kamala Harris ‘Weird’ Is the New ‘Deplorable’ JD Vance and the Bipartisan Itch to Tax Behavior What Does JD Vance Actually Believe About Abortion? The post Are the American People Smart Enough to See Through the Political Theater? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On Jan. 21, 2017, hundreds of thousands of feminists wearing pink “pussyhats” protested the prior day’s presidential inauguration of Donald Trump by rampaging throughout Washington, D.C. The “Women’s March on Washington,” an extension of the riots and protests that shook the capital on Inauguration Day itself, was not exactly a peaceful affair. Hundreds of anarchists in total were arrested over the multiday period, typically on rioting or vandalism charges. The “pussyhat”-clad feminist rioters thus constituted the first Trump-era manifestation of destructive Democratic shock troops. Call it Democratic Street Thuggery 1.0. That particularly virulent strain of radical feminism reached a crescendo during the #MeToo societal struggle session of 2017–2018, culminating in the infamous Christine Blasey Ford-led attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court nomination in Sept. 2018. Arguably the single leading misandrist crusader during that sordid affair, peddling the ludicrous “believe all women” smear from her senatorial dais and casually throwing out five millennia of “innocent until proven guilty” civilizational norms in the process, was none other than dimwitted California Sen. Kamala Harris. Alas, Joe Biden — or what little remained, even back then, of Joe Biden — was so awestruck by Harris’ vile interrogation of Kavanaugh and her own hilariously unimpressive 2020 presidential campaign that he tapped her to be his running mate. Cackling Kamala’s grand contribution to the Biden campaign was to dutifully launder her own swarthy complexion to “empathize” with left-wing America during our next great struggle session, the antifa-Black Lives Matter “racial reckoning” that followed the May 2020 death of St. George Floyd our Martyr. Such “empathy” included Kamala’s unctuous rhetorical support for the rioters, as well as her posting to social media a link to support bail for those rare BLM rioters who were actually arrested. The antifa-BLM rioters, who caused up to $2 billion in property damage during that infamous Summer of Love, constituted Democratic Street Thuggery 2.0. No politician in recent memory has parlayed such little talent into such stratospheric success as Harris. The cackler-in-chief “failed upward” yet again into the vice presidency — and now, following last month’s bloodless coup of Biden, into the Democratic presidential nomination itself. And this Tuesday, in announcing her running mate, Kamala ostentatiously passed on her clearly superior option, popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for the insipid prairie socialist Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz, as the home-state governor of St. George Floyd our Martyr, was the original arsonist of the Summer of Love nationwide fire. There was no greater fanner of the flames of Democratic Street Thuggery 2.0 than Walz. Choosing Walz over Shapiro is curious for many reasons, but adding to the intrigue is the peculiar context in which it all went down. Kamala made her announcement in Philadelphia, Shapiro’s hometown. It came a few days after the mayor of Philadelphia — or, more accurately, the mayor’s hapless social media intern — inadvertently posted a polished video in support of a Harris-Shapiro ticket. The implication seemed clear enough: The pick was going to be Shapiro. But then, following a weekend of keffiyeh-clad radicals running wild in Philadelphia, waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags and decrying “Genocide Josh,” the Keystone State governor was suddenly tossed aside. Kamala caved to the “death to America!”— and “death to Israel!”—chanting jihadists who constitute Democratic Street Thuggery 3.0. Harris, intellectually challenged and an empty vessel for Democrats to project their basest desires, is the unique politician to find herself at the tripartite Venn diagram of all three Democratic Street Thuggery movements. The overlap of “believe all women”–style destructive feminism, antifa-BLM “racial reckoning” anarchy, and Hamas/Hezbollah flag-flying civilizational jihad is embodied in one person: Kamala Harris. She is the perfect totem of the modern Democratic Party, which exalts intersectional victimhood and will whip its shock troops into a violent frenzy to get what it wants. The modern Democratic Party is less political vehicle and more Mafia — right down to the omerta code of silence surrounding Biden’s physical and mental decline. Many European countries have indulged the fiction that jihadist outfits Hamas and Hezbollah — the actual Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, not their useful idiot American supporters — can somehow be divided between “political” and “militant” wings. This is, of course, a lie — it is a distinction without a difference. Similarly, the notion that the Democratic Party can be distinguished between its elite “political wing” and shock troop “militant wing” is also a lie. The elites and the shock troops are one and the same. And Harris and Walz are at the epicenter of it all. On Oct. 30, 2020, this column argued that the then-impending election “pit(s) against each other a fundamentally Americanist vision of governance and a fundamentally insurrectionist vision of anarchic mayhem.” It was true then. And it’s even truer of our election cycle today. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Doug Emhoff’s Character Problem Could Hurt Kamala’s Campaign Kamala Harris Has a Disturbing Pattern of Creating Toxic Work Cultures The Secret Democratic Cabal’s Openly Anti-American Agenda The post Kamala Harris and the Civilizational Jihad of Democratic Street Thuggery appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The American Spectator’s own Paul Kengor, our editor as well as a professor of political science at Grove City College, is the author of a number of notable books, including A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.  The book, and its tale of Reagan’s response after being shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley on March 30, 1981, shortly after taking office in 1981, is a vivid tale, not simply of the shooting attempt itself, but also of Reagan’s response after he began his recovery. In Reagan’s case, the attempt on his life occurred after he had delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton hotel and was emerging from a special exit made for VIP visits. As he appeared into public view, Reagan raised his left arm to wave at the crowd of press and onlookers. Burrowed into the press scrum was Hinkley, who quickly pulled out his handgun and fired several shots. In addition to Reagan, three others were hit — White House Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and  Washington D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty.  Reagan was shoved into the back seat of the presidential limousine. While it was first directed back to the White House, when the president began coughing up blood, his Secret Service agents redirected the limousine to George Washington University Hospital. Collapsing on entering the hospital, Reagan was quickly taken to an operating room. Kengor recounts how, once on the operating table, “the surgical team eventually found the bullet in Reagan’s lung, mere centimeters from his heart and close to rupturing a valve.” Reagan was “perilously close” to death.  Forty-three years later, on July 13, 2024, another assassin scrambled onto a warehouse rooftop to target another president — former President Donald J. Trump. As the world knows from the decidedly vivid live television coverage, Trump was speaking at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when one Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 years old, fired his rifle, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, who died as he threw himself on his family, saving their lives. Crooks also injured rallygoers James Copenhaver and David Dutch. Trump, by the sheerest of accidents, turned his head momentarily — and the bullet intended for him grazed his right ear instead of plowing into his head and killing him instantly. What attracts considerable thought now is just how the two presidents responded in the wake of their almost assassinations. In Reagan’s case, he would later meet Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. And eerily, after Reagan’s recovery, the pope too was subjected to an assassination attempt that, as with Reagan, came close to succeeding but did not. Kengor’s book is remarkable in many ways. But, without question, it is the stirring story of how surviving an assassin’s bullet focused the American president on what he, along with the post-assassination-attempt pope, had come to call the “DP,” as in the Divine Plan to take down communism.  Kengor writes in the flyleaf of the book of the “inside story of the 1982 meeting where the president and the pope confided their conviction that God had spared their lives for the purpose of defeating communism.” In the case of Trump, in the aftermath of the attempt on his own life, Trump said the event had been a “very surreal experience.” He added:   I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead…. The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.… By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here. Full stop. Think of this. There is President Ronald Reagan, in the aftermath of the attempt on his own life, meeting with the similarly targeted pope and the two believing their lives had been spared by God — in their case to carry out God’s “Divine Plan.” And there is former President Donald Trump saying in the aftermath of the near-miss of his own assassination that the “doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.…By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” All of which raises the question: What is the “Divine Plan” for former President Trump? Only in retrospect does the reality of what Reagan and the pope accomplished strike home. In the day, Reagan in particular was called just about every slur in the book for his hardline stance against the Soviets and Communism. Reagan’s strategy in dealing with the Cold War that had been ongoing since the end of World War II, as expressed to his national security adviser, was simple: “We win. They lose.” As noted years later in The Hill:  In his first presidential press conference, Reagan stunned official Washington by denouncing the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to “world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state.” As he wrote in his official autobiography, “I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.” After the attempt on his life, this view of “we win, they lose” became especially vivid, a driving force in Reagan’s dealings with the Soviets for the rest of his presidency. There can be little question now with former President Trump that, as with President Reagan, the attempt on his own life by a would-be assassin has provoked Trump to think about just why he survived the assassination attempt.   Again, post-assassination attempt, Trump has said: I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead…. The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.… By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here. Those words are the Trump version of Reagan’s thought that he himself, along with the pope, had been spared assassination because of God’s “DP” — a Divine Plan. Kengor mentions that as Reagan was in the hospital and had “slipped into anesthesia,” the longtime pastor of the nearby National Presbyterian Church — where the Reagans were members — happened to be making his rounds when he heard that his president/parishioner had been shot and was taken to the George Washington University Hospital. In the inevitable chaos at the hospital, he managed to get close enough to the president’s location but was turned away by the Secret Service. Kengor writes: Just then, Evans was taken aback by a profound thought, which he felt that God had placed on him. The reverend could distinctly hear these words: “Mr. President, God has a plan for your life. And you’re going to be healed.” It was only later that Evans learned that, at that moment, there was a team of surgeons at work saving Reagan’s life. Kengor ends his book on Reagan and the pope by saying:  Reagan, always his mother’s son, believed that “all things were part of God’s plan.” It takes no imagination to believe that after the assassination attempt on his own life — an attempt that barely missed killing him outright — former President Trump believes in his heart and soul that, as with President Ronald Reagan, he too has been selected in another “Divine Plan” that is, in today’s world, designed to bring peace to the world. It takes no imagination to believe that President Trump, he who authored the Abraham Accords, the bilateral peace agreements between Arab states and Israel that many considered impossible, has before him more to achieve. With a little over two months to go before the election, of which many polls say Trump is leading, it takes no imagination to believe that, as with Ronald Reagan, another Divine Plan is not yet finished with Donald Trump. Stay tuned. READ MORE: Hunting Where the Ducks Are Behold, Tampon Tim The Second (Rate?) Gentleman The post Trump, Reagan, and God’s Divine Plan appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — I start with a prediction: Big media will not look into would-be veep Tim Walz with the intensity they reserved for digging up dirt on JD Vance, after Donald Trump named the Ohio senator his running mate. There will be no stories about leaked texts the now-Democratic running mate sent to someone he once considered a friend. There will be no stories about fellow Democrats urging Kamala Harris to renege on her choice and pick a new running mate. There will be no outrage that she picked an extremist, a progressive, when she could have gone with a centrist. The honeymoon will last up to the Democratic National Convention or Nov. 5, whichever comes last. Big media won’t find it weird that Minnesota’s Democratic governor bubbled to the top of the froth after he said of Donald Trump and Vance, “These guys are just weird.” “In one word, (Walz) gave the Harris campaign a sort of slogan that they’ve been using over and over again,” MSNBC’s Yamiche Alcindor explained. No, I’m watching CNN and hearing words like “folksy” for Walz. MSNBC reports that Walz is a gun owner and “avid pheasant hunter” — for Democrats, you see, gun ownership is a sign of authenticity. Walz is also the guy who said, “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” It’s like a tree falling in an uninhabited wood. The above remark came during Walz’ “White Dudes For Harris” fundraising phone call last week. White guys hitting up rich guys for money? Nothing to see here. My first-blush reaction to the Walz pick: Why didn’t Harris pick Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a moderate Democrat from a swing state? Shapiro is Jewish, which some believe could hurt Democratic efforts to win battleground states Michigan and Wisconsin. An NPR poll released Tuesday morning found 17 percent of U.S. residents viewed Walz positively, but 71 percent had never heard of him or were not sure how to rate him. Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly enjoyed better numbers, but they apparently weren’t sufficiently far-left. Pennsylvania has 19 Electoral College votes — nearly double Minnesota’s 10. And Pennsylvania is in play. The last time Minnesotans preferred a Republican White House hopeful over a Democrat was 1972. In short, the Walz pick wasn’t strategic; it was isolationist. At best. Commentator Van Jones acknowledged on CNN that an element of antisemitism has been “marbled into” the Democratic Party. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, disagrees. Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is also Jewish. One last thing: Walz was the governor who waited three chaotic days to send in the National Guard to quell violent “social justice” riots sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. “They make an interesting tag team,” Vance told reporters from the campaign plane Tuesday, “because Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the few that got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail.” Vance was referring to a Harris tweet inviting followers to donate money to @MNFreedomFund “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” And that’s a story. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Will Big Media Give Walz the Vance Treatment? Don’t Bet On It. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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