Category Archives: Progressives

by Barry Kelly | November 11, 2016 · 1:31 pm

The Professor – Fundamentals of Trump’s Success

The students trooped into their 11 o’clock political science honors class looking like they all needed at least a week of beach time. As they slouched into chairs around the conference table, the Professor said, “Well, I guess you didn’t get much sleep last night. I was up until well after 4:00 AM. The election was truly historic. I feel like a mantle of freedom and hope has settled over the land. Let’s talk about what happened. First, any questions?”

Alison raised her hand and the Professor nodded in her direction. “You told us two weeks ago that Donald Trump would win the election when all the polls were pointing clearly to Secretary Clinton. What was the reason you were so confident of a Republican victory?”

“First, I wasn’t talking about a Republican victory. The traditional Republican party is now part of history. It will never be the same. And for the nation, that is a good thing. Its time had passed. The victory I spoke about was only about the Trump movement. The Trump victory has given me a perfect ‘teaching moment.’ We are here to learn how to think about how humans govern themselves and that requires us to learn how to sift information.

“All of us were bombarded with polls, the analysis of pundits, party propaganda, government leaks, thousands of hacked emails from behind the scenes actions of the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign. Some of it was ugly, but it was all revealing and intriguing. Some of it was relevant, but mostly it was distracting. Many analysts thought the deluge of emails revealing the naked ambitions of Secretary Clinton trying to hide her efforts to balance her sworn duty as American’s Secretary of State with her drive to amass personal wealth and power would destroy her campaign.

“Instead of waiting anxiously for the next dump of emails that would dominate the news, journalists, commentators, analysts and political talking heads should have focused on the fundamentals. Instead, they couldn’t get past the day-by-day exposure of the Democratic National Committee, debate stumbles, and Donald Trump’s off-message comments and his need to defend himself from every attack. All of this was exciting and made the grist for hundreds of TV comments, newspaper columns, attack ads and maps of shifting electoral votes state by state.

“The fundamentals I focused on were the dynamics of the primary process of both parties, the gradual metamorphosis of Donald Trump from a flamboyant TV star and successful billionaire real estate tycoon to a disciplined politician who could sound and look presidential and the gap between the governing elite of the Progressive Party and the needs and hopes of the people. My most important indicator was the disparity between the polls and the energetic masses of people who attended Trump rallies. If you listened carefully, you could hear the rumblings of a revolution in the heartland of America.

“How could you miss Mr. Trump’s success after success in the primary campaign? Remember when he carried every county in several states late in the primary campaign? He felt and listened to the message coming from the forgotten citizens of the ‘rust belt’, those hunting a job where none existed, the citizens who wondered how their leaders could ignore the flood of people and drugs pouring across our open borders, the silent suffering of America’s veterans, the chaos of the Middle East and the failure of trade, the decades of wage stagnation and the total lack of a foreign and economic policy to deal with the realities of terrorism and increasing debt.

“Donald Trump and his campaign leaders heard these cries for help and crafted their message to respond. No one else did. The only missing ingredient was finding the right messenger with sufficient political maturing to talk to the people instead of at them and the unbelievable energy required to take this fresh message throughout the land. Donald Trump was the right messenger. In the future, if another messenger is required, I hope the people will find another Donald Trump.

“Your assignment is to predict who President-Elect Trump will select for his cabinet.”
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Filed under Barry Kelly, Clinton, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, foreign policy, Intelligence & Politics, Middle East, Progressives, Republicans, Terrorism, trump

by Barry Kelly | October 17, 2016 · 7:44 am

The Professor – What is Freedom?

The Professor was going over his file of past lectures and editorials to get ready for his next honors class. He felt that he had to get the class thinking in more basic terms. The hubris dominating this political campaign was driving out the discussions on basic issues that are critical to the survival of democracy, much the same way “Gresham’s Law” states that “bad” currency of questionable value will drive ‘good’ currency out of circulation. Certainly old and alleged sexual charges and published purloined emails have dominated this campaign, he thought.

If citizens do not know what freedom is, how can they protect it or even know if they have lost it? Freedom is the existence of individual choices. Without individual choices, there is no freedom. Those who have lived seven or eight decades have seen, sometimes up close and personal, societies in which the basic choices Americans exercise every day were unheard of or imagined. Current Russia and the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and some South American nations have tried various far-left ideologies. In every one of them, individual choices vanished.

North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, probably the best political organizer of the 20th century, had the North Vietnamese people organized into to a cascading staircase of political, economic, and social organizations. Everyone belonged to a peer organization with each peer group sending a delegate to the next higher group. There was no real individual choice.

Progressives and communists hate what capitalism and the free market stand for. They do not believe the forces of the free market are real and think greed is the only driving force of capitalism. Progressives will not believe the infinite number of choices made by a free people in a free competitive economy will result only in chaos. Instead, a small group of progressives can make decisions that will produce a vastly more efficient economy and much fairer distribution of wealth.

When you think about freedom, think about if the right of making choices is being taken from you and your family. Don’t be taken in by the words. They don’t mean anything. Look for the signs of freedom being eroded. Do government spokespeople tell the truth, or is their intent to mislead the people? Are there attempts to label dissenters as dangers to be silenced?

A few examples: The Clinton/Obama Administration’s desire to label people who do not believe manmade carbons cause climate change as “climate deniers.” The Administration is reported to have asked the Department of Justice to see if citizens who disagree with the cause of climate variations could be prosecuted. The Benghazi talking points, the benefits of the Iran deal, the claims for Obamacare, the misleading unemployment numbers, and the optimistic reports of the demise of ISIS are other examples of a government that is devoted to managing reports to the citizens.

The very essence of progressivism is to control choice because the political left believes it is chaos when people are free to choose their life’s occupation, their education, reading material, TV programs, news, religion, ways of raising children (including the choice to have children or not), health care, and the people who govern them. The current struggle in America between conservatives and liberals (the far-left liberals are progressives who now control the Democratic Party) is not over some obscure political difference. It is over who makes life’s choices, you or a progressive elite.

The Professor: Class Begins

Setting: Picture a 5,000-student liberal arts college on the Eastern Coast. It has a strong political science program and attracts students from all over the United States and a few other nations. Professor Mike Clark is the head of the Political Science Department and teaches a twice-weekly meeting of select political science honor students.

Professor Clark came out of an active retirement two years ago after the college offered him the opportunity to teach without the burden and distraction of administrative chores and attending functions. His ground rules before accepting the job stated he would be given no curriculum or college goals to meet and that he would have a number two who would handle the day-to-day operations of the department. He made it clear that his intent would be to help his students learn to think, and current events — whatever they are — would provide topics for discussion.

Seventy-five percent of the graduates who took his courses after his first two years back landed top jobs at successful law firms and Fortune 500 companies. The college was happy, the students were excited, the Political Science Department was over scribed, and the parents of his students wrote glowing letters with checks to match to the school.

As another year got ready to begin, Professor Clark was pleased with the eight students he had selected to take his political science honors course. There were no published pre-requisites for his course, nor could students just sign up to take it. He personally selected the participants from a stack of 25 files three young assistant professors sent to his desk. Students he selected were sent an invitation to enroll, and his invitations had never been declined.

This would be his first meeting with his new class of honor students.

The students filed in and selected seats at the polished cherry wood oval table near the palladium window looking out over the Bay. The room was not large and a normal speaking voice could be clearly heard. Professor Clark waited until the room had settled and said, “Good morning. Welcome. Some of the ground rules here are different from those you have learned in the past or that might be in place in some of your other classes. Here, you will be expected to play the role of several different officials, both domestic and foreign. To do that, you must keep up with current events, without me giving you a formal assignment. There is no room in this class for neutrality. One of Russia’s Cold War Premiers, Nikita Khrushchev, said that while nations might be neutral, there are no neutral men. You must be able to explain and defend the position you take on any issue.In the presentation of your positions, you must not degrade the value and integrity of your word. Once your peers lose trust in your word, it may never be regained.

“Grading will be simple. You either pass or you don’t. There will be no repeat courses or extra credit. I will pass out a general reading list. It is far from a complete list. You must understand the Constitution and how it was developed, the impact that slavery has had and still has our nation, and the doctrine of the separation of powers. There will be no tests on what you have read. The extent of your reading is up to you.

“You must have noticed all our classes are schedule as the last period before lunch. That is so we can run over the normal class period when we need more time. You can eat anytime.

“We are in the midst of a very important national election. The future of our nation will be changed by the result, maybe beyond return. I cannot imagine a better forum to bring political science alive than a class during this critical period in our nation’s history. The subject for Thursday’s class will be the role of the President as Commander-in-Chief and which candidate you support and why? You each will have ten minutes to defend your position. You will spend the rest of today’s class reading and studying global current events so that you are not only knowledgeable about what interests you and molds your opinions, but what also interests others and is shaping their opinions. You must know both sides of an argument to debate it well.”

INSIGHTS 275: President Trump – What is the Risk?

These thoughts are for those of you who voted twice for Obama and are now in the Hillary Clinton camp.

After eight years of the progressive rule of Obama, what does your country look like? Have you noticed transparency of government operations never happened? The Obama administration can’t seem to tell the truth about issues as important as unemployment figures. Can you believe from what you see that the unemployment number is 5.5 percent? I hope not. Any accurate honest accounting would put the unemployment number at near 15 percent. If you drop all the spin and count people who have dropped out of the workforce because they have given up on finding a job, the figure would be much more accurate.

Have you noticed that the moderate centrist Democratic Party is gone? It has been taken over by the progressives, who will never give it back. The real goal of the progressives is to turn American politics into a one-party system where the government controls the economy and moves the United States into some form of an international world order.

Have you noticed that American economic, moral and military power has been greatly reduced from pre-Obama days? American warplanes have run out of the spare parts needed to keep our ancient planes operating and new ones are not being built. Our military manpower (male and female) is now near or below pre-World War II levels. Never has peace come from weakness, yet the progressive party of Obama and Clinton is trying the historical failed policy of peace through appeasement again. Part of the result is tragically apparent in the Middle East where the human costs of Obama’s failure to act is approaching world war levels and Clinton is promising more of the same.

Have you noticed the ‘Rule of Law’ no longer applies to government wrongdoing? No one or organization important to the progressives is ever held accountable. The Justice Department under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch has been politicized beyond anything we have ever seen. The Watergate Nixon affair that we all thought was so bad now seems like an everyday executive action.

Have you noticed the national debt has doubled under the Obama administration and that the economy is stagnating even after unprecedented stimulus funds were poured into the economy? Wall Street and its investor class has prospered while Main Street businesses have suffered. The Clintons and their questionable foundation have grown rich. The Justice Department, reportedly, has prevented the FBI from investigating corruption and conflict of interest issues regarding the financial affairs of the Clinton Foundation.

Have you noticed nothing in the progressives’ management of the nation seems to have worked? The IRS, VA, EPA, DOJ, education, foreign policy, the Pentagon, intelligence gathering and analysis and immigration. Just pick an area. The result will be the same. The nation needs real changes. A lot of crockery needs to be broken. I believe Mr. Trump can do that. He has the ego and I hope the expertise to solve many of our problems. He’s not a perfect candidate and he needs to demonstrate a higher level of discipline and analysis. But the risk of a Trump Administration is far less than four or eight more years of Obama through Hillary. I know where that will lead and do not want to go there under any circumstances.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Clinton, Conservative views, democrats, Eight Decades of Insights, foreign policy, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, political solutions, Progressives, trump

Tagged as 2016, Clinton, hillary, Obama, presidential election, trump

by Barry Kelly | August 5, 2016 · 8:35 pm

INSIGHTS 273: Donald Trump and the politically correct world

America faces several critical problems. The national debt; stagnant wages; a real unemployment rate of plus 12 percent; an administration that cannot be trusted to tell the people the truth; terrorism that has reached our shores and shows no signs of being defeated; cash payments of 400 million dollars to Iran in the form of ransom for hostages; territorial aggression on the part of Russia and China; class warfare in America; a crumbling infrastructure network of roads, bridges, airports and utility distribution systems; a military that has to salvage parts from museums and junk yards to keep ancient warplanes flying; military manpower approaching pre-World War II levels; a war against terrorism our commander-in-chief refuses to recognize or to develop a strategy to deny ISIS safe havens in the Middle East; anti-American regimes in Iran and North Korea whose main national objectives is to develop and use nuclear armed ballistic missiles against the homeland; a tax and regulation load that kills existing business and prevents new start-ups; health care for the people, especially our vets … the list could go on.

And what is playing endlessly on our news media? Certainly not anything from the above list. No, we have become a nation of petty politically correct issues. Not just from the liberal media but also from conservative news outlets. The polls swing on the impact of politically correct trivia and not on a discussion of important issues that threaten America. The tyranny of the novel “1984” has been replaced by the politically correct dominated modern world of 2016. The progressives of the Hillary Clinton party know they cannot win a debate on real issues so have skillfully made the election about the real or contrived statements attributed to Mr. Donald Trump.

A few examples: The furor over Trump’s statements that some of the immigrants coming unopposed across the southern border were criminals, murders, and rapists. The PC spin is that Trump said all immigrants were criminals. Or his statement that Muslims should be temporarily banned from coming into the United States until they could be vetted. Sounds reasonable to me. But the PC version is that he is opposed to all Muslims entering the country. Or all nations in NATO should pay their required yearly proportion of their annual national budget. Reasonable, I think, but the PC spin version is Trump intends to withdraw from NATO. On the tax issue. Mr. Trump has said he would lower taxes on corporations and individuals. Not a bad idea. The PC spin version is that Trump’s tax plan will only benefit the richest Americans.

The Khan family dust-up. The Khans were recruited by the Progressives to attack Mr. Trump at the Democratic Convention over his stand on Muslims by doubting he ever read the Constitution and that he dishonored their son, an American soldier who was killed in Iraq. Again the motive of the PC spin was to attack Trump’s position on Muslim immigration. A long stretch, but the Progressives turned this into an attack on ‘Gold Star’ mothers when Mr. Trump unwisely questioned why Mrs. Khan had not spoken up at the DNC. His record shows Donald Trump is very pro veterans and military families. His stance on the Veteran’s Administration is far ahead of any past or present candidate.

Candidate Trump is not a politician. He often isn’t careful enough about what the progressive spin doctors can and will do with his imprecise words. The political world of dialogue about new thoughts and possible actions is very different from initial discussion of ideas and proposals in the world of commercial projects where the first mention of an idea is just the beginning of the negotiating process. In the high offices of government. Ideas are most often discussed, debated, and scrubbed before they see the light of day. Mr. Trump needs to recognize this difference and we need to reject the PC responses of the progressives and turn the debate to the real problems facing America. If not, four more years of the same. We need change before it is too late.