The Kamikaze Congress

It’s become all too apparent that this Democrat-controlled House is so Trump-deranged that they’ll stop at nothing to try and remove the president from office. Democrat House Counsel Douglas Letter recently suggested that if this impeachment fails in the Senate—which it surely will—they may impeach him again. Rep. Al Green also said they would continually impeach until they hound the man out of office.

When Nancy Pelosi and the gang were in charge before I often referred to them as the kamikaze Congress. They knew the American people wouldn’t allow them to remain in power for very long so they were going to try and destroy as much of America as they could while they could.

Looks like the kamikaze Congress is back.

If you believe polls it looks like the tide is starting to turn against them. Even a CNN poll showed more people against removing the president from office than for it. There’s so much that can go wrong for the Democrats between now and November. The impeachment itself can overshadow the Democrat primaries. Key candidates will have to stay in Washington for a ridiculous trial instead of campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. That leaves Joe Biden virtually all alone on the campaign trail. I’m still convinced he will be their nominee.

If Biden is the man then the timing couldn’t be worse for him and the Democrats. No matter your opinion of Hunter Biden’s deal with the Ukrainian gas company, you have to admit, as they love to say in Washington, the optics don’t look good. At the very least it’s an egregious case of cashing in on your privileged daddy. At worst it’s a full-blown political scandal. Which may be why Pelosi held onto the articles of impeachment. Could she have finally realized that an impeachment trial in which Biden is the centerpiece might backfire?

Meanwhile, Sen. Schumer is insisting that Mick Mulvaney and John Bolton testify. I can’t imagine what they can bring to the table that hasn’t already been revealed in the phone call transcript with the Ukrainian president, but bring it on. I’m one of those who isn’t afraid to see all the evidence. People who don’t want to allow the Democrats to call their witnesses are just as bad as what they’re accusing the Democrats of. If President Trump has done something truly illegal and impeachable then we all need to know it. This is not a time for the Republicans to play politics, too.

In fact, it’s a great time to let the American people see the truth. Once they do it’s probably not going to go well for the Democrats. I don’t want to get overly excited, but if even half the evidence turns out to be true, then the Democrats are in for a bad year. If the Democrats are exonerated in the process then so be it. I honestly think it would be bad for the country if they won the White House, but it would be worse if they lost at the expense of the truth.

The truth is the economy couldn’t get much better. The Saturday before Christmas was the biggest spending day on record. Those who choose to judge Trump in totality by what he tweets are missing out on a great time. Even Pierce Brosnan, former 007 and now an American citizen, has had a change of heart. A year ago he was threatening to leave the country. Now he’s crediting Trump for the good times. In the era of Trump, it’s better to be shaken, not stirred.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

None dare call it conspiracy

It was 1966 when the brutal communist dictator of China, Mao Zedong, launched the Cultural Revolution. Mao called on the youth of China to rise up against the establishment and their elders and purge anyone who was not robotically toeing the party line. Roaming gangs of youths called the Red Guards harassed and attacked their elders. Students would drag old people into the universities and literally beat them to death. Their sin? They weren’t pure enough in the communist dogma. They dared disagree with political correctness of the day.

Sound familiar?

We don’t have a Mao in the United States, but what we do have are millions of brainwashed youths who have become so vile, so nasty, that it demands closer inspection as to what in the hell happened.

On January 10, 1963, Congressman A.S. Herlong, Jr. of Florida read into the Congressional Record ‘The 45 Communist Goals’ taken from The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen. Looking back at them these 56 years later it’s downright eery. 

Take No. 17: ‘Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.’ Check. There’s no doubt that they’ve achieved that goal.

No. 20: ‘Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.’ Check. No. 21: ‘Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.’ Check. No. 22: ‘Eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms.’ Check. Sounds like the purge of Confederate statues. And now they’ve moved on to the founding fathers. No. 29: ‘Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”’ Check. The founders are under attack. 

No. 36: ‘Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.’ Check. No. 38: ‘Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].’ Check.

Oh, and I almost forgot the biggie. No. 15: ‘Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.’ Double check.

The left has now re-educated the youth of this nation to believe that catastrophic climate change is on the verge of destroying the planet, and the only way to stop it is to destroy what caused the damage: capitalism. We have marauding gangs of youth thugs like the Red Guard called Antifa. Antifa is a communist organization with roots in 1930s Germany as they were fighting the Nazis for control of the people. The Nazis won the battle but Antifa is winning the war.

Anyone who dares try to roll back their work on things like climate change indoctrination and stemming the flow of illegal aliens like Donald Trump has is viciously attacked to the point of trying to run a duly elected president out of office. Note how irrational their hatred of Trump is. He has become the biggest threat since Reagan ended communism in the Soviet Union. I still believe Trump’s grand plan is the same fate for communist China.

And who’s behind this witch hunt of the president? The socialist/Marxist wing of the Democrat Party is calling the shots. Notice how we haven’t heard a whole lot from ‘The Squad’ during this impeachment debacle. Nancy Pelosi has apparently made a deal. I’ll give you your impeachment if you’ll just keep quiet and act like I’m really still in charge.

From here on out every election matters. Put somebody like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders in and you can check off all 45 goals.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Obscuring the truth in the IG report

The long-awaited Inspector General’s report from the Department of Justice was finally released. Inside were accounts of 51 violations and 9 false statements by the FBI. What were the headlines from the coup-complicit mainstream media? “FBI was justified in opening probe,” said the Washington Post. “Russia Inquiry Report Finds Mistakes but No Anti-Trump Plot,” headlined the New York Times. CNN crowed, “Start of FBI Russia probe was justified and unbiased.”

But what’s the real story?

We already know about the toxic text messages floating back and forth between the adulterous FBI lovers, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Both were highly involved in the Trump probe. Strzok led that investigation. Their bias is obvious, yet it was explained away by the IG report as not relevant because “while Strzok was directly involved in the decisions to open Crossfire Hurricane (codename for the Trump investigation) and the four individual cases, he was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter that those investigating were dirty cops, they weren’t making the ultimate decisions. Yes, but they were feeding information to the decision makers. And the one clear case of bias within the FBI has been totally ignored by the mainstream media.

Kevin Clinesmith, an attorney involved in the Trump investigation, was referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution after he was alleged to have altered an e-mail regarding Trump aide Carter Page in an effort to continue a FISA warrant on him. This was an obvious and successful attempt to spy on the Trump campaign by a clearly partisan operative. Think he wasn’t partisan? The IG report chronicles some of his text messages. The day after the 2016 election he wrote, “I just can’t imagine the systematic disassembly of the progress we made over the last 8 years. ACA (Obamacare) is gone. Who knows if the rhetoric about deporting people, walls, and crap is true. I honestly feel like there is going to be a lot more gun issues, too, the crazies won finally. This is the tea party on steroids. We have to fight this again.”

Not bad enough? How about this?

Two weeks after the election another FBI colleague checked in with him to see if he’d had a change of heart about Trump. “Hell no,” he wrote. “Viva le resistance,” And resist he did. He didn’t alter the Carter Page e-mail until June of 2017.

Oh, that’s not biased at all. (Where’s my sarcasm emoji when I need it?) Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General, will tell you that those types of messages don’t matter because Clinesmith wasn’t a decision maker. That flies in the face of common sense. If people who are working a case are biased then the information they send their superiors will be biased.

And two people high up in the investigation having an affair? Remember what Ross Perot said about adultery? “If your wife can’t trust you neither can I.”

Fortunately Horowitz is not the final word on this. Attorney General Bill Barr and his chief investigator, U.S. Attorney John Durham, are ordinarily tight-lipped about their investigation into the origins of the Trump/Russia hoax. They both came out blasting the conclusion that there was no bias in the FBI. Not only did they believe there was “clear abuse of the FISA process,” as Barr put it, they believe the FBI actually uncovered exculpatory evidence and hid it.

The IG report is not the end, as the mainstream media hope. It’s just the beginning.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The lady doth protest too much

Those of us who seek justice and wish for the other side of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax to be told eagerly await Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report. I hope we will not be disappointed. If the pre-release hysteria from some of the principals involved is any indication, we won’t.

Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer and married mother of two young children, carried on an unforgivable extramarital affair with then-FBI special agent Peter Strzok. With the help of the willing accomplices at The Daily Beast, Page is attempting to portray herself as just another victim of President Trump’s misogyny. He hates women so much, they’ll have you believe, that he would continually attack a veteran FBI lawyer who was just doing her job.

She says the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when, as she put it, Trump performed a “demeaning” impression of her having sex with her FBI lover. This purportedly happened at a rally in Minneapolis. What Trump was doing was reenacting in breathless dialogue a text message exchange between Strzok and Page in which he assured her Trump would not stay president if he was elected president because Strzok had an “insurance policy.” That “insurance policy” has been widely interpreted as the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. It’s also the subject of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.

While Lisa Page was pretending to be righteously indignant, the mainstream media jumped into action to pounce upon Trump and his imagined hatred of women. They lament the fact that he treats women exactly the same as men, which means when a woman attacks him he counter-attacks just as he would if it were a man. This is something feminists have fought for over the last century, yet when Trump dares treat a woman as his equal and not lay down the proverbial jacket so she can cross the mud puddle they come unglued.

That’s not to excuse Trump’s vulgarity. It’s just to point out that he’s equally vulgar with both men and women.

Without getting too excited about the Horowitz report, it should be noted that it is not meant to be the definitive investigation. In fact, it is an independent investigation from the Justice Department itself and will not be nearly as thorough as the one being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham. Supposedly leaked portions of the Horowitz report criticize some FBI employees and their tactics but stop short of agreeing with President Trump that it was a witch hunt concocted to destroy his presidency. We’ll see.

The more important investigation is the Durham inquiry which is much broader in scope. When one pulls out to look at the big picture we may see a coordinated effort by some not only in the FBI but in the CIA to thwart Trump’s efforts to become president and then to bring him down after he wins. That’s purely speculation at this point, but so was the entire Trump/Russia collusion story, yet it was treated as a foregone conclusion by the press.

It seems rather odd to me that someone in so despicable and indefensible a position as Page would now go all out to convince the country that she’s a victim. It could be a clear sign that Durham and the DOJ are over the target. If the next exposé from the Beast is an exculpatory piece on Peter Strzok we can be certain of it.

I’ve been saying the impeachment circus is a preemptive strike on the Durham investigation. Page’s paroxysm is more of the same.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Transgenders will destroy women's sports

I must confess I’m becoming quite confused. We’ve got girls wanting to play on boys sports teams. We’ve got guys who aren’t really girls but who identify as girls wanting to play on girls teams. We’ve got upset girls who now have guys who identify as girls but are still equipped as guys getting naked in the girls’ locker room. How I long for the days when girls were girls and boys were boys. I’m afraid we’re way past that now.

A doctor in New York State was let go by the school board after he wouldn’t clear a 12-year-old girl to wrestle on the boys’ wrestling team. He cited New York law allowing him to make that judgement based on the girl’s safety. Safety be damned. We have a society to upend here.

That’s basically the motivation behind all of this. We have boys teams and girls teams for a reason. The reason is girls and boys are different. I know this may get me banned from cocktail parties in San Francisco, but males tend to be physically stronger than women. Smart women understand this. They don’t want men competing in women’s sports. That’s going to be the final frontier. Once that happens women’s sports as we know it will cease to exist.

It’s already well on its way with so-called transgenders competing as women. What’s a transgender? Well, that’s the problem. It can be anyone from a man who’s had a sex-change operation to some guy who enjoys wearing dresses. A case can be made for the former to compete alongside women. Allowing the latter to compete is inexcusable. 

There was a case recently where girls were in tears after the school approved some dude who ‘identifies’ as a girl to use the girls’ locker room. This guy’s cavorting about stark naked in front of girls and dares anyone to challenge him. The crazy people running the school sided with him. I don’t have daughters, but I can imagine I’d be fit to be tied if this were happening to my girl.

This is happening all over the world. Guys who identify as women are invading women’s sports and mopping up. Again, this is why we have men’s and women’s sports. It’s like allowing professional basketball players to play on a high school team. Pretty soon there would be nobody who goes to that high school making the team. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

But there’s a new purpose. That’s what I still can’t quite get my mind around. Is it to totally destroy women’s sports? Because that’s what it’s going to do.

Venus and Serena Williams once boasted they could beat any man in tennis. Some guy ranked 203rd in the world took the challenge and beat both of them back to back. This battle of the sexes in tennis has been played out dating back to 1888. In every match but one the man was victorious. The only victory for a woman was Billie Jean King over Bobby Riggs and that’s the one everybody’s heard of. They’ve never heard of the other nearly dozen battles. In fact, the same year Bobby Riggs lost to Billie Jean King he beat Margaret Court who was ranked number one in the world. Nobody remembers it.

What’s my point? My point is the Riggs-King match notwithstanding, you turn men loose in women’s sports and they’ll destroy them. You want to see LeBron James in the WNBA? Me either. Nor do the women in the WNBA. Let’s stop this before we ruin women’s sports.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Impeachment hearings expose arcane bureaucracy

I’ll have to say that the impeachment hearings have proven to be quite elucidating. One pattern is becoming crystal clear. There is a deep-seated problem with government bureaucrats who think they, rather than the president, set foreign policy. Each witness called before Adam Schiff’s committee has expressed concern about, in the words of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, “outside influencers” promoting a “false narrative” about Ukraine that, in Vindman’s mind, was “inconsistent with consensus views of the interagency.” 

Let’s analyze that for a second. The “outside influencers” Vindman was referring to are Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. Think about that for a moment. These are two of President Trump’s hand-picked people and Vindman calls them “outside influencers.” That’s because he believes he and other government bureaucrats dictate America’s foreign policy. When pressed by a Republican congressman on whether he tried to discourage Ukrainian officials from cooperating in Trump’s requested corruption investigation he answered, “The president of the United States has the authority to do this, I guess. I don’t know.” You guess? You don’t know? Who else would have the authority to do that? Vindman added, “I didn’t think it was right.”

Here’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter what Vindman thinks is right. He says Trump and his associates created a “false narrative” about Ukraine. He says Trump’s Ukraine policy was “inconsistent with consensus views of the interagency.” Dude, Trump’s the president of the United States. He sets the policy. It doesn’t matter what the so-called “consensus view” is. It doesn’t matter what Vindman thinks. The job of every member of the National Security Council is to give the president the best advice they can then get on board with whatever decision he makes.

Vindman was born in Ukraine and speaks the language fluently. He’s also rabidly anti-Russian. He’s upset because he’s the self-described “authority for Ukraine” at the White House and Trump’s not listening to him. That doesn’t mean he sets the policy. Those who work with him say he has a bad habit of going outside the chain of command when he doesn’t get his way.

But Vindman is not alone. Other career government bureaucrats like Acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor somehow believe that anything that runs counter to their views on foreign policy somehow constitutes a crime. Taylor’s aide, David Holmes, overheard a conversation between Trump and Sondland where Trump was asking about the progress on the “investigation.” This is seen by impeachment nuts as some sort of evidence of wrongdoing. President Trump had just discussed the “investigation” the prior day with the president of Ukraine. Following up with Sondland the next day is neither unusual nor criminal. However, it does cut against the grain of “consensus views” of the foreign policy bureaucrats, but so does slapping tariffs on China. We heard ad nauseam about how that was going to lead to a global depression.

President Trump is overturning the tables of the business-as-usual bureaucrats, and they don’t like it. Just as we’re liable to see when the Department of Justice completes its investigation into how the whole Trump/Russia collusion hoax got started, there are lots of bureaucrats who have gone to extremes to protect the status quo. When government is on auto-pilot no matter who occupies the White House we have serious problems.

This same establishment thinks it’s unseemly to investigate a questionable deal between a VP’s son and a corrupt Ukrainian oil company. I suspect it’s because that corruption is just the tip of the iceberg.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The gatekeepers of thought

I have to admit I don’t follow hockey. If I’m honest I’ll tell you that hockey doesn’t really interest me. However, when I saw that one of hockey’s longest-running commentators had been fired over something he said, I had to know why.

Up until recently Don Cherry was an 85-year-old hockey commentator on ‘Hockey Night in Canada,’ a sports program on Sportsnet. The network issued a statement saying Cherry “made divisive remarks that do not represent our values and what we stand for.” His partner on the show, Ron MacLean, went even further writing, “Don made comments that were hurtful and prejudiced.” I had to know what he said.

Don Cherry

I read the quote, frowned, scratched my head, then tried to dissect the statement in order to ascertain what was so offensive. This is what he said. “You people that come here, whatever it is—you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price.”

I knew he was talking about immigrants so I thought it might be the poppy part. Was that offensive to Middle Easterners since heroin comes from the opium poppy grown in the Middle East and Asia? No, I was way off. The poppy that Cherry was referring to is a tradition started by the Brits dating back to the first World War. The tradition is to wear a poppy in remembrance of those who died in war. That comes from the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae who was a lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. He had just lost a friend in the battle of Flanders, Belgium. On the bloody battlefield thousands of bright red poppies appeared among the carnage. McCrae was so touched by the scene that he memorialized it in verse.

Remembrance Day is observed in the UK and Canada. It’s much like our Memorial Day and falls on our own Veterans Day. A deeper dive into Don Cherry’s remarks reveals he was lamenting the fact that fewer and fewer people are wearing the poppy on Remembrance Day. “Very few people wear the poppy,” he said in the same conversation that got him fired. “Downtown Toronto, forget it. Nobody wears the poppy. Now you go to the small cities. You people that come here, whatever it is—you love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price for that.”

Okay, I still wasn’t getting it, although I had my suspicions. But that couldn’t be it. Ross Perot was chastised for that way back in 1992 when he spoke to a black group and was forced to apologize. Then I saw a CNN story. That was it. Don Cherry’s horrible offense was he used the term “you people.” OMG.

I’ve spoken to dozens of groups. Women’s groups, black groups, Hispanic groups. I’m almost positive I’ve used “you people” in the course of my speech. “You people do great work” or “You people know exactly what I’m talking about.” We use that term when we’re not part of that group. Oh, but you can’t say that…anymore. It’s offensive.

It’s offensive only to the dim-witted or the speech police. And I don’t know which one’s more dangerous.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

It's time to declare war

I have long advocated that we declare war on drug cartels and gangs. We should be sending these animals to Gitmo now that Obama has emptied it out. If you sat there as I did and watched coverage of the nine American women and children who were butchered by a drug cartel in Mexico you’re probably nodding in agreement. If you’re waiting for the Mexican government to do something about it you’re going to be waiting a long time.

Mexico is a corruptocracy. Yes, that’s my word for it, but it accurately sums it up. Mexico is run by the drug cartels. That’s why the government there has done very little to stem the flow of illegals into this country. The liberals will tell you these are people doing the jobs Americans just won’t do. I will tell you the truth. The truth is we have no way of knowing who’s good and who’s bad. That’s what border checkpoints are for. We have them at every airport. You can’t enter this country without first being checked by a border agent. Why in the world is the Southern border any different? It’s not.

What we just saw in Mexico happens here with regularity. In 2014 a drug cartel hitman confessed to killing 40 people, mostly in California, for hire. There have been beheadings in Arizona, countless gang killings in LA. As much as we like to think this is something that just happens south of the border, it’s here. And it’s been here. And it’s getting worse.

Our open border policy has blurred the lines between a civil society and barbarians. Did you see the way Mexican police cowered in the presence of El Chapo’s son recently? These people are scared to death of the drug cartels, and we should be, too. The only way we’re going to survive is to wipe these people off the face of the earth as we’ve done with ISIS.

It’s almost comical how the hysteria has been over Turkey’s incursions across their border into Syria, but these same people don’t give a damn about the invasion into our own country. Think what you will about the Kurds, we’re abandoning our own people in border towns across the Southwest and in big cities and small hamlets across our own country.

We don’t need a war on drugs. We need a war on drug cartels. And I don’t mean a figurative war or a rhetorical war. I mean bombs. I mean strafing. I mean everything short of boots on the ground. If the Mexican government’s not going to clean up the problem, we should.

We also need the military all across our southern border. A wall would be nice, but it doesn’t look like Congress is going to give Trump the funding anytime soon. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval to put troops on the border.

President Trump has warned us that most of the drugs coming into this country from Mexico aren’t coming through the checkpoints. The idiots at the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets pointed to a Border Patrol report that chronicled the large amounts of drugs being caught at border checkpoints in order to prove him wrong. What they fail to see is the Border Patrol can only report what they catch.

The Border Patrol seizes under 3 tons of heroin per year. Americans use around 22 tons of heroin a year. Where do these people think the rest is coming in from? It’s coming across our open border from drug cartels south of it. And it’s time we did something about it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Explaining the Barr investigation

Ever wondered why the Democrats were so quick to move to impeach the president over a telephone call? I mean with all the things they’ve threatened impeachment over it ends up being a simple phone call to the Ukrainian president? It was completely out of the blue over the course of one weekend and boom! Suddenly we were in the middle of an impeachment inquiry. Don’t worry. By the end of this column everything will make perfect sense.

President Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian president sent shivers down the spines of certain Democrats. It should have indicated to the rest of us that Trump and his people were over the target. 

This whole thing begins and ends with a man named Joseph Mifsud. Professor Mifsud split his teaching time between London and Rome. He was the one who allegedly told George Papadopoulos, a Trump advisor, that the Russians had Hillary’s e-mails and had found dirt on her. Papadopoulos ended up telling that to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat. Downer, in turn, told the FBI and thus began the whole Trump/Russia collusion investigation.

As we’re now finding out, both Mifsud and Downer may very well have been U.S. intelligence assets. Papadopoulos contends he was set up. He says he was fed information from one U.S. intelligence asset and then coaxed into giving the same information to another U.S. intelligence asset thus creating probable cause. The truth of the matter, as it now appears, is the Papdopoulos affair was an isolated incident. Papadopoulos was in a closed loop and the FBI knew it from the start. The question that remains is whether it was the FBI who desperately tried to conflate the Papadopoulos angle or if it was the Mueller team

Ever since Bill Barr became attorney general he’s been trying to untangle the complicated web that was weaved in the Trump/Russia collusion scandal. As Mueller’s report found, there was no collusion. Then how does such a conspiracy take root and consume the front pages for better than two years?

Professor Mifsud has maintained that he was not an intelligence asset and that he never discussed dirt on Hillary with Papadopoulos. Whatever his story, he went missing from the university at which he teaches in Rome and sometime later turned up at the doorstep of Italian intelligence claiming his life was in danger and requested police protection. He gave a taped deposition explaining why he thought his life was in danger. The Department of Justice was alerted and Bill Barr was on his way to Rome within two days along with U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Once at the American embassy in Rome, Barr insisted on a secure room where he could meet with high-level Italian intelligence agents and listen to Mifsud’s tape. Soon after returning from Rome, the inquiry into the origins of the Trump/Russia collusion story was upped to a criminal investigation. 

What’s interesting—and telling—is how the mainstream media continually refer to the Mifsud angle and the possibility that Trump was set up as an ‘unfounded conspiracy theory’ yet they treat the Mueller investigation as totally legit. If there ever was an unfounded conspiracy theory it was that Donald Trump was a Russian spy.

Once the Democrats had impeachment lodged in the American psyche they immediately moved to destroy Barr’s reputation by claiming he’d “gone rogue.” And now that Barr has kicked his investigation into high gear the Democrats suddenly call for an impeachment inquiry vote? You tell me which one is the conspiracy and which one’s the theory.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The China question is not hard

I’ve heard a lot of commentary lately on what to do if you’re an executive of a company doing business with China. Surely you’ve been following some of the flap in the NBA over a tweet by Rockets GM Daryl Morey. Morey tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Innocent enough, right? Who could be against fighting for freedom? Well, the NBA threw a hissy fit. They made Morey delete the tweet then began their tightrope act trying to balance between pleasing their Chinese market and not looking like the stooges for communism and oppression that they are.

LeBron James weighed in saying Morey needed to educate himself on the subject and sided with the Chinese communists. Apparently it’s James who needs to educate himself. The Chinese have murdered far more people than the Nazis ever thought about killing. Yet James Harden, who plays for the Rockets, felt compelled to apologize for his boss’s tweet.

Since the controversy began I’ve heard political pundits and business experts chime in on the dichotomy of running a corporation and supporting freedom at the same time. I’m going to make it real easy for everybody.

There are alarm bells that go off in the heads of most people when they’re doing something wrong. It’s called your conscience. This is your inner sense that guides you. When you get too close to doing something wrong you start to feel something in your stomach. Some people condition themselves to ignore this inner sense and plow forward anyway. These people are what’s known as psychopaths. They are the kings of rationalization. They will convince themselves, then in turn try convince others, that what they’re doing is actually right when they and everybody else knows it’s wrong.

If you made $200,000 last year but only claimed $50,000 on your tax returns because the other $150,000 was made through the sale of cocaine then an alarm bell should be going off in your head. You can rationalize it by saying your employer doesn’t pay you what you’re worth or you’re just providing a service for people who are going to get their coke from somewhere, but you’re a psychopath. You know it’s wrong, but you continue to ignore your conscience and do it anyway. Eventually your conscience is pushed so far away that you no longer even hear it.

If you’re a businessman and you do business with the mafia you know it’s wrong. You may not even rationalize it. You just know it’s wrong, but it’s too lucrative to turn down. You also know that if you ever criticize anything the mafia holds near and dear you’ll be swimming with the fishes. So you keep your trap shut.

Here’s the bottom line. Making money and freedom of speech are not mutually exclusive. If you’re making money but you can’t stand up for freedom and liberty because of it, then alarm bells should be blaring in your ears. You’re doing something wrong.

Think about how you’re making money right now, whatever your job. Would you get in trouble if you tweeted support for Hong Kong? Would you get in trouble if you tweeted support for freedom and liberty anywhere? Then you’re not selling your soul for your livelihood. You’re doing the right thing.

This ain’t hard, folks. It’s something I’ve been preaching for over 20 years. We should not be dealing with a brutal, murderous, communist regime. If that’s the way you’re making your money then you’re doing something wrong. And if alarm bells are blaring in your head right now then there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

I don't care about diversity

When it comes to dealing with a business, I couldn’t care less about diversity. That may sound like heresy in this day and age of political correctness, but diversity is the enemy of excellence. There was a story recently where Air Canada is going to stop announcing ‘ladies and gentlemen’ on their flights in recognition of ‘gender fluidity.’ News flash: Gender is not fluid. You’re either a man or a woman. Sure there are some men who want to be women and vice versa, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Nor does my identifying as the King of England make it so.

While Air Canada brags on their website that they’ve been named one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, they’ve also been named the worst airline in North America for flight delays. You see, referring to people as ze, zir, or zem ain’t getting them to their destinations on time. Diversity is killing customer service.

Does that mean I want everybody I deal with to be white? No, just the opposite. I don’t care who I’m dealing with as long as they’re great at what they do. Diversity for diversity’s sake forsakes everything else. What these companies who put diversity first end up doing is attracting people with chips on their shoulders because society won’t accept them for this or that or the other. When I’m trying to book a flight I don’t give a rat’s rump about your personal problems. Sorry. All I care about is getting to where I’m going to on time and in reasonable comfort.

To show you how ridiculous this diversity thing has gotten, Asians apparently aren’t diverse enough anymore. Harvard has been blocking the number of Asians it accepts because, well, they’re too darn qualified. They’re taking up spaces black or Hispanic people could occupy. The Asians took Harvard to court for discrimination and they lost! Yes, they lost. The judge wrote in her ruling, “Ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race conscious admissions.”

See there. It’s all about ensuring diversity at Harvard. It’s not in the least about excellence or who’s most qualified, or any of the things that used to matter in a great country. All that matters is a school or business ‘looks like America.’

Let me ask you something. Does the NBA ‘look like America?’ Of course not. You know what the NBA, the NFL, NHL and MLB are all about? Excellence. You think a sports fan cares about anything else aside from winning? Sports are the last frontier of excellence in America. It’s all about being the best, regardless of race or gender or perceived gender.

Ever wondered why customer service stinks? Wonder no more. When a company is more interested in accommodating the employee rather than the customer then customer service will always stink. 

Georgetown University, riddled with guilt over the Jesuit priests who sold 272 slaves in 1838 to keep the school afloat, announced affirmative action for descendants of those slaves. The interesting part is they don’t get automatic admission. They get the same advantage as ‘legacy students.’ These are students whose family members went to Georgetown. Yeah, universities across the country do this, and it hasn’t occurred to even one liberal diversity do-gooder how patently unfair that is.

So legacy leg-ups stay and they’re adding an advantage if you’re a dude who wants to be a woman. Where is excellence in all of this? It’s not there, and it will be the downfall of this country if we’re not careful. It’s time we got back to being better rather than being different.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Syria's complicated, which is why we're pulling back

You know you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole when a president of the United States announces total military withdrawal from a foreign country and the folks at MSNBC go nuts. They weren’t the only ones. Neocons and the military industrial complex lost their minds, too. Then President Trump let the world know that we only had about fifty soldiers left in Syria.

It was as if the country had collective amnesia. President Trump announced last December that we were pulling out of Syria and it was met with the same outrage and condemnation from the same quarters. What’s head-scratching is that these same folks were stunned by Trump’s most recent announcement. It’s just the final stage of a troop draw-down that’s been going on for about eight months.

So, why is the president leaving Syria? Well, if the mainstream media in America actually chose to tell the truth for once you’d learn that the 50 to 100 U.S. special forces soldiers would be redeployed to more secure positions inside Syria. Why are they pulling back from the 30km safe zone on the border with Turkey? Because the job is done. We routed ISIS. They are operationally gelded. And should they rear their ugly heads again we stand prepared to lop them off. Again.

But what about the Kurds? This is where the pro-war forces join with the anti-Trump leftists. Somehow we’re leaving the Kurds high and dry to be slaughtered by the Turks. How can we abandon such a strong ally? First, let’s get the terms straight. Turkey, as a member of NATO, is technically our ally. We have a sworn treaty to protect them and our other NATO allies. Second, a large part of the Kurdish separatist movement is fomented by the PKK. This is the Kurdistan Workers Party. Yep, just like they sound, they’re a bunch of Marxist commies. They claim an area at the convergence of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey as Kurdistan. It’s not a real place. They want parts of Southern Turkey as their own. The Turks will fight to keep that territory in Turkey, and rightfully so.

Imagine if we had a bunch of Hispanics who helped fight the war on drugs down at the border then decided they’re going to claim the Southern part of Texas as their own. Think that’s gonna happen? Not under this president.

To the Kurds we say, “Thanks for your help with ISIS, but we’re done here and we’re going home.” The Kurds only want us there long enough to help them carve out their own digs, then they’ll be blowing us up if we don’t go home. A smart leader knows when it’s time to get out. Trump is that smart leader.

Still the calls to reverse his policy by Congress have already begun. Look, here’s the long and short of it. The president is the commander-in-chief. If he doesn’t want to fight a war then Congress sure ain’t gonna make him.

As for Turkey and the Kurds, President Trump has warned Turkey not to try any shenanigans or he will “obliterate” their economy. We’ll see who blinks first on that.

In the meantime, the Syrian Kurds just might have to make up with Assad. The Turkish Kurds might just have to make up with Erdogan. Syria and Turkey go back to their own corners and play nice. And we just might have peace in that part of the Middle East. Sounds like something worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, yeah. That one’s already been earmarked for Greta Thunberg.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Connecting the dots on Ukraine

Has it struck you as odd that the Democrats moved so quickly on impeachment over an insignificant telephone call by the president of the United States to the leader of a relatively insignificant country? Buckle up. I’m about to connect the dots for you.

This may have taken the country by surprise, but it had obviously been in the works for some time. How long? It’s hard to say.

Nancy Pelosi knew what was in the transcript before the Trump administration actually released it. Pelosi let this little fact slip in an interview with 60 Minutes. She told Scott Pelley that Trump called her about his phone call with President Zelensky. “He told me it was perfect,” she said. “There was nothing in the call, but I knew what was in the call.” Then she caught herself. “I mean, uh, it was in the public domain.” No it wasn’t, Nancy. When President Trump called you the transcript had not yet been released. That means Nancy Pelosi has a spy on the inside of the Trump administration. As Congressman Liz Cheney asked on Twitter in response to the slip-up, “What did Speaker Pelosi know and when did she know it?”

Why is the call to Ukraine so important to the Democrats? As it turns out, there were news reports in 2017 that triggered a letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department. It was in regard to a Financial Times story quoting various Ukrainian officials who admitted that they coordinated with the Clinton campaign and various Obama officials to connect Trump, Manafort, and the Russians. In other words, this was the true collusion conspiracy of 2016: the framing of Donald Trump. That’s one of the reasons President Trump made the call to the new president of Ukraine. President Zelensky ran on a no-corruption platform. Trump thought he might be able to get to the bottom of the collusion.

But apparently Trump wasn’t the only one interested in Ukraine. We now know that Attorney General Barr asked the president to call other world leaders, including Australia, in an effort to open doors to his investigation into who exactly was behind the framing of the president with the false ‘Russian collusion’ story. Someone who’s been at the forefront of that investigation is Rudy Giuliani. In his capacity as the president’s attorney, he’s been following up leads that his client was framed. One of his sources has been Viktor Shokin. This is the prosecutor who Joe Biden got fired after threatening to withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine. This is also the same prosecutor who was investigating, in his words, “all members of the executive board [Burisma Holdings], including Hunter Biden.”

The Biden story is simply a sideshow of the real story. Giuliani says he’s uncovered mountains of evidence that Donald Trump was framed. In fact, his investigation has been going forward with the blessing of the Justice Department. The Democrats knew he was getting too close to the truth. That’s why they had to rush out an impeachment narrative to the media. Biden knows he’s getting too close. That’s why he’s pressuring the news media to ignore Giuliani. In what even CNN described as a “highly unusual letter,” Joe Biden’s campaign has asked all the networks to not allow Rudy Giuliani on their air.

The real scandal of the 2016 election is how the Democrats conspired with foreign agents to try and frame Donald Trump with Russian collusion. Rudy knows it. Apparently so does Bill Barr. And the Democrats are running scared.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

What passes for news these days

If there were ever any doubt that the mainstream media are no longer the watch dogs of government but the lap dogs of the left that doubt should have been obliterated by the latest New York Times hit piece on Justice Kavanaugh. I’ll spare you the details on the accusation, but the Times claimed Kavanaugh had exposed himself to a fellow student while at Yale. Turns out the woman he supposedly exposed himself to has no recollection of the incident. In other words, it didn’t happen, yet the Times reported it as if it did.

When President Trump refers to ‘fake news’ this is exactly what he’s talking about. Many in the journalistic community—and some who supposedly support Trump—say his ‘fake news’ mantra is dangerous to the underpinnings of our republic. What’s dangerous to the underpinnings of our republic is rumor and innuendo that’s passed off as solid news. When the president refers to fake news he’s not talking about all news. He’s talking about stories like the one the New York Times ran about Kavanaugh.

My first encounter with how the left-wing media operate was back in 1995. It was during the government shutdown when Newt Gingrich had just ascended to the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives. At issue was a budget bill which would have slowed the growth of Medicare spending. The Democrats and their complicit media were telling the American people that the Republicans were trying to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to the wealthy. I had actually read the bill and knew that there were no cuts to Medicare.

I was broadcasting from the basement of the Capitol and had just finished my radio show. I went in search of the facilities, and as I was making my way back to my broadcast room I encountered a swarm of reporters surrounding a prominent Democrat. I waded through the reporters trying to get through the hallway. As I did I heard this Democrat say, “The Republicans want to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to their rich constituents.” I couldn’t just let that pass. I said, “Congressman, isn’t it true that the Republican plan actually increases spending for Medicare? It just doesn’t increase it as much as the Democrats want.” The lights of the news cameras turned on me. I then proceeded to tell him that I had been there all week and I’d yet to hear one media outlet report that, and I pressed him for an answer. He hemmed and hawed then made some excuse as to how he was late for a meeting and quickly dashed away.

I went back to the room where I was broadcasting and a reporter for NPR followed me in. She angrily demanded to know who I was, which I told her. She said I was not allowed to ask questions of a congressman. Seriously? I told her, “I was just a citizen walking through the halls of Congress, heard a congressman telling a lie, and called him on it. Instead of yelling at me why don’t you ask him the tough questions?” She turned on her heels and stormed out.

Later that day I was observing the debate in the press section of the Senate gallery. The head of the press office came over and informed me that my press credentials had been revoked.

The media are referred to as the Fourth Estate. They’re supposed to be the final check against government corruption and abuse. Supposed to be. They’re not always. Advocacy posing as news is not news. It’s propaganda.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Nashville is shielding violent criminals...and the news media are silent

It’s become a familiar refrain with me, but I too often have to say that media bias isn’t necessarily what they tell you. It’s what they don’t. Case in point is a recent story in Nashville. ICE agents attempt to apprehend a criminal illegal alien and he flees in a box truck, almost running over one of the agents as he does. Shots were fired by one of the ICE agents and the suspect was hit. He later turned himself in and was treated at an area hospital.

That, in and of itself, is a rather dramatic story. It got local coverage in Nashville, but inexplicably got virtually no coverage on the national news. It was what I was able to learn afterwards and what was not reported that was so disturbing.

ICE agents just before illegal flees in box truck

But let’s back up to the original story itself. This illegal alien, who allegedly tried to run over a federal agent, was called a ‘victim’ in a statement issue by Nashville Mayor David Briley. Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition called ICE a “rogue agency” that was “terrorizing and traumatizing the entire community.”

I knew ICE didn’t routinely arrest illegals who were just going to their jobs (although I think they should). They normally removed violent criminals from the country. I wanted to know what this particular illegal alien’s name was and what crimes he had committed. My staff and I were stonewalled at every turn. Nashville police referred us to ICE and wouldn’t tell us the suspect’s name nor would they reveal his crimes in Nashville. ICE referred us to the FBI since the FBI had taken over the case because a federal agent had been involved in a violent incident. The FBI wouldn’t return our inquiries.

I finally made contact with a government official in the know who asked to remain anonymous. I will tell you that this person is as close to this investigation as you can get and the information he gave me is beyond question. I was able to confirm that the information on the suspect’s identity we got through other investigative avenues was correct. The man’s name is Jose Fernando Andrade-Sanchez. He’s been living in the Antioch section of Nashville. He has a conviction of aggravated child abuse and another conviction of domestic violence. He’s a bad man, and ICE was trying to get another violent illegal alien criminal off the streets. Instead the government and the news media tried to keep that information from the public. My government source told me I was not the only one from the media to whom he had imparted that information, which meant I was just the only member of the media actually reporting it.

Now, if you’re doing a story on ICE trying to apprehend an illegal alien and it ends with the suspect being shot, isn’t an important part of the story why they were trying to arrest him? I would suggest it’s the most important part of the story, yet no news media outlet bothered to inform the public. This is a blatant attempt to not paint an illegal alien in a negative light, even though he deserved to be.

What’s more, Mayor Briley, fully knowing that this guy was a convicted child abuser, issued an executive order to ignore state law and forbid anyone in Metro Nashville government from working with ICE. Even when he issued the EO the news media still kept under wraps that he was blatantly protecting a violent criminal.

We all should be outraged over this, but it’s hard to outraged if you never even know.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.