Dems see their opportunity for socialism

The left’s hatred of Donald Trump has emboldened them to do something that several years ago was unthinkable. They have now mainstreamed socialism in the Democrat Party. Of course, there have always been socialists in the party. Bernie Sanders has made no secret of his socialism, but there was little chance he was going to get the nomination for president. That’s all changing.

Kamala Harris, the Democrat senator from California, is the odds-on favorite to win the Democrat nomination for president in 2020. She’s also an unapologetic dyed-in-the-wool socialist. She recently told Jake Tapper from CNN, referring to the private health insurance market, “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.” Her remarks caused hardly a ripple at the other networks and warranted only passing coverage. Perhaps Kamala Harris is too liberal for even the left-wing media.

We know she was too liberal for gun-grabbing potential presidential contender Michael Bloomberg. He said her idea of Medicare for All would bankrupt America. That doesn’t seem to matter to the left. The main proponent of Medicare for All is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has all sorts of radical ideas like taxing those at the ‘tippy top’ at 70 percent and making a college education free for everyone. A recent Axios poll showed that 74 percent of Democrats would vote for her for president were she old enough to run. There’s even a movement afoot to amend the Constitution so she can run.

This sharp and open turn to the left by the Democrats is due to their perception that the country hates Donald Trump. Presuming that the Republicans will stick with him in 2020, the Democrats see their chance to lurch to the left and turn America into a European-style socialist state. Trump Derangement Syndrome has not only exposed the latent insanity that has been simmering just below the surface in many liberals, it has also exposed their true intentions.

Their hatred for Donald Trump goes way beyond anything personal. He’s actually accomplishing things Republicans have merely dreamed of. Look at the economy. Despite the continual predictions of impending doom, the economy continues to startle the experts with its robustness. Unemployment hovers near a 50-year low. Hispanic and black unemployment are both at record lows. The president jumped 19 points in popularity with Hispanics during the government shutdown over the wall. All of this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that Trump is the most hated man on the planet. He’s the most hated man by the media and they amplify that every day, but that doesn’t make it so.

Recent polls have shown President Trump at or above where Barack Obama was in popularity at the same point in his presidency. That fact gets no press whatsoever. I will be the first to admit that Trump has a nasty habit of stepping on his own message. I also believe the left continually underestimates him. 

The upcoming State of the Union address will be a turning point in his presidency. I believe he will lay out a rational argument to the American people of just how bad things are at the Mexican border and why we need a wall. I also believe he will declare a national emergency before the end of February and we will start building that wall. Much of it will be completed in the next year and we will start to see a drastic reduction in crime and drugs and all the nasty things an open border brings. And Kamala Harris’s socialism will look like Venezuela by comparison.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Pulling back the curtain on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

OK, we’ve had our fun with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s time to stop pretending that she’s relevant. Or even serious. Sure, she took the left-wing media by storm when she unseated the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. That was quite a feat. Joe Crowley had been there for 20 years and had climbed the ranks of power, but his defeat was a local issue in the Bronx.

The left-wing media have blown her all out of proportion. Why? Because she’s a socialist just like they are. It also helps immensely that she’s a) young, and b) attractive. Liberal, young, and hot are three attributes that make a politician absolutely irresistible to the media. However, AOC is devoid of any substance, despite constant appearances on late night television and cable news.

She has equated the fight against global warming to that of defeating the Nazis in World War II. She believes we should ‘mobilize and industrialize our entire economy’ to fight it, just like we did during the war. The Nazis were real. Global warming isn’t. We could actually see Hitler and the Nazis marching across Europe. The left chases this phantom of global warming without a shred of evidence. All you have to do to shut them down is ask them to prove it. They look at you with anger and frustration as if you’d just asked them to prove the Easter Bunny is real. If you believe even half of the rhetoric of the Branch Algorians, you can’t really think that retooling our entire economy to fight it is a good idea.

Speaking of World War II, AOC compared the migrants fleeing Central America with victims of the Holocaust. Maybe you believe most of these people are refugees from violence (which they’re not), you still can’t possibly equate them to 6 million Jews being gasses by the Nazis. But, of course, if you’re trying to gin up hysteria you can.

AOC came out with the claim that the Pentagon had lost over $21 trillion. Even the left-wing media were skeptical. Jake Tapper at CNN called her out on the numbers. She couldn’t produce any evidence to support her accusation. She made the point to illustrate that we could fund Medicare for All, her communist plan to take over the medical sector, at 66 percent with just the lost money from the Pentagon. Problem is the entire military budget for a year is barely over a half-trillion dollars. In fact, experts estimate that we haven’t spent $21 trillion on the military in the entire history of the country, must less lost that much.

Now the Bronx Braintrust is at it again on global warming. During a Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration she said, “And we’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The crowd applauded in agreement. Then she asked, “Your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? And, like, this is the war, this is our World War II.”

Um, like, Alexandria, the world is not going to end in 12 years. This is the same bovine scatology that Al Gore’s been pushing for 30 years or more. It’s always 10 or 12 years in the future. Then the future arrives and nothing happens and the crazy people who worship at the altar of Al Gore act like it was never said.

I’m going to be brutally honest, because somebody has to be. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is cute, but she’s nuts. It’s time to actually start listening to what she says.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The coup attempt on Trump

OK, so now Donald Trump is a Russian agent? You’d think so by the mainstream media coverage. The New York Times ran a story that the FBI was investigating Trump right after his firing of James Comey for wittingly or unwittingly being a secret agent for the Russians. It was ridiculous on its face, but given the timing and who was involved it makes sense.

Andrew McCabe

Andrew McCabe became acting FBI director in the wake of Comey’s firing. He launched the investigation between the time of the firing and the time Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as the special counsel. We now know from discovered text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover, Lisa Page, that there was essentially a coup attempt going on. They reference “Andy” in their text messages. It’s presumed they’re talking about McCabe. Two hours after Comey’s firing Strzok sent Page this message: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting (director). Page replied, “We need to lock in (redacted). In a formal chargeable way. Soon.”

Strzok and Page refused to clarify the exchange in testimony before Congress. I can imagine so. If the texts reference what we think they reference it could very well be treasonous. What’s interesting is James Comey appears not to be part of this plot. The man most vilified in all of this was apparently not open to trying to unseat Trump. Note that Strzok said they needed to open the case against Trump now that Comey was gone and McCabe was acting director. They knew their window would be short since the president would be naming a permanent replacement for Comey soon. 

A case can also be made that Rod Rosenstein was part of the conspiracy. Remember it was Rosenstein, according to McCabe’s notes, who floated the idea of secretly taping Trump and using the 25th Amendment to oust him from office. Apparently once McCabe’s fellow traveler had put his man, Mueller, in place there was no longer a need to investigate Trump as a Russian agent. The cabal had their full hooks in the investigation once Mueller was on board.

What the mainstream media chose to omit when serving as an echo chamber for the Times was the FBI found no evidence that Trump was a Russian agent, either wittingly or unwittingly. This was simply a vehicle used by rogue elements inside the FBI to try and topple the Trump presidency.

But where’s the investigation of that? The spineless Republicans who had every opportunity to build a wall and fully repeal Obamacare also fumbled the biggest story so far this century. There is ample evidence that key people inside the FBI were doing everything they could to end the Trump presidency. No one in the mainstream media is the least bit curious. The Republicans who run the national apparatus of the party in Washington appear to be equally disinterested. It’s probably because they don’t like Trump any more than the media or the Democrats. He’s an embarrassment. Why? Because he’s actually getting things done. He’s actually going about the task of fulfilling his campaign promises.

The dirty little secret in Washington is the people who pull the strings love the status quo. They have a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-your-back mentality. This is why, on the key issues, there’s rarely ever much movement. The Republicans in charge want to continue that status quo just as much as the Democrats do.

Donald Trump came to town to bust up the club. And he must be stopped at any cost.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Chicken Littles of the government shutdown

What if they had a government shutdown and nobody noticed? If you’re one of the few Americans who has actually had to go without pay, I apologize. My point is the doom and gloom and Armageddon of a partial government shutdown foretold by the Democrats never materialized. It was similar to the apocalyptic predictions of tax cuts. Instead, the economy has been on fire. We added 312,000 new jobs in December, far above the 180,000 that were predicted by the so-called experts. Hispanic unemployment has now hit yet another historic low.

Despite the tweets, despite the vulgarity, despite his stepping on his own message, Donald Trump knows what he’s doing. He decided to run for president in order to make America great again and he’s delivering big league. And the Democrats have become the obstructionist party just for the sake of obstructing. They were for the border wall before they were against it. And they’re against it simply because President Trump wants it. The game plan is to make sure he doesn’t get anything he wants. If he does, their reign in the House will be short-lived.

To illustrate how desperate they are, the Democrats are now calling a wall ‘immoral.’ Immoral? Is the wall around the Vatican immoral? What’s immoral is allowing thousands of Americans to die at the hands of illegal aliens each year and not build a wall to stop them. The open borders crowd seems to carve out an exception for those streaming across our southern border. They would never go for allowing planeloads of people to enter JFK without going through Customs. It’s hypocrisy at its highest.

Yes, Donald Trump said Mexico was going to pay for the wall. Chance are they’re not. That doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It doesn’t mean we don’t build it. In the meantime, thousands of government employees hang in the balance. Yes, they’ll get back pay, but making it without a paycheck is tough. It’s something we shouldn’t subject anyone to. Trump said he’d take responsibility for the shutdown, but is he really responsible? He’s asking for $5 billion to get started on the wall. In Washington terms that’s chump change. 

The National Priorities Project, a left-wing, pro-big government organization out of Massachusetts, compiled a list of nine things we should buy with the $5 billion instead of the wall. They listed things like doubling federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Can you say Solyndra? We blew a half-billion on that boondoggle, and it was just one of many. We’ve spent over $155 billion on green energy with little to nothing to show for it.

NPP suggested giving the EPA a 60 percent pay raise instead of building the wall. Seriously? Look, I’m all for clean air and clean water, but the EPA has gone nuts as of late. Their obsession with this fantasy of manmade global warming is costing us billions. If anything, we should be cutting out the dead wood at the EPA, not giving 60 percent pay raises.

They want to increase federal spending on public K-12 schools by 30 percent. Schools should never be funded by the federal government. That’s the responsibility of states. More federal money means more federal strings attached. Anybody remember Michelle Obama taking over the lunchroom? Or George W’s ‘No Child Left Behind?’

And they want to give the $5 billion to the National Endowment for the Arts. I guess so we can fund more crucifixes in urine.

Build the wall. It’s a project long overdue. And let’s make America safe again.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Why Trump is right on Syria

The Washington chattering class is once again stunned that President Trump is keeping a campaign promise. Like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and building the wall, the president is following through, and Washington elites don’t quite know what to make of it. Remember, it was Nancy Pelosi who told Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office that the border wall was just a campaign promise. Unfortunately, this is the attitude of most elected officials. You say what you have to say to get elected, then you do only what’s popular with your Washington colleagues.

Syria is a real head-scratcher. Not that President Trump is pulling troops out, but that so many want to keep the troops there. We are uninvited guests in a hostile country. Not that we didn’t have a right—even an obligation—to rout ISIS. That mission has largely been accomplished. That’s not to say that ISIS won’t rise again. If they do we should reserve the right to rout them again, but a prolonged presence in a sovereign nation that doesn’t want us there should not even be an option.

The usual Russia conspiracy freaks wasted no time in claiming more collusion with Russia since Syria’s strongman is a Russian ally. It’s not as if Trump hasn’t been tough on Bashar al-Assad. The United States has attacked Assad’s military ten different times since Trump took office. Syria is basically in the midst of a civil war. Our only interest is ISIS and its accumulation of land and power stretching across the Iraqi border. Outside of that we have no business in Syria.

It was President Obama who drew a red line in August of 2013 saying if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people we would retaliate with military action. He did and we didn’t. It wasn’t until Donald Trump became president that we actually punished Assad for chemical weapons attacks. But punishing Assad was never the primary mission. The American-led coalition in Syria, which included the UK, France, Jordan, Turkey, Canada, and Australia, was specifically forged to defeat ISIS, or ISIL, as Obama so puzzlingly called them. That mission has been largely accomplished. 

According to The Guardian, ISIS has lost over 95 percent of the territory it held before the coalition was launched against it. The coalition has started to unravel. The Kurds have been the principal fighters on the ground against ISIS. Turkey attacked Kurdish militants in northwestern Syria. We did nothing to intervene. It’s becoming clear that, like most disputes in the Middle East, Syria is far more complicated than simply backing the good guys against the bad guys.

The Kurds have been staunch allies of the United States, but only because they want their own country carved out of sections of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The U.S. failing to come to their aid against the Turks indicates that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Many of the Democrats who supported military action in Syria only did so because it was a Democrat president who wanted it. Many Republicans were opposed for the same reason. Now it’s as if everyone wanted to fight Assad all along, even though that was never the mission. President Trump seems to be the only one who remembers the mission, and now everyone in Washington is against him because his name is Donald Trump.

Thank God for people like Sen. Rand Paul. He was against military intervention in 2013 and he’s against it now. Not that he’s necessarily right. He’s just consistent, something sorely missing in Washington these days.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.