Flynn's departure emboldens the media

The media smell blood in the water. There are four people in Trump’s orbit who they’ve been trying to take down and they just got their first kill. General Mike Flynn, the now-former national security advisor to the president was the first. They hope he won’t be the last.

Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer are all on their hit list. Unfortunately, Flynn gave them the rope to hang him. In the end, it wasn’t some ridiculous violation of some arcane law (the Logan Act), it was the fact that Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence which caused Pence to repeat the lie.

And it was all so unnecessary. Flynn was talking to a Russian ambassador about all sorts of issues, including the Obama sanctions against his country. Trump’s position had been that he would take a look at those sanctions once he became president. Telling the ambassador that was neither illegal nor improper. Misrepresenting the conversation apparently damaged Flynn’s credibility, and credibility is crucial to a national security advisor.

It’s a dangerous game to give the media their pound of flesh. Thus far in this administration, they have been relegated to mere spectators. They’re accustomed to driving the narrative. They’ve convinced themselves that Flynn, Conway, Bannon, and Spicer drive the narrative in the Trump White House. What they fail to realize is that Trump drives the narrative in the Trump White House. They seem to believe if they can destroy his inner circle they can destroy him.

With the Flynn kill it’s even more than that. To a journalist, Watergate is the gold standard. It’s the Pulitzer. It’s journalistic immortality. Before Flynn’s resignation, I predicted you’d hear the famous question crafted by the late Senator Fred Thompson and uttered by Senator Howard Baker: What did the president know, and when did he know it? Now it’s on every reporter’s lips.

Russia has been made the bogeyman. Seems like I remember not too long ago Hillary Clinton was hitting a reset button with her Russian counterpart. What happened? Well, what happened was Hillary was desperately searching for a vehicle to derail the Trump train and cloak-and-dagger intrigue reminiscent of the Cold War era seemed to be the only option. Vladimir Putin had made Obama look like a White House intern by comparison. His KGB ties and sinister looks made him the perfect personification of the leader of SPECTRE.

The left-wing media ran with the narrative. Any type of contact with Russia was suddenly an act of treason, despite the fact that since the fall of the Soviet Union they ceased to be our mortal enemy. Meanwhile, fraternizing with the true enemy of the United States—China—was not only tolerated but encouraged. China is a country that has hacked into defense contractors, social media outlets, and countless other American companies. They’ve manipulated their currency to our detriment. They’ve employed slave and near-slave labor to unfairly compete against American businesses, and they’ve killed or imprisoned millions of their own people.

But don’t look over there. Look over here at Putin and the Russians. Putin may have ordered the murder of somebody, somewhere. He rides a horse shirtless and snarled at Obama as a weak and ineffective leader. God forbid a future national security advisor was trying to build a diplomatic bridge with the likes of him.

No, let’s cozy up to the brutal butchers of Beijing instead.

Flynn’s departure was probably necessary, but it breathed new life into the left-wing media who were all but relegated to irrelevancy. Now it gets interesting.

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

84 Lumber fumbles the Super Bowl ad

There are three things we’ll remember from Super Bowl LI. The greatest comeback in the history of the big game, Brady winning a record five Super Bowls, and the day 84 Lumber went all in on supporting illegal aliens and lost.

A couple of weeks before the Super Bowl I was alerting my listeners that Fox had nixed the long version of 84 Lumber’s commercial. The network found it too political because the beautiful young mother and the beautiful young girl make it to the border only to find a large wall in their way. In the version we all saw on TV they catch a freight, walk for days, and cross a river to finally arrive in the Promised Land. It was promised by the last several administrations, a promise that was expressly against the law. 

President Trump has a new promise, only this one is for the American people. He promises that illegal aliens will no longer cross our border at will. Illegal aliens will stop taking American jobs. Illegal aliens will stop killing American citizens and draining our coffers of valuable resources.

84 Lumber chose only to show you illegal immigration in the most positive light. What they didn’t show you was the MS-13 gang member getting up early in the morning, stealing his way across Mexico, hauling illicit drugs across the border, then killing Americans on the other side. What they didn’t show you were the 25 Americans killed, on average, each day in America by illegal aliens.

Sure, there are plenty of people coming across the border who just want a better life. The problem is we don’t know who’s who. That’s the whole point of legal immigration. Proponents of illegal immigration love to point out that our country was built on immigration. That’s true, but it was also built on the rule of law. There is a right way to come into the country and there’s a wrong way. Two-thirds of those coming up from Mexico into the United States come legally. Two-thirds. It’s the other third that’s breaking in. It’s the other third that we have no idea who they are.

You don’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to recognize common sense. If two-thirds of the people coming up from Mexico are coming legally, what’s up with the other third? Why are they breaking in? The short answer is a disproportionate number of them couldn’t come the legal way because of shady backgrounds, disease, gang affiliations, terrorist ties, or myriad other reasons.

Someone on Twitter told me “human beings should allowed to travel without fear.” My response was that Americans should be allowed to live without fear. Right now we can’t.

I’ve traveled quite a bit in my life. I’ve never assumed that I have a right to break into someone else’s country. If France or Canada or any other country I travel to decided they no longer wanted Americans, I wouldn’t break in. And I darn sure wouldn’t sue to get in. I recognize that countries have a right to control their borders and their people. That means they, and they alone, get to decide who comes in and who doesn’t.

Too many people believe it’s a God-given right to travel freely wherever they please. It’s not. The reason we have borders in the first place is to protect the people within them. A country without borders is not a country at all. These days the stakes are so much higher. It’s literally a matter of life or death. Which side are you on?

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

Trump takes national security seriously

It’s interesting, isn’t it? A guy makes a campaign promise. He gets elected on that promise. In the first two weeks he keeps the promise. And people lose their minds.

Let’s get a couple of things straight up front. President Trump’s executive order is not a Muslim ban. There are roughly 49 Muslim countries in the world. The ban only affects 7 of them. In other words, citizens from 42 Muslim countries still freely travel to the United States. Secondly, the ban is far from unprecedented. President Obama banned Iraqi refugees for six months in 2011. Critics of Trump’s ban will tell you the two are different, but they’re only different in their scope. Trump’s ban casts a wider net, something that’s been needed for a long time.

I was reading a so-called ‘Politifact’ analysis and it argued that comparing the two is flawed. They had to admit that the two policies are similar. However, they argued, “Obama’s suspension was in direct response to a failed plot by Iraqi nationals living in Bowling Green, Ky., to send money, explosives and weapons to al-Qaida.” They act as if there’s no threat to the United States now. Let’s take a look.

In June of last year, 3 Somali men in Minneapolis were found guilty of trying to join ISIS. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Too many Somalis have been arrested to name here. Remember the mall attack in Minnesota where nine people were stabbed? An off-duty copy shot the man dead. He was a “soldier of the Islamic State,” according to a news agency linked to ISIS. He was also Somali. Somalia, by the way, is on the travel ban list. 

Mahmound Amin Mohamed Elhassan pleaded guilty last October for his involvement in international terrorism. He’s from Sudan, another country on the list. He was also a barista at Starbucks. Interestingly enough, Starbucks has blasted Trump’s travel ban and has vowed to make a special effort to hire refugees from these countries. Can’t imagine that I’ll ever set foot in another Starbucks.

This list of seven countries wasn’t pulled out of thin air. The Department of Homeland Security compiled a list last year following passage of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria were placed on the list in January of 2016. The DHS later added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. That’s how Trump got the seven countries. These were seven countries already under great suspicion during the Obama administration for being state sponsors of terror.

Anyone who’s followed the news understands why these countries are suspect. Large swaths of Syria and Iraq are under ISIS control. In fact, ISIS controls some passport offices in Syria. The other passport offices are controlled by Bashar al-Assad. Can you imagine either one of those not wanting to send undesirables to the West?

Al Qaeda is big in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has tried to smuggle bombs aboard aircraft bound for the United States. Somalia is headquarters for Al Shabaab, another al Qaeda affiliate. They’re constantly trying to launch attacks on the West. ISIS has set up shop in Libya over the last two years, thanks to Obama’s failed Arab Spring. Sudan has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. for over 20 years. Iran? You need to ask?

Basically, Trump is taking all the intelligence we’ve gathered over the last decade or so and is actually doing something with it. For the first time, a president’s actually trying to keep us safe.

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

Trump gettin' 'er done

Is your head spinning? I know mine is. President Donald Trump hit the ground running his first day in office and didn’t look back. Freezing government hiring with the exception of the military, canceling the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, temporarily suspending all contract and grant awards through the EPA, ripping all vestiges of ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ from the White House website and replacing it with a common sense energy policy, putting Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC which all but ensures net neutrality is dead, gutting the most damaging Obamacare mandates. He’s been moving at mind-numbing speed. Heck, at this rate, he may cram four years into a month.

But there’s so much yet to be done. Within his first 100 days Trump will cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities, establish a mandatory minimum prison sentence of two years for anyone violating a deportation order, put in place “extreme vetting” for anyone coming from a terrorist-sponsoring country, label China a currency manipulator and end their trade abuses, green light the Keystone Pipeline, lift restrictions on America’s energy reserves, cancel all payments to the U.N. climate change programs and divert that money to America’s water and environmental infrastructure. 

Then there’s tax reform. The shift will be monumental. The most important change will be reducing the business tax rate to 15%. It’s now at 35%, the highest in the industrialized world. That alone will mean billions of dollars infused into our economy and millions of jobs created.

I continue to hear people say they hope he works with the Democrats. Have they lost their minds? All of the above changes are a direct result of horrific Democrat policies. If you’re trying to fix Washington, the last thing you do is compromise with the people who broke it.

If this sounds like an intractable position, it is. Too many politicians take pride in how often they reach across the aisle. Republicans are famous for doing that and drawing back a nub. Thank goodness Donald Trump is not a politician. He was elected to fix things, and fix things he is.

If there’s one thing you can give the Democrats it’s the fact that they don’t waste an opportunity. When President Obama took office, he joined with then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in implementing the Democrat agenda. And why not? The American people showed the poor judgement of putting the Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress and the presidency. They took full advantage of their good fortune. That’s how we got Obamacare and a slew of bad laws and policies that Trump is now having to clean up.

They even tried to pass cap-and-trade. Even the Democrats in the Senate couldn’t go quite that far. It wasn’t for lack of trying. At the time, I referred to the Pelosi-led House as the Kamikaze Congress. They knew the American people would wake up, and they were going to do as much damage as they could in the short time they had.

Now the American people have sent Trump to Washington to clean it up. They didn’t send him to be timid or compromising or bipartisan. They sent him to Washington to do exactly what he’s doing, rip as much of Obama’s legacy out by the roots as he can.

We tried this failed experiment of the government doing everything for everybody. It was a colossal failure. Dependence sounds all warm and fuzzy until you find yourself under the smothering blanket of big government. Trump is here to set us free.

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

What really drives the anti-Trumpers

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the car switching between Fox News Channel and CNN on satellite. I heard a promo for some channel with ‘master storytellers’ and was intrigued. Not really knowing what to expect, I switched over. What I found were two people still whining about the election.

They were going on about what a joke Donald Trump is. One mentioned that conservatives always claim that when Democrats are in office our friends don’t respect us and our enemies don’t fear us. They wondered aloud how much our enemies would fear a clown like Trump. I guess the promo was accurate. These were two master storytellers.

The conversation gave me a glimpse inside the mind of the injured snowflakes who just can’t seem to get over the election. Then I hit upon the basic reason why. They truly believe the biggest threat to the United States and the entire planet is global warming. That’s bound to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies. They believe President Obama was really doing something about it. Now they see Trump undoing it all and they really believe we’re all going to die.

I recently decided to watch actress Leah Remini’s docuseries called Scientology and the Aftermath. I sat down to watch the first episode and ended up watching all seven. Not only was I stunned by what I saw, I was struck by how similar Scientology is to the global warming movement.

Remini talked about what drew her to Scientology. It was an almost euphoric feeling that she and others inside the so-called religion were saving the planet. Scientology gave her life purpose. She was working for the greater good. This is identical to what I hear from adherents to the manmade global warming theory. Mind you, I’m not talking about the great numbers of people who just blindly accept the science as settled. I’m talking about those at the core of the movement.

Remini’s docuseries highlighted the wild claims made by Scientologists. They trot out examples of inner city youths whose lives are snatched from a life of crime because of Scientology. They claim Scientology heals all sorts of physical and mental ailments. Much of what they say is either greatly exaggerated or completely fabricated, yet followers lap it up and repeat it at every opportunity. 

The L. Ron Hubbard of global warming is Al Gore. His god-like status among the global warming alarmists is scary. Like Scientology, Gore makes all sorts of wild claims, like sea levels will rise twenty feet this century and all the polar bears are dying. He set it all to ominous music in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Nothing Al Gore predicted in his 2006 film has come true. Now he’s releasing a sequel, and his adherents will, in all likelihood, lap it up with equal vigor.

But the aspect of Scientology that really hit home with me was the consequence if you left it. Remini documented dozens of cases where those who dared speak ill of ‘the church’ were harassed and their reputations destroyed. That’s exactly what happens to any scientist who dares question the theory of global warming.

Dozens of highly respected scientists have turned on the theory of global warming only to have their reputations savaged. They are accused of shilling for ‘Big Oil’ and cast out into the scientific wilderness. Proponents will shout you down and call you names. Scientific debate is now regarded as heresy. Sounds eerily familiar.

Scientology is a cult. I fail to see how global warming is any different.

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

The real story about 'Russian hacking'

There's so much you’re not being told about the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). First of all, let’s get something out of the way. Nobody “hacked the election,” as the left-wing media are telling you. No vote totals were changed. No electoral votes were stolen. There are two separate hackings. There’s the DNC hacking that came to light last summer and got Debbie Wasserman Schultz fired as chairman of the DNC. Those e-mails showed her colluding with others inside the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign to ensure Hillary won the nomination.

The other hacking is of John Podesta’s Gmail account. Podesta was Hillary’s campaign chairman. Podesta fell for a phishing scam that gave the hacker access to his e-mail. By the time the general election rolled around, the DNC hacks were ancient news. The only hacks that were in the news leading up to the election were the Podesta e-mails. The intelligence assessment makes absolutely no mention of the Podesta hack. Curious, isn’t it? The left-wing media have conjoined the DNC and Podesta hacks as if they’re the same. They’re not.

The report clearly states that it “does not and cannot include the full supporting information.” That’s because doing so would reveal that it was CrowdStrike, a company hired by the DNC, not U.S. intelligence agencies, that determined the DNC hacking came from the Russians. CrowdStrike is funded by Google, a benefactor that is neck-deep in Hillary donors and supporters. It’s the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. In fact, the FBI says the DNC refused to turn over its servers for examination. The DNC says that’s not true. They say the FBI never asked for the servers. The bottom line is intelligence agencies never saw for themselves that the Russians hacked the DNC. They relied on propaganda, not intelligence.

In the “Sourcing” section of the report, they state their judgements are based on “our understanding of Russian behavior.” They do not source the actual DNC servers or computers because they never saw them.

Furthermore, the intelligence assessment of the hacks specifically states “we did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.” Nothing had more influence on the election than the Access Hollywood leak. That certainly cost Trump millions of votes. Nobody’s the least bit curious as to who was trying to influence the election there. It was Hillary’s campaign that kept trying to link Trump with Putin, and remember, it was a company hired by the DNC that came to that conclusion, not U.S. intelligence agencies.

Another interesting note is the report singles out the RT network (Russia Today) as a Russian “government-funded outlet.” They accuse RT of focusing on Hillary’s e-mails and accusing her of “corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism.” In other words, reporting the truth is somehow criminal. Oh, and no mention that the darling of the left wing, Larry King, does a show on RT.

In fact, the bulk of the report focuses on RT as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin advancing issues like anti-fracking and pro-Occupy Wall Street programming. Couple that with the negative Hillary coverage and it sounds like the Bernie Sanders network. The report reads like an editorial from the New York Times. It’s long on hypothesis and accusations and devoid of facts and substance.

Everybody is focused on the DNC and the Russians while we should all be concerned about the real problem. Our U.S. intelligence agencies have been breached by partisan hacks. 

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

Now hear this! We are not a democracy!

I know you’ve heard your entire life about our “democracy.” I hate to be a nitpicker, but we are not, nor have we ever been, a democracy. We are a republic. You’ll note that we pledge allegiance to the flag, and “to the republic for which it stands,” not the democracy. But “democracy” is used so much by presidents and candidates that it’s become almost interchangeable with “republic.” Almost.

What prompted me to make this important distinction was an interview on Fox News with a supposed political science professor from the University of North Carolina. He made the outrageous claim that North Carolina is no longer a democracy because Republicans seem to have a lock on the general assembly. Forget that the new governor is a Democrat, somehow North Carolina’s political system is now akin, according to this professor, to “Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.” The good professor apparently still suffers from Post-Trump Stress Disorder.

Where has the professor’s outrage been? Last century North Carolina had exactly two Republican governors. When Republicans took over the general assembly in 2010, it was the first time they had done so since 1870. It seems that “democracy” is only in peril when Republicans are in charge, not when Democrats have a 140-year lock on the general assembly.

Of course, the epicenter of the professor’s discontent is the transgender bathroom bill that requires people to use the public bathroom in state-controlled buildings that aligns with their plumbing. I know. Ridiculous, huh? The fact that a university political science professor thinks we’re a democracy gives us all a special glimpse into the mindset of liberal academia. Basically, they prefer mob rule to a representative republic. 

So, what’s the difference between and democracy and a republic? A democracy has been described as two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. In a republic, the individual is sovereign. The sovereignty in a democracy is in the group. 

This is one of the prime drivers behind abolishing the Electoral College. It doesn’t seem fair to those with a mob mentality that the lamb should be protected from the wolves. In the founding fathers’ infinite wisdom, they foresaw the stronger, densely populated areas running roughshod over the smaller states, so they built in a little extra strength for the smaller states to fend off the wolves.

Time was when you never heard a president refer to the United States as a democracy. That changed under the great progressive of the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson. Henceforth, presidents have increasingly used “democracy” in place of “republic.” Our founders most assuredly knew the difference and frequently warned of sliding into a democracy.

Alexander Hamilton said, “If we incline too much to democracy we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.” He cautioned in his last letter that “our real disease is democracy.”

Thomas Jefferson said, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule.” John Adams begged us “remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

The Constitution declares, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” 

Benjamin Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention what type of government was chosen. “A Republic,” he said ominously, “if you can keep it.”

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