So Obama's Netflix deal was about attacking Trump all along
After going to great pains to assure his media allies that his unconventional Netflix deal was all about inspiring and telling uplifting stories, former President Obama got down to business with what he really had in mind:
Getting Trump.
Apparently, that's what passes for 'uplifting' for the embittered ex-president. When he said uplifting, he meant uplifting himself.
Here's what the New York Times is reporting:
Former President Barack Obama’s production company has bought the rights to the Michael Lewis book “The Fifth Risk,” its first known acquisition since it signed a deal with Netflix in May.Lewis made the announcement on a Katie Couric podcast episode that aired on Thursday. Deadline reported the acquisition earlier this week.“The Fifth Risk” tracks the messy transition from the Obama administration to the one headed by President Trump, as inexperienced appointees take over important bureaucratic jobs. In particular, the book examines what Lewis says was the bungling of day-to-day operations at the Agriculture, Commerce and Energy departments.
Which is amazing, when you think about it. Not only has Obama broken the established and sweetly first-world democratic custom of previous presidents not criticizing their successors, he's out there making movies about it, with his first project a movie about how bad his successor is, all as a means of showing how great he was by contrast. Is there a better way of drawing sympathy for President Trump wtih this sort of stunt? Don't think so.
But don't say there wasn't a heaping helping of deception in getting to this sorry place.
Less than a year ago, when the trial balloons were being floated out there about the deal, Obama was promising this:
Mr. Obama does not intend to use his Netflix shows to directly respond to President Trump or conservative critics, according to people familiar with discussions about the programming. They said the Obamas had talked about producing shows that highlight inspirational stories.
Then after he pocked the big-bucks deal, we got this...
Netflix said in a statement that the Obamas would "produce a diverse mix of content – including docu-series, documentaries and features" under their imprint, Higher Ground Productions."Michelle and I are so excited to partner with Netflix – we hope to cultivate and curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the entire world," the former president said in the Netflix statement.
...and this:
Obama explained that the Netflix deal was going to be focused on telling people's stories. He said he hopes these stories will help people see and better understand one another and ultimately help us move past the divisive political discourse that has mired Washington for so long.
So much for that claptrap. Promote greater empathy and understanding between people? Moving past 'divisive political discourse'? To heck with that. Getting Trump is more like it. It's always all about politics with these people, it's all they know. Why did they even try to fake it? Do they lie just because they like to lie? Or did some cronyism that affects shareholders in the big-bucks deal prompt the disposable kumbaya crap?
As I wrote here last March, very skeptical of the New York Times claim that Obama wanted to 'inspire' with his film deal:
Apparently, it wasn't enough to take taxpayer funds (and some were taken) to build a monument to himself in his non-library presidential library to loom big over the south side of Chicago, expropriating a historic Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park for this purpose. He needs to be on television all the time, the better to keep stirring the pot as President Trump sweeps out all of his bad executive orders, high taxes, massive regulations, vast expansions of the bureaucracy, bows to dictators, and nightmare of Obamacare. And while undoubtedly making millions (at what point has he made enough?), he wants to build an electronic monument to himself, in the same pharaonic tradition.And like a dictator, he seeks to control history. You can bet there won't be any self-criticism in this Netflix series; it will be about how great he was. As Obama's minions themselves tell it to the Times, it will be about "narratives." And "inspirational stories," he says. This is nonsense – think of all the astroturf "inspirational stories" he laid out during his administration. What were they done for? To sell horrors like Obamacare to the public and make them think something good was in store. That was all, and we expect that these new inspirational stories will be to sell other socialist programs, as well as do their darnedest to attack President Trump.We know that's going to happen.
He's amazingly predictable, isn't he?
The left is desperate and floundering badly
Readers of AT are likely to have seen the many, many clips of deranged leftists who spew their anti-Trump venom 24-7 on CNN and MSNBC. No reason to name them all – they all say exactly the same things. Each one of them morphs seamlessly into the next one.
It is hard to imagine the level of their rhetoric being worse than it was throughout the 2016 campaign, but it is. They have gone off the rails, out of their minds. While the published polls show most races in the midterms as very, very close, they may suspect that they are going to lose badly. So bedeviled by Trump's success in all aspects of the government except illegal immigration, thanks to the Democrats and RINO republicans, they are melting down like the Wicked Witch of the West.
The left's accusations have ramped up beyond calling Trump Hitler, Stalin, tyrant, dictator, etc. They call him racist a thousand times a day, even though the man has never said or done a racist thing in his life. You can Google him with Rosa Parks and countless other African-American leaders with whom he has had long and close relationships. These people who are pontificating all day long about Trump's "racism" are idiots spewing talking points with which they've been up-armored in order to turn Americans against the man.
It's not working. The more they spout their groundless allegations of racism, homophobia, etc., the more they alienate the Americans who are gladly aware, day after day, of how much Trump has accomplished in just under two years. Their lives are better. The formerly jobless have jobs. The tax cuts have let workers keep more of the money they earn.
Trump's detractors are embarrassing themselves, and most Americans are paying no attention to them. These talking heads of the left have rendered themselves irrelevant. So invested in destroying the president, they've lost their minds and any sense of journalistic ethics they might once have had.
There are only four days left before the midterm elections, and the bad behavior of the left media has escalated: fake mailers, fake threats (if you're a hunter, don't vote), etc. There is no end, no low too low, for the Democrats; they mean to win by any means necessary. Will all their dirty tricks (false allegations against Kavanaugh as a last-ditch effort to derail his nomination, find a dupe to charge with fake mail bombs) help them win on November 6? Let us hope to God that Americans are not that gullible. Let us pray they realize that the left today hopes for Trump's failure. His successes are killing them. They are horrified by every economic triumph. These wins make them angrier and more desperate.
We now know one thing for certain: The left does not care one bit about the daily lives or the prosperity of the 300-plus million American citizens who actually work for their livings, who are happy but not wealthy, who love their families and their country. So desperate now, they are encouraging, fomenting the invasion of thousands of migrants from Central America. This invasion has been organized, choreographed, and funded by leftists, here, there, and everywhere, including the ubiquitous George Soros, whose mission it has been for decades to destroy capitalism.
It was not so long ago that these same Democrats opposed exactly what they are promoting now – Clinton, Harry Reid, Feinstein, all of them. Desperate now, they've changed their tune in order to create a permanent underclass and guaranteed votes. These people, our leftists, are loathsome, and they are anti-American.
Those of us who are horrified by what the American left has become are terrified by the possibility that the Democrats retake the House. They have made clear their plans for the destruction of Trump, the economy, and the country; they want revenge for his electoral victory.
Oleaginous Adam Schiff is still stuck on stupid regarding the claim that Trump colluded with Russia. Maxine Waters, the most corrupt and moronic member of the House, is planning all manner of Trump harassment once head of the Banking and Financial Services Committee. Demented Nancy Pelosi? One can only speculate as to her plans to prevent Trump from governing.
If this possibility does not send voters toward an all Republican ticket, then we are fatally gullible. These Democrats who are salivating at the prospect of wreaking havoc on the Trump administration are enemies of the state. What they plan, if they win, will negatively affect all of our lives. They want to undo the tax cuts and increase taxes on all of us. They want to bring back all the purposefully destructive regulations Obama imposed on businesses across the board that hamstrung the economy. They will make worse the damage already done to our health and medical care by Obamacare. Trump has eased some of that pain; they want to make it painful again. They will again engage with the worst actors on the world stage, as Obama did. They will torment Israel, as Obama did.
Every bit of their campaign promises and slogans is a lie. The left, as demonstrated by all the videos posted by Project Veritas, prove that the Democrats dissemble, lie, and cheat to win, and they are proud of their fakery. They must not prevail, must not win on Tuesday. They mean to ruin America as founded. They mean to turn us into something the Founders meant to preclude: a class-based tyranny of the elite. They mean to control every aspect of our lives, especially how we vote.
Don't fall for their treachery. Let them flounder like the fish out of water they are.
ELECTION DAY: THE CLEAR-CUT CHOICE AMERICANS FACE
The stark contrast between the two parties.
November 2, 2018
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.
Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.
Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.
The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.
Accelerating under Franklin D. Roosevelt, this ideological program relentlessly moved forward, bringing along many Republicans who accepted the inevitability of the technocratic, redistributive state, and found that the centralization of power and privilege served their own interests as well. They embraced the Democrats’ underlying technocratic assumptions, and ceded their legislative authority to the cadres of unelected, unaccountable federal workers, and to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, which now essentially legislate laws, enforce them, and determine their legitimacy.
Eventually, this bipartisan progressive paradigm provided the foundations of the “ruling center” in which Democrats set the bounds of acceptable policy and political discourse, and Republicans practice the “preemptive cringe” in the face of Democrat overreach. This dynamic is lauded as “bipartisanship,” the preferred method of progressive rule by political technicians, who see citizens as their wards and clients, and dismiss the Constitution’s separation and balancing of power and factions as inefficient “partisanship” that keep us from “solving problems.”
What accelerated this long-developing transformation of the political order and brought us to this momentous choice was Barack Obama. Exploiting our dysfunctional racial narrative of indelible white racism and guilt, Obama was twice elected on the hope of racial redemption on the cheap, and the promise of technocratic expertise and “science-based” government. All voters had to do was ignore his public record of leftist progressivism, and whites would be forgiven. Then the races could start coexisting like human beings in a world with “no white Americans, no black Americans,” rather than remain trapped in an eternal racial melodrama in which whites always have to pay.
But the Democrats’ true intensions soon became clear. Racial reconciliation was a pipe-dream, as Obama and his Attorney General interfered in racial conflicts and stoked the fires. Policies like Obamacare well beyond the progressive-lite center began to emerge. Crackpot ideas of the cultural left escaped from the universities and began an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in service to an illiberal identity politics. Political correctness, imposed on the country and enforced by the technocratic federal overlords, grew ever more intrusive and totalitarian. Citizens who resisted their patronizing tutelage were insulted as “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “deplorables,” or “wacko-birds,” as the Dems’ favorite conservative John McCain called them. Protesting the admission of nearly two million poorly vetted immigrants a year was decried as “xenophobia” and “racism.” Patriotism and national pride were demonized, and American sovereignty subordinated to the global technocratic elite and its “rules-based order” alleged to be superior to a toxic American exceptionalism.
But typical of all tyrants, the Democrats overreached. Obamacare, growth-killing regulations, and higher taxes at home; and a foreign policy of retreat, “leading from behind,” and apology for America’s sins abroad marked the progressives’ hubristic certainty that they could ride roughshod over the bipartisan consensus that at least had checked some of the left’s ambitions by reminding them––in 1968 1972, and 1980–– that the US remained a center-right country most of whose citizens self-identified as conservatives or moderates. The political success of “New Democrat” Bill Clinton followed his recognition of this truth, which he brilliantly exploited as a “Third Way” and more cynically, as “triangulation.”
The Dems’ arrogance at ignoring Clinton’s strategy during the Obama years was punished with the loss of the House and then the Senate, along with most of the state governments. A sluggish recovery and foreign policy debacles like Benghazi, the rise of ISIS, and the catastrophic Iran deal showed starkly the failure of the technocratic elite when its utopian delusions and ideological pretensions met the stern taskmaster of a world of hard, cruel men who respected only brutal force. The wages of progressive statism––more intrusive federal power, illiberal policies backed by executive fiat and the courts, the corruption of federal agencies by partisan interests, and a worsening of race relations–– had earlier fueled the Tea Party, which galvanized the discontent and helped the Republicans take the House in 2010.
Then came Donald Trump.
Trump launched an all-fronts assault on the bipartisan consensus. The establishment Republicans, who used the Tea Party for electoral gain but didn’t address the larger discontents it gave voice to, revealed with some exceptions their fealty to the social and cultural shibboleths that marked the elite apart from the middling classes and non-college educated working class of flyover country. In contrast, Trump spoke in the direct, earthy, and at times vulgar idiom that has been part of American folkways since the Republic’s beginning. His disdain both for totalitarian censorship by politically correct commissars, and for the illiberal neo-tribalism of identity politics, captured the citizens’ anger at the double-standards and hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou nomenklatura virtue-signaling as it grubbed for more privilege and power. The progressives helped stoke the anger even more with their eternal media savaging of the president that culminated in the still festering Russia collusion show-trial and the shameful slandering of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Equally important, on issues such as hyper-regulation of the economy, the relentlessly metastasizing federal bureaucracy, the addiction to high taxes, the excesses of activist federal courts, and the dysfunctions of our immigration policies, Trump expressed the common sense that many ordinary people used to understand just how much our government has failed the people.
And, so far, his policies have worked. Trump is reshaping the courts, appointing 84 federal judges, including two Supreme Court Justices, who promise to rein in for decades the judicial activism the progressives have relied on to implement their policy preference without having to face the voting citizens. On the economic front, wages and salaries have the highest year-to-year gain, 3.1%, in a decade. Economic growth has reached 3.5% this quarter, a rise that progressive economic savants had announced impossible. Unemployment is the lowest in decades, and more new jobs have been created than people available to fill them. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high. Tax reform has put more money in people’s pockets. Repatriated corporate taxes have fueled investment in the domestic economy rather than abroad.
Finally, Trump has returned common sense to our foreign policy. He has backed out of multinational treaties like the Paris Climate Accords, and the disastrous agreement to bribe Iran into delaying for less than a decade its development of nuclear weapons. Both were manifestations of the long failure of the decrepit “rules-based international order” that served mainly the transnational global elites at the expense of national sovereignty and the people. He has moved our country closer to the traditional mission of foreign policy, which is to serve the interests and security of American citizens and put them first, not the interests of some fantasy “global community” or the “cosmopolitan” functionaries of transnational institutions. This credo of putting America first, and his full-throated expression of this sentiment has revived and celebrated the patriotism and national pride that progressives and Davos Man have long scorned and slandered as the nursery of fascism rather than of democratic freedom for distinct and diverse national identities.
On Tuesday we will face the choice: continue to push back against the progressive agenda to “fundamentally transform America,” or continue to feed the progressive Leviathan at the cost of our freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and national identity of a people who have never been perfect, but have advanced and inspired prosperity and freedom more than any other country in history.
Common sense tells us the choice is obvious. Vote for freedom, and vote for America.
2018 MIDTERMS: ALL ABOUT OBAMA
The Narcissist-in-Chief’s miserable legacy of failure and deceit.
October 25, 2018
Former President Selfie Stick is back in action, firing up Democrats before the midterms with his signature rallying cries:
I, I, I, I! Me, me, me! My, my, my!
According to a tally by The American Mirror's Kyle Olson, Barack Obama's campaign speech Monday for Nevada Senate Democratic candidate Jacky Rosen referred to himself 92 times in 38 minutes — or an average self-allusion every 24.7 seconds.
When he wasn't "I"-ing, the former narcissist-in-chief was lying.
"Unlike some, I actually try to state facts," Obama snarked passive-aggressively in a swipe at President Donald Trump. "I don't believe in just making stuff up. I think you should actually say to people what's true."
Sit down, Mister "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
Thanks to you, my husband, children and I lost not one, not two, not three but four private individual market health plans killed directly by Obamacare. Reminder: When the health insurance cancellation notice tsunami hit in 2013, liberal Mother Jones magazine sneered that the phenomenon was "phony." But after 4 million American families received cancellation letters at the end of 2013, Obama's health care prevarication was finally deemed the "Lie of the Year" by left-leaning PolitiFact.
And five years after promising Americans they could "keep their doctor" along with their health plan "no matter what," Obama belatedly 'fessed up that "the average person" would be forced "to have to make some choices, and they might end up having to switch doctors."
Facts, schmacts.
Moving on, Obama tried to galvanize voters this week by trashing Trump's jobs boom: "When you hear all this talk about economic miracles right now, remember who started it."
Hold up, Mister "Jobs are not coming back." I remember you taunting Trump for needing a "magic wand" to achieve what you claimed was an unachievable manufacturing industry renaissance — for which you are now claiming unadulterated credit!
I remember you, Mister Multitrillion-Dollar-Stimulus, promising the sun, moon and stars with the "most sweeping economic recovery package in our history" that was supposed to lift two million people out of poverty.
I recall sky-high unemployment rates for black Americans, nearly double the national rate, and 90 million-plus able-bodied citizens of all colors simply giving up looking for work while wasted billions went to fund crony green energy boondoggles, bridges to nowhere, renovations to Joe Biden's favorite Amtrak train station in Delaware, General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts and stimulus propaganda road signs planted nationwide and stamped with the shovel-ready logo.
Speaking of which, I won't forget you smirking while you admitted at one of your phony Jobs and Competitiveness Council meetings that "Shovel-ready was not as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected." Yukkity-yuk-yuk.
Nor will it go down the memory hole how the Obama administration's wreckovery lies were enabled by slavering "journalists" like New York Times columnist David Brooks. He giggled on Jim Lehrer's PBS show that Obama had told him off the record that the shovel-ready promise was a crock, yet he sat on the truth until his Times' colleague Peter Baker reported the admission more than a year later.
Wait, we're not done yet. Astonishingly, Obama is now on the campaign trail comparing the Trump White House to a "tin-pot dictatorship" and calling for a return to "decency" and "lawfulness."
Yes, this is the same man who sicced the IRS on tea party conservatives, evangelicals and pro-life citizens, amnestied millions of illegal immigrants through executive fiat, appointed dozens of unaccountable and unvetted policy czars, used his Justice Department to spy on journalists, deceived the country over the Benghazi massacre and the Iran deal, demonized his political opponents, and mastered the very social justice agitation techniques now wielded by left-wing mobs targeting Republicans in every corner of the public square.
Thanks, Obama, for reminding America of your miserable legacy of deceit, division, persecution and redistribution as voters head to the polls. You wanna make the 2018 midterms all about you? It's on.
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