2020 elections – Page 8

Is our flag next?

By Steve Woodward

As do many, I have a friend who tries persistently to view everything around him through an apolitical lens. I suppose it’s his alternative plan for managing blood pressure.

When I mentioned my outraged reaction to Nike’s willful compliance with the left’s poster child for oppressed millionaires, Colin Kaepernick, in connection with withdrawing Betsy Ross flag emblazoned Nike footwear, my friend did not concur. He does not agree that Nike caved to one of its highest profile, most radical endorsers, and therefore should be called out. Quite to the contrary, my friend sees Nike’s decision as a stone cold business decision intended to inspire an important target audience of consumers — the growing number of Americans who no longer are sure they really want to be (Americans).

Nike-air-max-1 If absorbing the very good possibility that his assessment is correct does not turn your outrage into sadness, we’ll assume you are standing in line as we speak at a Nike store. In fact it is more than a possibility. Forbes.com reports a 2% increase in Nike’s stock price after the Ross decision, adding $3 billion to the company’s market value virtually overnight.

Observing the socialist-leaning, anti-American left routinely hijacking formerly enjoyable holidays, such as Independence Day, or global sports events, such as the just concluded soccer Women’s World Cup, only deepens my profound sadness. At the same time, I do not equate sadness with defeat. The remaining 45% of citizens who are extremely proud to be American are also extremely likely to continue defending our nation’s core values, to denounce Nike and other consumer brands which applaud the decline of patriotism and leverage it as a sales strategy, and to feel ashamed of American athletes such as Team USA soccer star Megan Rapinoe for using a world stage to f-bomb the nation’s majestic White House, trample an American flag in plain sight and infer that her talents stem from her identifying as a lesbian.

Are we to accept that celebrating American independence on the Fourth of July, celebrating historic women like Betsy Ross and celebrating dominant American athletes wearing the red, white and blue are tied to a bygone era?

The corrupt U.S. media are more than determined to extract the joy out of everything to damage Donald Trump and diminish long standing traditions. The “Salute to America” parade, military flyovers and fireworks in Washington were derided as an obscenely expensive production and a platform for a Trump campaign event. It instead attracted a sea of patriotic humanity on the Mall in inclement weather, but the washout thunderstorms the media predicted never happened. America happened.

And now we are scolded by agenda-driven sports “journalists” for daring to be uncomfortable about behavior by U.S. team members during the World Cup in France. A good many Americans looking on recall a time not so long ago when our athletes competing in international events were required to “represent our country” with dignity and class. (In the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow, members of the U.S. women’s basketball team were derided for draping themselves in American flags after a victory).

With Nike rooting them on, the American women’s World Cup team spent much of the tournament drawing attention to themselves. Rapinoe kneels during the National Anthem. President Trump kindly invites the team to the White House before knowing if it would win a fourth Cup, and Rapinoe responds, “I’m not going to the f—ing White House”. They spend inordinate time talking, not about soccer strategy, but about how unfair it is they are not paid as much as U.S. men when they qualify for the national team, ignoring basic economics.

But instead of suggesting these unhappy campers tone it down, publications such anti-USA Today continued to applaud their self-absorption.

“(It was) a group that confronted the issues that have roiled our society – gender equity, sexism, what we stand for as a country – head on, making sure these much-needed conversations keep going,” wrote cheerleading Nancy Armour.

“Eventually, (Rapinoe) will endorse someone in the Democratic presidential race,” Christine Brennan wrote, nearly short-circuiting her keyboard with torrents of saliva. “Rapinoe is going to become as a big a person in our culture as she wants to be.”

More than likely, she will become a footnote by next week. Always happens. But should she venture into the political arena, how will Rapinoe explain post-victory video capturing her shoving away an American flag, leaving it on the pitch and partially trampling it as she and two teammates performed an obnoxious routine that might have been choreographed by street thugs?

It’s a good guess she’ll never be asked for an explanation. And it’s an even better guess that the revulsion Nike customers feel toward the Ross flag some day will be directed toward our modern day stars and bars. We’ve already seen Kaepernick’s kneeling replaced by violence in our streets by America hating, Trump loathing marchers and rioters. “Our media and popular culture institutions portray love of country as inherently racist and xenophobic,” writes Jarrett Stepman for The Daily Signal.

If the American flag, and by extension a secure and prosperous America, are the next targets in the left’s war on all things sacred, let us pray that the sadness filling our hearts quickly will engender in us the courage of our founders to draw battle lines and defend our freedom. We are, as Ronald Reagan warned, but one generation removed from losing it.

The good fight

By Steve Woodward

“I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.”

Among the most beautiful, meaningful sentiments ever recorded, it is found in the Holy Bible, in Second Timothy. Who would not wish to express this emotion at journey’s end?

Michael Whatley and Miriam Chu have finished the race. They’ve kept the faith. The newly elected North Carolina Republican Party Chairman and Vice Chairman most certainly fought a good and fair fight. Now, we begin, together, the next race. Because there always is the next race.

Sausage making is unpleasant. But in the end you have sausage. After an arduous weekend in Concord, not far from a famous speedway where all of the turns go left, the NC GOP righted itself, hopefully, in preparation for the 2020 election cycle.

The stars of convention weekend in Concord’s poorly ventilated convention center were the delegates, 1,368 in total (40 from Moore County). The convention chair, a man who, empowered with a microphone and a gavel, continuously beckoned us to be silent, to be “in order”, to “suspend” (a nice word for shut up), orchestrated a 12-hour day on June 8. It felt like a nonstop flight in coach in the back of a jumbo jet from New York to Johannesburg, South Africa, except with even worse food options.

But it was worth it, I kept telling myself after the convention ran over its scheduled conclusion by 190 minutes, because we landed safely and have reason to be inspired and more optimistic than we’ve been in recent months.

Whatley, who defeated Lee County GOP chairman Jim Womack by a narrow margin with 50.78% of the weighted vote, is well connected within the national Republican party and was instrumental in coordinating Donald Trump’s 2015-16 ground game in North Carolina. Whatley, in his first political race as a candidate, ran for state chair promising to bring about a “reset in Raleigh”. What remains to be seen if he will become familiar enough with the road to Raleigh.

Womack, a former Lee County commissioner, IT sales executive and active duty military serviceman, legitimately argued during the campaign that he was prepared to be a full-time state party chairman at a time when that level of focus is needed. Womack is retired; Whatley is a 12-year partner in HBW Resources, for which he is a government lobbyist in the transportation and energy sectors. He resides in Gastonia, NC, 184 miles by car from the State Capitol, but insists his fellow HBW partners are willing to give him flexibility to chair the party. But Whatley is not retired and has not suggested he is contemplating it.

Political observer and prolific blogger Brant Clifton sizes him up thusly: “Whatley’s experience has been in influence peddling and greasing politicians’ palms. That appears to clearly be what’s most important among the power players in the NCGOP. And it’s the same preoccupation that spawned the environment that led to those five federal indictments on April 2” (and the resignation of former party chair Robin Hayes).

Misgivings about Whatley immediately diminished, however, when Moore County’s political force of nature, Miriam Chu, was narrowly elected vice chair. Everyone who knows Chu knows she does nothing half way or in her spare time because she has none. She is resolute and resilient. Chu reports she traveled 12,000 miles campaigning for the job. What was not mentioned is that much of her traveling took place while she wore a medical “boot” on her left leg.

Chu plans to be a full-time vice chair and, in the lead up to election night, articulated that she sees herself becoming “the liaison between the Chairman and other officers and organizations across the state.”

Speaking Monday before the Moore County Republican Women’s Club, Chu expressed confidence that she and Whatley are ready to move the party into a position of strength as the 2020 election cycle approaches.

Despite a recent party leadership void, elected Republican lawmakers have kept the state on a robust course economically. In Concord, Sen. Paul Newton (NC-36), co-chairman of the N.C. Senate finance committee, reported that this is the fifth consecutive year that our state has experienced a revenue surplus. The 2019 surplus is around $643 million. Meanwhile, the state’s “rainy day” fund has topped $1.1 billion. Newton said consecutive pay raises for public school teachers — a group Democrats always portray as neglected — have resulted in real money piling up for veteran educators. Today, a teacher on track to work for 30 years in the classroom will realize an additional $237,000 in pay as a result of continuous annual raises over the course that career.

The convention also heard from “Right Dan” Bishop, who will square off with his Democrat opponent in a special election for U.S. House in NC-9 in three months. Numerous convention speakers urged state residents outside of NC-9 to donate and volunteer to propel Bishop to victory. A May 24 poll by JMC Analytics and Polling found Bishop leading Democrat Dan McCready 46% to 42%. Notably, 10% weighed in as undecided.

Keep the faith.

Land of the Freebie?

By Steve Woodward

For most Americans it is taken for granted that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now it turns out that a new generation of Socialists disguised as Democrats envision a land where everything is free and bravery is the weapon of choice if you dare oppose them.

These same people who say they want to give us everything are, ironically, not the least bit interested in freedoms embraced by our nation’s founders. They want to strip us of self-reliance and independence in the very moment they hand over the keys to everything they say we need — and only a ruling elite class knows what that is.

The elites calculate that once they secure a vast pool of entitlement addicts, citizens and border runners alike, by doling out free education, free healthcare, and student loan forgiveness (a free diploma), and by making our nation gun-free, religion-free and speech-restricted, their power will expand and endure.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recently expressed his belief that Americans of all ages must be stirred by the aspirational underpinnings of a free society (ours) rather than enslaved by a permanent entitlement state.

“When progressives promise government will pay for health care and college,” Jindal wrote, “they are really saying government will run medicine and higher education. Medicare for All explicitly calls for the abolition of private health insurance.”

If today’s students were allowed to think critically and possessed even a shred of familiarity with recent American history, they might already have concluded that entitlement addiction will never allow them to fulfill their potential or, for that matter, succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Historian and author Shelby Steele asserts that Martin Luther King Jr. pursued freedom, not justice, but his legacy has been ignored by the left and it’s obsession with racial inequality, which meant blacks and other minorities were viewed as “victims who had to be socially engineered into equality.”

Steele is the author of Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country. The book’s title is self-explanatory, and Steele, a black scholar and expert on race relations, speaks with authority when he observes that minorities in the 21st century “suffer from underdevelopment, not racism. And, here, at last, is conservatism’s great opportunity.”

Empowering citizens makes so much sense, and is so embedded in America’s psyche, that you even can find Democrats who agree wth Jindal and Steele. Notably, Democrat policy wonk Ted Van Dyk, writing for the Journal on May 31.

In a piece entitled, “How Democrats Can Avoid Losing”, he laid out a scathing rebuke of the runaway freight train that is the far left Democrat party in 2019. Van Dyk makes the outrageous (and very obvious) observation that dismantling Confederate monuments does nothing toward addressing the “plight of black Americans in inner cities.” With black and Hispanic unemployment at historically low levels, the left, with typical media complicity, obsesses on “identity politics based on victimhood,” he laments.

As for promising a list of “free stuff”, Van Dyk correctly notes that these freebies are “out of line with most Americans’ core values.” Think about the millions of blue-collar laborers, lifelong union members and reliable Democrats who are proud of what they earned, or thrilled to have saved and paid for a child or grandchild to earn a college degree. Would they support free tuition and loan forgiveness? Not a chance. Intolerance of snowflakes seems inherently non-partisan.

“Why not go back to that perpetually workable thing,” writes Steele, “the American dream?”

AOC for bartender

By Steve Woodward

Democrat Presidential aspirant Joe Biden is channeling Margaret Thatcher from her grave, apparently. He says the former British Prime Minister is lamenting the United States in the age of Donald Trump. He meant to reference Theresa May, the very alive Prime Minister who probably could use an overaggressive Biden hug about now.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking to social media to explain that she is horrified by the food waste disposer in her apartment (never seen one, she says), and mystified by produce growing out of the dirt in a garden. She is, famously, an ex-bartender and gives this profession a bad name.

Electronic surveillance is not the same as spying, claims former FBI Director James Comey. But, either way, he and current FBI Director Christopher Wray express no regrets or even acknowledge that high ranking FBI personnel weaponized the Bureau in an attempt to bring down Trump’s campaign. Spying or not, scandalous.

Hillary Clinton is out on the irrelevance circuit proclaiming that the 2016 presidential election was “stolen” from her. She should have her irony meter inspected. Three years on, it is clear that Clinton’s campaign hired the opposition research firm that would aid and abet an effort to rig the election — in her favor, not Trump’s.

China is practically begging for an all-out trade war. Iran is rattling its sabers in the Middle East, targeting U.S. forces. Hamas terrorists are bombing Israel with renewed fervor. Christianity is under persecution to such a universal degree that one expert says Christians find themselves facing genocide across the globe.

But what is making headlines in the fully compliant left wing media? Outrage over President Trump presenting golf legend Tiger Woods with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barack Obama presented it to Biden, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey, but that was just fine.

Meanwhile, with a few exceptions by select media outlets committing inadvertent acts of journalism, reporting on the U.S. economy as the marvel of the world (even China, if its leaders had an honest bone) and a work force partying like it’s 1969, is barely a blip on mainstream media’s radar. The MSM is all over Attorney General William Barr, who released the long awaited Mueller Report but somehow is to be charged with contempt of Congress. Any red-blooded American would freely admit being contemptuous of these frauds.

If the economy remains on its current trajectory, Biden will be asking to have Thatcher exhumed, and AOC will place her quivering hand into her food disposal (because she doesn’t know any better) when it’s in the “on” position. Against this backdrop of inside-the-Beltway hysteria, consider that:

The unemployment rate last was at 3.6% when Richard Nixon was beginning his first term as President in 1969. It is 3.6% in 2019.
Wage growth, which negates Democrats’ calls for national hourly minimum wages of $15+, hit 3.2% in April, the ninth consecutive month of wage growth north of 3%. In other words, inspired laborers will be blowing past $15/hour, if they have not already.
The last time unemployment among women was at 3.4%, Dwight Eisenhower was President (1953).

That’s good news for Ocasio-Cortez. When she loses in 2020, bartending jobs will be plentiful. Or, in this land of prosperity, she could try her hand at food waste disposal sales.