As usual, these stories don’t fit the media’s “Republicans bad, Democrats good” narrative. I am doing longer quotes of fewer articles this week, as I am overseas for most of this month. Let’s get started.

1. Well, lookie here! Despite the endlessly-repeated Democrat/media narrative to the contrary, I guess Ukraine just isn’t only about the Bidens after all.

Given all the focus on nefarious Russia, you could be forgiven for missing the fact that Ukraine was always at the center of the Trump-Russia affair. Viewed in this light, the Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo bribery narrative must compete with another explanation: Trump’s determination to get to the bottom of an underhanded years-long campaign arrayed against him. One of the first things he did after the Mueller report debunked the collusion narrative was to call the Ukranian president and ask him to help do just that.

The impeachment battle is not just about congressional probes and alleged presidential strong-arming, but about the Russiagate narrative. Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election. Although the details are different – no mention this time of hookers and golden showers – the whistleblower’s central claim closely resembles the thesis laid out in the anti-Trump dossier compiled by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which the FBI used as its roadmap to collusion: That Trump took or solicited dirt on his Democratic opponent from a foreign power in exchange for favors to that country’s government.

Once again, much of the media seem to be treating every allegation against Trump as probable fact, while dismissing any questions and concerns as conspiracy theories. The Ukraine story starts no later than March 2016, when Democratic Party operative and Ukrainian-American activist Alexandra Chalupa approached the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington for information on the Trump campaign. Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington told [John] Solomon that Chalupa wanted to approach a member of Congress to initiate hearings on Manafort or arrange

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for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s alleged Kremlin ties. Keep that in mind when Democrats and their media allies routinely suggest it is treasonous to seek foreign aid during an election. In a three-day period at the end of April 2016, for instance, Slate, the Washington Post and Guardian all published articles alleging that Manafort’s work for Yanukovych showed the Trump team was close to Russia.

This is another reminder of the double-standard that has driven so much media coverage: the eagerness to buy Clinton’s spin on Manafort and then connect Trump to it all while dismissing Biden’s clear conflicts. In driving the whistleblower chapter of the Russiagate operation, Schiff reprised the part he played in its earlier chapters. For nearly two years the California congressman filled the media with claims there was more than circumstantial evidence of collusion that would bring down the president.

[T]he subject matter, Trump’s “promise” to a foreign official, was leaked for a Sept. 18 Washington Post story including the bylines of Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, two of the reporters who in February 2017 received a seminal leak in the Trump-Russia case, regarding a conversation between Trump’s erstwhile national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The same political operatives and journalists appear throughout the anti-Trump operation, as do the same themes and even the same language.

It was logical that Trump, and millions of other Americans, wanted to know the origins of the Russia probe and that the investigative work would be taken up by the Department of Justice. Since DoJ and FBI officials at the highest levels were implicated, it was natural that the attorney general himself would have a hand in the investigation. Thus, the panicked clamor coursing through the press at present is not about Joe Biden or his son or Trump’s alleged commerce with foreign powers. Rather, it is the fear that the Russiagate bubble is likely to burst. And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin.

Read the rest of this great article here. It’s about protecting the seditious conspiracy, folks, and the Democrats will do anything to prevent that coming to light.

2. Let’s look at the decision to get out of Syria. It’s not the way the globalists are spinning it. Here’s some far better analysis to consider:

So which is it: is the President endangering the United States and our allies by pulling out of Syria? Betraying our allies, the Kurds? Or is he defending America’s national interest? I have spent a lot of time with the Kurds on the ground, especially in northern Iraq, along the Iranian border. I have also met with Kurdish peshmerga generals in Iraq, as well as the overall Iraqi commander, in charge of the fight against ISIS in Mosul. That battle is over. And contrary to how MSNBC has been misquoting Sen. Lindsay Graham all day, the United States has indeed utterly defeated the ISIS caliphate.

[Trump] looks at the administration of George W. Bush and the war with Iraq, and sees the hand of deep state agents there as well. And guess what? He’s right. I wrote a book about that in 2007. It’s called Shadow Warriors, [detailing] how a cabal of Bush-hating, pro-Democrat State Department weenies and intelligence community weasels conspired to feed false intelligence on Iraqi WMD to the Bush White House, and then blasted Bush 43 for waging a “war for oil.”

The President also argues that the Middle East wars the deep state wants us to fight are primarily tribal in nature. He’s right there as well, up to a point. Turkey will continue to whack the Kurds for as long as one Kurd remains breathing who demands his freedom and ethnic identity. The Iranians will continue to wage war against the Saudis until they have toppled the Saudi monarchy, a prospect that is becoming increasingly likely.

[I]n the World According to Trump, America wins when we have a powerful military, sitting at home, rested and well-armed, ready to fight if we ever face a serious national security challenge. Think of this: today, the U.S. Navy is defending our interests overseas with just two aircraft carrier groups: the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is prowling the seas off Oman and Iran, and the USS Ronald Reagan, patrolling the South China Sea. The five other active-duty carriers are currently sitting in their home ports so their crews can prepare for future operations. Another four are in dry dock getting refurbished, and two more are under construction. I don’t know of any other period in recent history when our military has done so much to defend our national interests with so few forces deployed around the world. And that is the world according to Trump.

Read the rest here. Bottom line: it makes perfect sense to pull out of Syria, and President Trump’s instincts in that regard are correct.

3. Our cultural institutions are kowtowing to China.

America’s elite institutions are catering to communist China. The NBA provided the latest example Sunday night, when league commissioner Adam Silver apologized for Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Rockets star James Harden followed suit and apologized to China for Morey’s tweets. China Daily, the communist government’s propaganda arm, used the NBA’s conciliatory reaction to warn other companies to learn “a lesson: The big Chinese market is open to the world, but those who challenge China’s core interests and hurt Chinese people’s feelings cannot make any profit from it.”

The NBA isn’t alone in bowing to communist China. American universities have allowed the Chinese government to fund centers called Confucius Institutes that provide the communist regime with avenues to infuse pro-China propaganda into American academia. Eighty-nine Confucius Institutes were operating in the U.S. as of September 2019, according to the National Association of Scholars. Hollywood has self-censored for years in order to ensure access to the Chinese market. The U.S. government published a report in 2015 detailing how filmmakers tailor their messaging to appease Chinese audiences and—more importantly—Chinese government censors.

Read the rest here. Follow the money, folks, follow the money; it explains EVERYTHING with respect to China. The sad part about it is that the US trade deficit with China is a large source of the money that our cultural institutions are chasing – and for which they’re selling their souls.

4, The Left are evil, and this article proves it:

“Save the Planet, Eat the Children,” reads a T-shirt at a congresswoman’s townhall. Meanwhile, a teenager skipping school and in obvious emotional distress makes the Nobel Peace Prize shortlist for berating world leaders about a supposedly looming mass extinction. The most privileged generation in human history — enjoying the longest, healthiest, wealthiest, and most comfortable lives men and women have ever lived — thinks the world is collapsing around us.

By nearly every measurement, from child mortality and life expectancy to poverty and education, quality of life around the globe is better than it’s ever been. In much of the world, subsistence living is a thing of the past and humanity is flourishing — especially those with ready access to electricity. The Industrial Revolution, when an unprecedented boom of technological innovation transformed agrarian America into the nation we know today, wasn’t just a time of economic change and scientific progress. It propelled humanity to the most prosperous time in our history.

For all the environmentalist movement’s hand-wringing, you’d think our extinction was scheduled to commence tomorrow. But despite the wildly popular and equally wildly misinterpreted trope that all scientists agree the world is ending, there is no concrete evidence right now to suggest climate change will be anything but mild and manageable, or that we won’t be able to handle it. Humans are becoming more resilient to mild changes in average temperature. Migration trends show Americans are readily moving to warmer states. Even more crucially, deaths due to climate-related natural disasters have declined by a providential 98.9%. That is thanks to our modern-day technology, which allows meteorologists to more accurately predict storm patterns and near-instant communication keeping the public better informed and prepared. It’s the reason the Great Galveston Storm of 1900 claimed more 8,000 lives, but a recent storm of similar magnitude on the Texas coast — Hurricane Harvey — killed just 68. We can and should work to improve disaster readiness, but we should do so without the fear-mongering.

Yet climate change hysteria is plaguing an entire generation with a crippling fear of the future. Not only is foisting this burden on today’s children and young adults unhealthy— it’s simply unfair to limit the younger generation’s potential to contribute to the innovations that will drive the future. Young leaders should be empowered to pursue their passions and encouraged to experiment with new solutions, just as the greatest innovators of the past have done.

Read the rest here. The Left’s use of children to advance their political agenda here is simply child abuse. What does that say about their parents?

5. This article is absolutely correct that it’s scary! There are SO many active and retired military with whom this resonates completely.

Donald Trump came into office promising to not start any new wars and to get us out of the old ones our feckless elite had dragged us into, and now that he’s doing it in Syria the usual suspects are outraged. How dare he actually deliver on his promise not to have any more of our precious warriors shipped home in boxes after getting killed on battlefields we can’t even pronounce, while refereeing conflicts that began long before America was a thing, in campaigns without any kind of coherent objective?

Conservatives like me still think of ourselves as hawks, but after hard experience we have learned to be hawkish only where America’s interests are directly at stake. We’re not doves. We’re just not going to spill our troops’ blood when we do not absolutely have to. The elite may not like our attitude, but then it’s generally not the elite that ends up having to bury its sons, daughters, husbands and wives. We do. We have our own national interests to protect. The threat to America is not Turks imposing a security zone a few miles inside Syria. It’s China pumping out a couple warships a month and deploying new carrier-killing missiles using tech they steal from us under the noses of our politically preoccupied FBI and CIA.

If the president’s critics in Congress really want to be tough guys, let them pass a declaration of war and let them sign their names to the butcher’s bill instead of trying to get Trump to walk out to the end of the branch so they can saw it off. Let’s be clear – and I need to be crystal clear because the gung ho gang’s MO is to mischaracterize its opponents’ views to distract from the strategic bankruptcy of its own – that fighting for the Kurds would not be immoral. It’s a good cause, but we can’t intervene every time there’s a good cause. Iraq was a good cause, and a disaster. I’d come back on active duty, if the Army was that desperate, and serve there proudly. Our troops will do everything we ask of them and more. They will lay down their lives for this cause if we send them.

And that’s the point. How many dead Americans is it worth to stop the Turks and Kurds from brawling? I, and our president, say, “Exactly none.” Those who disagree owe us all an exact number of their own.

Read the rest here. The bottom line? President Trump is right yet again; he ALWAYS has Americans’ best interests in mind and is continuing to clean up the messes of prior administrations (especially Obama’s!). And he really brought home the human impact of foreign wars on an individual level during his Minneapolis rally, didn’t he?

6. Here’s how we got into the current IC “whistleblower” predicament – yet another offense to be laid directly at the foot of Obama, as it turns out! This is a phenomenal must-read article:

A whistleblower exposes structural waste, mismanagement and abuse within the civil service, among government contractors and in varied ways within the private sector. This is meant to protect employees who blow the whistle on misbehavior, not to serve as cover for assorted political agendas. In the Trump era, whistleblowing and partisan leaks to the media have been conflated by the media. Partisan government workers, some openly aligning with the “resistance” and participating in partisan groups within government agencies, have sought to undermine administration policies through leaks. These leaks were in turn meant to generate congressional investigations of cabinet officials. The impeachment effort against President Trump takes that ongoing tactic to the ultimate extreme.

The politicization of the civil service is a deeply troubling phenomenon. Efforts by members of the civil service to undermine elected officials is a threat to our entire system of representative government. This problem goes beyond the ‘Deep State’ and has shown up in a wide variety of government agencies. But its appearance in national security agencies is deeply troubling because these agencies have the infrastructure to act as a police state. The existence of national security agencies in a free country is contingent on their subservience to elected officials. Anything else isn’t whistleblowing, it’s a coup.

Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 opened the door by expanding whistleblowing protection to members of the “intelligence community” and other personnel handling classified information. But PPD19 was never really meant to help the likes of Manning and Snowden. Instead it was part of a larger pattern of politicizing national security organizations that led directly to the current crisis. Both the Russians and the Democrats understood that whistleblowers were a strategic vulnerability. Whistleblowers were seen as sympathetic underdogs who were trying to do the right thing. That was the perfect camouflage for an enemy agent or the agent of a police state. Astroturfing, the practice of manufacturing grass roots efforts and building causes around individual protesters, like Greta Thunberg or David Hogg, had moved into the national security infrastructure before going off like a bomb.

The real purpose of PPD19 was to aid Obama loyalists is undermining a Romney administration. The Obama administration would not have been too worried about Romney reversing its social policies. But Romney had run sharply against Obama on national security. And Obama’s cronies knew that there would be significant foreign policy differences there. PPD19 may have been their answer. Romney lost. PPD19 remained obscure.

By the time Trump won, the weaponization of the national security infrastructure in national politics was complete with national security organs spying on Trump associates, investigating his campaign, entrapping his associates, leaking his phone calls, and now setting the stage for impeachment. Whistleblowing protections are meant to protect government employees in the civil service from retaliation by their supervisors in the civil service when they report waste or abuse. They are not meant to allow an anonymous government employee to assist in a partisan campaign to remove the President of the United States as part of a ploy orchestrated by the opposition party. That is a breathtaking abuse that will damage whistleblower protections indefinitely. The Obama administration and its allies have tried to turn government agencies into bear traps, seeking to retain control of policymaking a network of lefty loyalists in agencies and activist judges in the courts, and, beyond that, to force out Trump appointees and to even force out President Trump.

At the heart of this crisis is the conflict between representative government and the infrastructure of government, between the will of the voters and the will of D.C., between the taxpayers and officials, that is the breaking point of any free country. Some countries lose their freedom through violent revolutions. Others ossify into an oligarchy of government officials and elites who call all the shots.

Read the rest here. More of the time bombs left by the miserable Obama to defuse at what cost to the country! His goal was always to destroy the US in all ways, and this whistleblower business undermines the people’s faith in their government just as he planned. That people still think highly of him and his administration is appalling.

7. This one is great! US Attorney John Durham’s investigation has been expanded due to the evidence collected so far.

John Durham, the U.S. attorney reviewing the origins of the 2016 counterintelligence investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, is probing a wider timeline than previously known, according to multiple senior administration officials. [B]ased on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, the senior administration officials said. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel.

Attorney General Bill Barr and Durham traveled to Italy recently to talk to law enforcement officials there about the probe and have also had conversations with officials in the U.K. and Australia about the investigation, according to multiple sources familiar with the meetings. Democrats increasingly have targeted Barr. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said … that Barr has “gone rogue,” alleging an attempted “cover-up” of the whistleblower complaint that has led to a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

Read the rest here. This is excellent! You know that US Attorney Durham is “over the target” when Democrats like San Fran Nan concoct excuses to go after AG Barr and are trying to spin the investigation into something that is entirely politically motivated. Weren’t they the ones supposedly the most concerned about “foreign influence in US elections”?

8. And we’ll finish up this week’s summary with this item that continues the unraveling of the Democrats’ Ukraine hit-job against POTUS:

The intel community inspector general testified Friday to congressional investigators that the so-called “whistleblower” who mischaracterized President Trump’s call with the leader of Ukraine had a previous “professional relationship” with a 2020 Democrat candidate. “The IG said [the whistleblower] worked or had some type of professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates,” one person with knowledge of inspector general Michael Atkinson’s testimony told the Examiner’s Byron York.

In another conversation with York, a second source revealed: “What [Atkinson] said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.”

Read the rest here. Every day there’s something new that chips away at the Democrats’ Ukraine narrative. There are a bunch of them who have some really tight sphincters now, especially those complicit in Crowdstrike and Burisma Holdings shenanigans.

Honorable mentions for this week include:

Here is the short summary of this week’s news items:

Ukraine isn’t about the Bidens’ corruption per se; it’s about corruption in general, as well as Democrat collusion with a foreign power during the 2016 election cycle.

POTUS made a deal with Turkey to pull the US out of northern Syria, and the usual suspects are unhinged about it.

American institutions continue to kowtow to the ChiComs. It’s all about the money!

The Left’s use of children to further their climate alarmist hoax(es) is criminal.

Kurt Schlichter provides the perfect rationale for getting out of northern Syria.

How we got into the current whistleblower kerfuffle is explained by Daniel Greenfield – yet another disaster laid at the feet of the Obama regime.

US Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the counter-intel investigation of the Trump campaign has been expanded into the spring of 2017 timeframe due to evidence collected to date.

Lastly, we learned that the Ukraine “whistleblower” (better known as a leaker) had a “professional relationship” (i.e., was in a paid position) with a 2020 Democrat presidential candidate!

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the impression that we’re really close to the dam breaking on investigations and indictments of major cabal figures. The legacy media and Democrats are making insane comments, and their violent arm (Antifa) were acting up again – this time in Minneapolis. The Barr/Durham investigation into the origins of the 2016 counter-intel investigation is flushing out the rats. Blowing the lid off Crowdstrike and Ukraine will destroy the Democrats (and some Uniparty Republicans, as well). Also note the apoplectic response of Uniparty figures to POTUS’s decision to withdraw from Turkey. No more gravy train of “nation-building” and arms-trading corruption for them! And how about Shifty’s unforced error in which he claimed the Ukraine “whistleblower” was receiving death threats (pretty difficult for an anonymous guy to get a death threat!). And it now appears that the Ukraine leaker/”whistleblower” was linked to Joe Biden.

There’s a lot more coming in the weeks ahead, especially the Barr/Durham investigation report and the DoJ OIG report on FISA abuse. And DECLAS is the trump card (pun intended). Stay tuned….

The end.