For about a week now we have been watching the Winter Olympics from Korea.  The Games started with the same formulaic and boring Opening Ceremonies.  I’m sorry, and I confess to watching some of it, but unless they tell you which Olympic parade of nations you’re watching, it’s hard to tell one from another.  This year’s ceremonies were a bit different though.  The International Olympic Committee banned a Russian team from competing in these Olympics.  It seems that, 4 years ago in Sochi, the Russians built a building directly next door to the building to be used as the Lab that would test the athletes’ urine samples to ensure that they were not cheating.  In the spirit of international sportsmanship, the Russians cut a hole into the Lab and used it to replace “dirty” Russian urine samples with “clean” samples.  They got caught, and the Russian Team was banned from these Olympics.  That means no Russians will be at these Games, right?  Wrong!  Athletes who pass a real test can still compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR).  Just no Russian flag or anthem.  Big deal.  The decision of Kim Jong Un to permit North Koreans to march in with South Koreans as one team got a lot of attention.  I guess if a South Korean wins a medal, Kim can take credit for it.  It’s just for 2 weeks, though, when the Games end, they’ll be at each others throats again.  I was really hoping they would use one of Rocket Man’s missiles to light the Olympic flame.  Too bad.  Anyhow, the Games grind on.  There are hours of TV coverage every day, and I continue to be drawn to it, but the real question is “Why?”  These Winter Olympics sports all tend to blend together, and frankly, some of them are strange.  The ancient Olympics in Greece had nothing to do with snow and ice.  There were a small number of events:  boxing, equestrian events, chariot racing, riding, pankration, pentathlon, discus, javelin, jumping, running, and wrestling.  What in the world is pankration, you may ask?  It was sort of like ancient Ultimate Fighting.  Biting and eye gouging were not permitted, but belly kicking was O.K.  The most popular sport for television is figure skating, because every female in America wants to spin around fast and then get jewelry.  I can’t take it anymore.  In the old days the only times we saw these winter sports was about once a year on Saturday afternoon on Wide World of Sports, or every 4 years in the Olympics.  Today, there’s a televised figure skating competition almost every week.  Enough already.  Every one of these skaters is a tightly wound head case, and I simply don’t care if they get marked down for landing their triple Lindy on the wrong side of the skate blade. It’s tedious.  I’d rather watch the Sumo wrestler figure skater from the Geico commercial, or have a pairs competition where they have to lift fat women over their heads.  Then we have skiing, of all descriptions.  It doesn’t matter, we’ll watch just about anything.  Skiing straight down the hill, skiing side to side through poles, skiing over bumps and doing flips.  Then there’s cross-country skiing.  We sit for hours watching people ski in circles, uphill, and every few minutes they whip out a rifle and shoot stuff, which is really the best part.  (If the figure skaters had to dodge gunfire, that would be a sport).  Another popular TV sport is snowboarding. It is fun to watch, but basically, they are handing out medals to teenagers for doing tricks which, if done on a skateboard in your driveway, would cause you to yell, “Get off my property!”  Sledding is big too.  Every man would love to drive a bobsled (push it and jump in the back, not so much).  At least the bobsled gives you some protection.  To ride a luge down the track, however, is something else again.  I’ve been to Lake Placid and seen the luge track.  The walls on the turns are straight up and down.  These people hurtle down the track at over 80 MPH, through 180 degree turns, and can’t see where they are going.  I take nothing away from these fearless athletes, but the difference between 1st and 15th place is less than a second.  I think you could send a 150 pound sandbag down the track on a luge and still get honorable mention.  Moving from the fearless to the absolutely nuts, another popular sport is ski jumping.  In Lake Placid, I took the chair lift up to the top of the 120 meter jumping tower.  Whew!  Anybody who skis off that thing into the air, flies hundreds of feet and survives the fall, deserves a medal.  For comic relief, we have curling.  I don’t know who came up with this one, but it’s sort of a combination of shuffleboard, bocci ball, beer pong, and Spring cleaning.  One player slides a polished rock with a handle down the ice, while the others use brooms to sweep in front of it, coaxing the rock into scoring position.  It looks easy.  It’s not.  A number of years ago, my daughter and I attended an open house event at the Plainfield Curling Club here in New Jersey.  These are serious competitors.  We got to try it, and it’s not as easy as it looks.  Think sliding the rock is the easy part.  Think again.  I tried to do it.  Just put one knee down and slide it … crash, I keeled over onto the ice.  My daughter was much better at it.  You have to admire the dedication of these athletes, and we’ll keep watching whatever comes on next, despite the predictable NBC coverage.  If they broadcast only the competitions, and left out coverage of personal tragedy – “He (she or it) is skating (skiing, sliding, curling) with a heavy heart,” they could cut out about an hour a night.  Bottom line, I’m tired of it already, but what’s coming up tonight?

Every day brings new and increasingly shocking revelations about the lengths, and depths, to which the Justice Dept. and FBI went to subvert the 2016 election.  We are told that only about 20% of the sad story has been publicly revealed, and frankly, that 20% is bad enough.  It now is abundantly clear that the Obama FBI, Justice Dept., and we are now learning, State Dept., conspired (yes, that is the word), to conduct electronic surveillance on the Trump campaign and on the Trump administration.  Much of the details emerged from the release of the thousands of text messages between adulterous FBI paramours Peter Strozk and Lisa Page.  These two crazy kids exchanged some 50,000 texts (it’s a wonder they did any work), about the plan to keep Donald Trump from being elected President.  The texts show that there was pressure to end the Hillary Clinton email server “investigation” when Ted Cruz dropped out of the race in May 2016.  James Comey announced that Hillary would not be prosecuted in July 2016, but we now know that the FBI drafted the exoneration memo in May, the same time that the FBI felt “pressure.”  Then there was the wiretapping.  Yes, children, Trump was right last March when he said he was wiretapped, because that’s what electronic surveillance means.  We’ve been through this before.  Hillary pays Fusion, GPS for the Steele dossier, containing lies about Trump, provided by Russian intelligence agents.  Nellie Ohr, of Fusion, gives it to her husband, Bruce, who just happens to be a high-ranking Justice Dept. official, and the dossier is used to get surveillance on Carter Page and Trump officials.  The surveillance goes on for about a year.  The dossier was pure fiction, but the Justice Dept. used it in the wiretap affidavit (that means they swore it was true) to the FISA court judge.  Recently fired FBI Deputy Director McCabe told Congress there would have been no wiretap without the phony dossier information.  It turns out the FBI didn’t corroborate any of the claims in the dossier. (That’s really hard to do when the claims are false).  The dossier came from the Clinton campaign.  Courts are not supposed to get involved in politics, so the Justice Dept. didn’t tell the Court it was a scandalous political hit piece. (No sense burdening the Court with the facts).  Christopher Steele told the FBI he hated Trump and wanted to prevent his election at all costs, but they didn’t tell the Court the source was biased, because had they done so, the Court would expect the FBI to fully corroborate the claims, and they couldn’t do that.  Then the FBI caught Steele leaking to Yahoo News.  The FBI was angry (leaking is their job), so they withheld Steele’s $50,000 payment and severed ties with him, but they didn’t tell the Court they no longer trusted their source.  Instead, McCabe, and Comey and Rosenstein kept signing renewals of the wiretaps.  That’s the same James Comey who in January 2017 told President Trump the dossier was “salacious and unverified,” but who signed an affidavit to the Court swearing that the information it contained was true.  Which leads us to the $64,000 question.  Why would the FBI, the Justice Dept. and the State Dept. do what they did?  Did the FBI just have a few bad actors who went rogue?  No.  The FBI has legal counsels and an Inspector General, and anyhow, the FBI answers to the Justice Dept., which has to approve what they do.  And who, pray tell, was running the Justice Dept. until January 20, 2017?  Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  And who did General Lynch work for?  The President, Il Duce Barack Obama.  Long ago, I wrote here, The Fish Stinks From the Head, and so it does.  None of the illegal activities undertaken by Justice and the FBI would have happened, or could have happened, unless Obama and Lynch approved them.  Barack Obama, who told us he was going to “fundamentally transform” the United States, did so by thoroughly corrupting our law enforcement and intelligence services.  Obama weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies to spy on a political opponent.  That happens in Russia and in banana republics.  Loretta Lynch has been laying low, relying on the fiction that she took no part in the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for obvious crimes.  Remember the June 2016 furtive meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton, at the Phoenix airport?  Lynch announced she would remove herself from the prosecution decision, leading to Comey’s July 2016 “no prosecution” statement.  It was a lie.  Lynch didn’t announce she removed herself to be ethical, she announced it because she got caught.  Had a reporter not seen Bill sneaking onto Loretta’s plane, she wasn’t about to make that meeting public.  The FBI doesn’t decide who gets prosecuted, Justice does that.  Comey told Congress he did not give Lynch advance notice of his “no prosecution” conclusion.  He didn’t have to.  One of the Strozk texts confirms that Lynch already knew.  Of course she did.  Comey said that Lynch told him not to call the Clinton investigation an “investigation,” but to instead call it “a matter.”  That’s because Lynch, and her boss, Il Duce Obama, well knew that there was never going to be a real investigation of Hillary Clinton.  That’s why Comey didn’t have to tell Lynch his decision in July.  The fix already was in.  And remember, that the exoneration memo was written in May 2016, before the Lynch-Bill Clinton meeting.  This sad story gets even sadder when the conspirators expanded their conspiracy to bring about the impeachment of Donald Trump.  In their minds, they had to do it.  If Hillary won, their crimes would never be disclosed.  She lost, and they were in jeopardy.  So Trump fires James Comey (a wiretap affiant) in June 2017.  Then, wiretap affiant Rod Rosenstein brings Comey’s good friend Bob Mueller to Trump to interview to replace Comey. (A perfect choice to ensure that FBI misconduct stayed a secret).  Trump wouldn’t appoint Mueller to be FBI Director.  So the very next day, Rosenstein appoints Mueller Independent Counsel to investigate Trump.  If they get away with this, none of us is safe.

They say that the best gauge of a person’s intelligence is how much he or she agrees with you.  If that’s true, then Shelby Steele is very smart.  Mr. Steele is an African-American author and columnist.  He stands out from the crowd because he is one of the few black commentators who consistently has rejected identity politics; the notion that African-Americans should find solace in group identity, and should rely upon diversity and victim status above individual achievement.  I often have mused that much of the race politics strife might be avoided if only we would declare all minorities free and equal.   Mr. Steele has written that, “the left causes people to sell themselves out to identity and all sorts of ideas and idealisms and so forth.  The left encourages them to take these multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, all these sorts of things, and identify with them and give themselves a self esteem based on these empty idealisms that have no connection to reality.  Leftism really retards development, as in human development.  The more you get stuck in them, the less you grow, the less you develop.”  He added selling blacks as victimized and entitled is the kiss of death that will hold them back.”  Recently, Mr. Steele authored an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Black Protest Has Lost Its Power.  In it, Mr. Steele argues that the NFL protests were sad and fruitless, and may represent the end of an era for black Americans.  As he sees it, the NFL kneel-down protests are a watershed moment because they point out the obvious differences from previous protests, which were a high calling that called for great sacrifice on the part of the protestors.  In the civil rights protests of the 1960’s, the protestors risked their safety, and their very lives, to end real injustices.  By contrast, the NFL protestors take no risks,  make no sacrifices, and are not speaking truth to power.  In Mr. Steele’s view, while the history of past protests made the NFL players’ actions unsurprising, the surprise was that the protests didn’t work.  He then made a statement that many might consider shocking in today’s perverted PC world, “The oppression of black people is over with.  We blacks are today a free people.”  By this, Mr. Steele by no means denies that pockets of racism exist.  He instead recognizes that, unlike in past times, racism is universally recognized as an immoral scourge.  He attributes the recent protests, not to racism, but instead to the shock of freedom, which requires self-reliance and an end to the excuse of oppression.  In his view, that explains the need to conjure up new supposed injustices such as “systemic racism,” and “white privilege.”  In Mr. Steele’s judgment, the accountability that necessarily accompanies freedom itself is seen as an injustice, which has led to the notion that it is suffering, poverty and under development that makes one “truly black.”  He argues that the Black Lives Matters group actually aspires to black victimization, which he labels an”abstract, fabricated oppression.”  Mr. Steele sees the reaction to the NFL protests to be a harbinger of change.  The protests didn’t win over white America, but instead fostered resentment.  There were counter-protests, and ticket sales and TV ratings suffered.  Mr. Steele predicts that this reaction may foretell a new fearlessness in white America to tell black people what they really think, instead of acting deferential to avoid a charge of racism.  He envisions a time in which white Americans will feel free to tell black Americans what they really think, “to judge blacks fairly by standards that are universal.”  I hope he’s right.  Equality necessarily entails viewing and treating all people in the same way and judging all by the same standard.  The politics of victimization prevents African-Americans from enjoying the the very equality to which they so long aspired, and directly frustrates the hope of Martin Luther King that African-Americans might be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  Amen to that.  So, forget about Oprah’s campaign.  Shelby Steele for President.

As Donald Trump’s first year as President came to a close, he celebrated by handing out Fake News Awards to media outlets that got just about everything about him and his Administration dead wrong.  Surprising no one, CNN topped the list.  On the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration, Chuck Schumer and his band of insufferable hypocrites managed to shut down the government (like that’s a bad thing), over the DACA plan.  That’s right.  The Democrats put the welfare of illegal aliens over that of American citizens.  The DACA deadline isn’t until March, and even then, the truth is that none of the 800,000 (or is it 3.6 million) illegals is going to find an ICE agent at his or her door if the deadline passes, but no matter.  Schumer and company are holding the military, veterans, and even the “children” they always claim to care about, hostage to DACA.  I guess the Dems only care about foreign kids.  Then, miracle of miracles, 3 days later, Schumer folded, ended the shutdown, got blamed for it, and pissed off the really extreme Dem base.  But I digress.  CNN, the Fake News Network, celebrated the one year anniversary by continuing to bash Trump.  I was in the gym, and thus was forced to see CNN on the TV, the only way I’ll watch it.  I think most of CNN’s viewership comes from people who are in a place, like an airport, where they can’t change the channel, but again, I digress.  CNN ran a banner for about 30 minutes announcing “TRUMP’S FIRST YEAR – INSULTED FRIENDS AND ADVERSARIES.”  When they got tired of that one, they changed the banner to “THOUSANDS MARCH TO PROTEST TRUMP.”  Fair and balanced, huh?  No wait, I guess that’s Fox.  CNN had nothing to say about the soaring stock market, where the DOW topped 26,000, and is up 32% since the election.  They said nothing about the lowest unemployment rate in years, including record low unemployment among women, blacks and Hispanics, the holy trinity of the Democrat Party.  They had nothing to say about the tax cuts, which have resulted in many companies already handing out bonuses and increasing pay for employees, or about Apple repatriating billions of dollars, investing $350 billion in America, hiring another 20,000 people and paying some $38 billion in additional tax.  No.  You see, the great economy comes from Obama, not from Trump.  The obligatory Democrats on FOX say that every night, like they believe it.  Some of them, and millions of deluded leftists actually do believe it.  Here’s how it worked.  Obama presided over the worst economic recovery in 75 years.  He never had 3% growth in any year, a dubious record for a President.  Wages were flat and millions of former workers just stopped looking for work.  But Obama cleverly timed things so that the stagnant economy he ran into the ground would blossom as soon as he was gone.  Uh huh.  The truth is that the economy expanded by more than 3% for the first time in years in 2017 because Obama finally was gone, not because of anything he did.  But Trump is hated.  When people are interviewed, and asked whether he should be credited with the economic boom, they say maybe, but “we don’t like his tone,” or “he Tweets too much.”  Tone and Tweet trumps accomplishments so far as Trump is concerned.  Lots of people mention the Tweet rate, but in fairness, can you blame him?  More than 90% of the coverage Trump gets in the media is negative, no matter what he does or says.  They give hours of coverage to the non-existent Trump-Russia collusion witch hunt, and no coverage to the ever-expanding evidence of Hillary-Russia collusion and Justice Department corruption.  Trump’s best chance to be heard is via his Tweets.  Well, he doesn’t act “presidential,” which I guess means that other presidents didn’t act the way Trump acts; he’s blunt, and he’s crude at times.  Two things about that.  First, Trump was elected precisely because he pulled no punches, and because he was able to connect with the common man.  The fact that he does make that connection with a group the Democrats thought they had sewed up, is why he’s President right now, and why the Dems hate him.  Secondly, while it’s true his inexperience and bluntness sometimes cause self-inflicted wounds, what did you expect.  Donald Trump is in a unique position as President.  He really is an outsider.  Every other President has had a former President to consult with when the going got tough.  Bill Clinton used to call Richard Nixon for advice late at night.  George W. Bush had his father.  (Obama had Bill Clinton, but he didn’t need advice from anybody, because he was a community organizer).  Apart from past Presidents, every other incoming Administration has had thousands of the Party faithful ready to step into jobs in the White House.  Donald Trump had none of that.  Obama and the Clintons are “the Resistance,” and it now turns out, were responsible for conducting domestic spying on the Trump campaign, and are actively working to have him impeached.  The Bushes hate Trump even more than Obama and Clinton, so no help is coming from them or their allies.  Under the circumstances, it’s a wonder that Trump has fared as well as he has in his first year.  If the Dems had any brains, they would help Trump succeed, share the prosperity, and tell voters they made their lives better.  Instead, their plan is simply to oppose Trump at all costs.  If they’ve miscalculated, it will cost them dearly.

The title of this week’s offering is in the Haitian Creole language.  It translates to “What is a shithole?”  It was inspired, of course, by last week’s immigration negotiation meetings at the White House.  One day, President Trump had all the major players together for a televised meeting, during which he laid out his requirements for a DACA deal, namely, secure the border, end chain migration, and end the visa lottery.   To recap, the reported 800,000 illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents were protected from deportation by an Obama Executive Order of questionable legality.  Trump gave Congress 6 months to work out a reform; hardly a novel notion, as immigration law is their job.  So Trump brought them all in, told them what he needed, and indicated he’d sign any bill they came up with.  The next day, the Democrats, plus Bob Corker and Lyndsay Graham (almost the same thing) proposed a plan that handed citizenship to the DACA “kids,”provided a pittance for a border wall, expanded chain migration and continued the lottery.  Not surprisingly, Trump rejected this insult, reportedly asking why the U.S. would want to continue taking in more people from shithole countries like Haiti and some African nations.  The Dems and the media predictably went nuts, calling Trump a racist who defamed nations like Haiti.  The problem is that truth is a defense.  In other words, you can only be defamed by false statements.  If Haiti really is a shithole, then Trump was right.  Let’s take a look at Haiti.  In 1788, there were 47,000 free people and 700,000 slaves in Haiti.  In 1792, the French colonial masters abolished slavery.  In 1800, the newly freed Haitians revolted against the French, and set up their own State.  In 1802, Napoleon tried to put down the revolution.  He sent 57,000 troops to Haiti.  But the Haitians won, because within months,  50,000 Frenchmen died of yellow fever.  The French gave up, presumably having concluded that Haiti was a shithole.  The U.S. profited however, as Haitian war losses led France to sell Louisiana to the U.S.  I’m not sure if we should thank the Haitians for that, or yellow fever.  In 1804, Haitian President Jean-Jacques Dessalines launched the First Empire, and declared himself Emperor for Life, which sounds a lot like Idi Amin, who later ran another shithole, Uganda.  Dessalines ordered the massacre of all whites who did not swear allegiance to him, but spared women who agreed to marry non-white men.  Thomas Jefferson and most of the world refused to recognize Haiti.  Things did not improve.  In 1809, nearly 10,000 refugees, knowing a shithole when they saw one, fled Haiti and settled en masse in New Orleans, doubling the city’s population.  Sound familiar?  In 1824, more than 6,000 African Americans migrated to Haiti.  Many quickly returned to the U.S., presumably preferring a slave nation to freedom in a Haitian shithole.  In 1825, the Haitian government promised the French 150 million francs, later reduced to 90 million, for independence.  It took Haiti 122 years to pay the bill.  The U.S. occupied Haiti for some years starting in 1915, after the assassination of Haiti’s president, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.  Apparently Haitians were upset by Sam’s habit of killing political prisoners.  The Duvaliers, brutal dictators, ran Haiti from 1957 to 1986, during which time they killed more than 60,000 Haitians and stole $500 million.  When a country robs, starves and murders its own people, it’s probably a shithole.  In the 1990’s, Jean-Bertrand Aristede staged a coup and took over the government.  He later fled the country, after a revolt in Northern Haiti.  When your elected leaders flee their own country, it’s probably a shithole.  But how about the weather?  Housing is so deficient in Haiti that lives are at risk whenever there’s a storm.  If thousands die and tens of thousands are left homeless every time it rains hard, it’s probably a shithole.  The 2010 earthquake left 300,000 Haitians dead, and 1.6 million homeless.  How’s the infrastructure doing years later?  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessed the damage from the quake and found that many of the roads aren’t any worse than they were before, because they never were any good.  If a massive earthquake couldn’t make the roads worse, it’s probably a shithole.  What about the Haitian people?  Well, they are largely uneducated, and unskilled.  More than 40% of them are unemployed.  The International Red Cross reports that seven out of ten Haitians live on less than $2 a day.  It is one of the poorest, and by far, the most corrupt nation on Earth.  If it’s the poorest and the most corrupt, it’s probably a shithole.  The commune of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince has been called “the most dangerous place on Earth” by the United Nations.  If even the U.N. calls it that, it’s probably a shithole.  Not that the U.N. has been much help.  The massive cholera outbreak, that killed 10,000 Haitians, reportedly was caused when cholera-infected waste from a U.N. peacekeeping station contaminated the country’s main river.  But at least they have their health, right?  Wrong.  The World Health Organization cites diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, meningitis, and respiratory infections as common causes of death in Haiti.  Ninety percent of Haiti’s children suffer from waterborne diseases and intestinal parasites. The incidence of tuberculosis in Haiti is more than ten times as high as in the rest of Latin America, and malaria is rampant.  Putting aside whether these diseases are the result of living in a shithole, give me one good reason why the U.S. should be importing infected men, women, and children; children who will be added to your kid’s class in school.  You can’t get your U.S. citizen child into school without vaccinations, but infected Haitians, come on up!  But wait, Haiti, at least is supposed to be a democracy.  They do have elections.  The U.S. even gave Haiti $33 million to ensure fair legislative and presidential elections in 2015.  It didn’t help.  A special verification panel declared the results “tainted by significant fraud.”  No, we didn’t get a refund.  I don’t want to influence the readers.  Make up your own minds.  In light of the foregoing, is Haiti a shithole, or not?  It’s really not about whether using the word “shithole” was a good idea.  Take “shithole” out of the equation, and convince me why we should be importing more unskilled, poor people, who don’t speak English, from places like Haiti.  I can’t think of a good reason.  Trump was right again.