Opinion | Freedom Isn’t Just Another Word
We often take liberty for granted, but it is a prerequisite for everything great.
The voters now backing socialists have been in this ideology since they were three years old.
We often take liberty for granted, but it is a prerequisite for everything great.
Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted about eleven days as President Donald Trump's communications director in 2017, says he finally understands a children's story that puzzled him as a boy — thanks to the man he once worked for.In a post shared with his followers, the former White House aide turned vocal Trump critic offered a blunt assessment of the president's fitness, writing that Trump "is not well and he's probably too old for the job." Scaramucci acknowledged the line wasn't "politically correct," but argued it was "probably right."The bulk of his post, however, was less about Trump than about everyone around him. Scaramucci described an administration paralyzed by fear, staffed with people afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of being attacked online, and afraid of being primaried by a challenger Trump himself would select to take them out."That's why we're frozen," he said.Then came the epiphany that gives the post its punch. Scaramucci recalled his first-grade teacher reading the class "The Emperor's New Clothes," the fable in which a vain ruler parades naked while terrified subjects pretend to admire his nonexistent garments. As a child, he found the premise absurd, wondering why anyone would go along with such an obvious lie."I'm 62 now," Scaramucci said. "Now I get it."The implication was hard to miss: in Scaramucci's telling, the people surrounding Trump are the courtiers too frightened to say what they plainly see, and Trump is the emperor convinced of his own splendor.Scaramucci has spent years warning about his former boss, but the fable framing casts the dysfunction less as a policy failure than as a psychological one, sustained by everyone too afraid to point it out.
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The great Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas won nationwide praise for an incredible line in his concurring opinion in a ruling earlier this week, which delivered a huge win for the Trump Administration. The post Justice Clarence Thomas Earns Nationwide Praise with This Brilliant Line in Opinion Supporting End of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
MS NOW analyst Steve Benen says House Speaker Mike Johnson dropped an unexpectedly corruption-friendly reason for protecting the House’s GOP majority against its near inevitable collapse in the November midterms.“If we lose the midterms, these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted,” Johnson said — and then added out loud that “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”In the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, said Benen, and Republicans “put aside any legislative ambitions and spent 2023 and 2024 … investigating all sorts of perceived controversies related to the Democratic administration.”But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress completely switched gears and clanked the Congressional vehicle into protection mode.“This time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals,” said Benen.In fact, Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight,” said Benen.That same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings have included “a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.”Regarding his statement, Benen notes the GOP leader did not appear to be reading from a prepared text. He was just shocking shooting GOP intent from the hip before a live audience.“What was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course,” said Benen. “This isn’t altogether surprising,” he added, “given everything we’ve seen from Capitol Hill over the past year and a half, but it was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a ‘protection program’ — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.”Republicans have already been using their majority to shield the president from the fallout of the Epstein files, with Kentucky Republican and House Oversight Chair James Comer being accused of using "a new strategy" to "contain" the ability of lawmakers to issue subpoenas against "high-profile figures in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation."Before that, Republicans used their majority to stall the passage of a new law making the Trump administration’s release of the files legally mandatory. And after failing in that effort, Trump himself targeted Republicans who favored the release for ousting in GOP primaries.The GOP’s labor to protect Trump from incrimination is well noted, but Benen said “usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.”Johnson’s protective oath sounds odd considering how hard Trump appears to be working to get the Republican majority removed from Congress, however. Trump’s polling is at historic lows, and his recent effort to blowup a hugely popular housing bill in the Senate is souring voters to both the administration and his party.