Fact Check: No, Donald Trump Did Not Mock a Disabled Reporter

Apparently, this video needs to be reviewed again. The narrator speaks slowly, so everyone should be able to understand this and get it through their heads. No matter what you think of Donald Trump, he never made fun of the disabled reporter named Serge Kovaleski as so many in the media still maintain. Including the Washington Post, who was the original perpetrator and discredited source for the fake news story.

Also worthy of noting from the video:

• Kovaleski allegedly didn't remember details from a report he did about 9/11, yet expected Donald Trump to remember him personally from his exciting business articles from 22 years prior. That's like remembering a bank teller or a sales clerk from 20 years ago.
• Donald Trump gave millions of dollars to charity for disabled people.
• In 1988, Donald Trump flew an Orthodox Jewish boy named Andrew Ten on his private jet to receive treatment for his rare illness. The commercial airlines refused to fly Andrew from Los Angeles to New York as Trump agreed to because he had to fly while hooked up to expensive life-support equipment.

The conclusion is worth accentuating:

Folks, Donald Trump did not make fun of a reporter with a disability. He did something "worse"—he embarrassed the media. Especially the Washington Post, whose crummy fact-checkers failed to uncover the true story of Middle Easterners living in New Jersey celebrating the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11, a story one of their own reporters covered. As someone who has been around disabled folks my whole life and as one whose wife worked with those who are deemed severe and profound, if I believe that Mr. Trump had truly mocked a man with a disability, I would be writing a very different article and recording a very different video. But the sad thing is, there are those who still perpetrate this lie even when confronted with the facts.

I feel compelled to post this "old news" at this juncture for a number of reasons. Mainly I think that everyone needs to remember how much the media is willing to stretch the truth in order to smear President Trump, and also how in general the Swift's quote still holds true:

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

A secondary reason is that I was one of the victims of this outright media lie fabricated about Donald Trump. It was the picture with the fake freeze-frame which prompted the visceral reaction at the time, and I was livid that Trump would put the GOP in such a predicament, viz., having to own a man with no regard for the disabled. I later realized that my viscera had been fooled by ca leverly manufactured tale as often happens. Then I became inflamed with the mainstream media who, like the mob they have become, all repeated the same false narrative and all presented the same false evidence. Thus it was that I began to appreciate something which I would later begin to share, especially with those who stil recoil at the mention of Trump's name: no matter how irritating President Trump can get, the left and the media is always worse.

Time after time, time and again.

One last thing to note. Several days after September 11, 2001 I was at Daily Mass in a nearby Cleveland suburb. The priest celebrating the Mass talked during the homily about how America needed to come together and so he was starting a Interfaith group with a nearby Muslim Imam. It was put on his heart to do this after he heard about Muslim students at Lakewood high-school applauding and cheering during a school assembly where a video showing the Twin Towers being crashed into coming down was played. So the idea that the only people who talked about this were bigots or crazy people was always offensive to me. The Truth is sometimes uncomfortable, yet it is always incontrovertible.

Unfortunately for the good Father—who is retired now and who shall remain anonymous—his Imam friend was deported in 2002 due to his involvement of funding terrorist group with American Muslim contributions. That was probably the end of the interfaith group, if it had even ever really started. I'm guessing that, er, not every participant had his heart completely in it.

Why don't people want to admit this kind of thing? That some Muslims are bad, and/or succumb to fundamentalist pressure. It's too easy to follow the mob, denounce Trump as an evil maniac and make up stories about him and his supporters.

(H/T Catholics for Trump.)

Democrat Campaign Ad

Hey, I saw you, Zuck!

More Pro-choice Violence

Hat tip Live Action.

The new White Supremacy could be set to explode

Just found a great writer, Samuel Sey, via this article about the Two kinds of White Supremacy. His blog is titled Slow to Speak with the tagline "let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." So the man gets extra points in my book for quoting the Bible.

As always, I advise to "read the whole thing" — it's not long. But here are some excerpts:

Some of the biggest protesters against White supremacy are also some of the biggest protectors of White supremacy. They cover and carry themselves differently, being less sectarian and less severe, but they are just as White supremacists.

White supremacists do not all share the same covers, characters, or chants. In fact, some of them do not get along with each other. For instance, the Alt-right’s two biggest leaders and their followers, Richard Spencer and Patrick Casey dislike each other. Many White supremacists share different opinions on several issues. But they all fundamentally believe that White people are superior to other racial groups, particularly, Black people.

It is no wonder they are not in any way united since their sole common belief is something completely negative and demonstrably false, accent on the first two syllables of demonstrably. So that's a good thing.

Sey himself is black, so that gives his argument some more force, especially when he speaks from personal experience.

What White supremacists like Richard Spencer calls White power, they call White privilege. They are one-side of the same coin, which is why Richard Spencer thinks they are the easiest to flip to his brand of White Supremacy. They affirm much of the same things, though they do not hate Black people—but that is starting to change. White people are increasingly using racial slurs like “uncle tom” and “coon” to describe Black people who refuse to agree with them. My inbox is full of angry words from White people who use racial slurs against me because they supposedly love Black people.

I've been saying lately that it is only a matter of time until we start being called "uppity conservatives" just for having different opinions than the establishment.

Many of these type of White supremacists hate me because I am Black but think differently than they do. And like Richard Spencer, they practically believe Black people are inferior to White people, though they blame that on the government, not genetics. They believe that though Black people share the same rights as White people, Black people are unable to perform as well as White people without special provisions from the government.

I am thankful that this type of White supremacy doesn’t lead to genocide. However, it harms Black people. For instance, colleges and universities lower standards for admission for Black students. That isn’t only racist, it’s disastrous. This is actually one of the reasons why the dropout rate amongst Black college students is so high. When a student is admitted into a school they are unqualified for, they often drop out because they are unprepared to overcome challenges within their courses. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, which produces low performance.

Let me lay out the reason for my title, that I think that this form of white supremacy could be "set to explode". I think there is plenty of evidence that this liberal babying of black people as a permanent class of victims in the abstract is going to always, by its nature, ignore anything good that blacks have been able to achieve on their own or any changes in prevailing attitudes of whites toward blacks in recent times. For example, we hear whining recently about how Anita Hill's life was ruined when actually she became a rich, respected, tenured professor by her semars of Justice Clarence Thomas, someone who is routinely called an "uncle tom" by liberal white supremacists.

People my age (50+) roll our eyes, but the kids in school are being told that she is a down-trodden hero. They are being told a lot of things from the liberal point of view, especially in college. They will see blacks in their year, and not in any other year, and they will think "this is unfair; it is a form of white racism" when really it is, as Sey suggests, just another function of affirmative action. Also schools benefit from this monetarily, especially when a student quits mid-year.

Showing any progress for blacks in any category is bad for the business of race hustling. So as a white male, I will be shouted down as an ignoramus if I point out improvements in the condition of the lives of black people. Blacks on the other hand are viciously attacked for daring to support Donald Trump or saying anything conservative. They are called sellouts and "uncle toms". The latest poll about Trump's rise in black approval to over one third was met by disbelief and high dudgeon by the WaPo in an inadvertantly humorous article, "No, one-third of African-Americans don't support Trump. Not even close."

There is an interest of keeping black people down in the minds of Americans, keeping the story going that there is still widespread white racism, danger of violence directed toward blacks around every corner, and virtually no opportunity for advancement of black Americans. Race hustling may be an industry for the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but the victim class designation is much bigger than that — it's an ideology. Any fact which seems to counter that is seen as a threat. And black messengers delivering the news? Ask Candace Owens who was attacked by Antifa, ask Diamond and Silk who had their Facebook account censored, ask Kanye West, who earns profanity-laced smears from fellow black performer, Snoop Dogg, for announcing support for Trump.

These people don't love, or even like, black people as individuals who speak their minds. They like black people as an amorphous group of victims who can be leveraged for a big government agenda and to assuage their own guilt. So the more people like Owens, West, Larry Elder and others like them who step forward speaking their minds, the more pushback there will be. The left is pretty horrible at self-examination and would never take a step back to say, "Well, maybe blacks have made progress and they've done it on their own as individuals with no help from the NAACP and big government programs." Instead it seems as if they would rather continue to paint more and more blacks who don't buy into the victimhood mantra as race-traitors and enablers of those nasty white racists.

So if you have loud, angry, frothing howls on one side and reasoned, compelling argumentation on the other, what happens? In high school debate, the reasoned side wins. In real-world politics? It's different, obviously, more of a toss-up. Our polarization as a country is still not at 1969 levels — in my very humble opinion — but as I ponder the things about which I have just written I continue to repeat to myself: Something's gotta give.

Florence

Monsignor Gänswein appears to be sold...

This may be my "just-when-I-thought-I-was-out-they-pull-me-back-in" blog post.

But I'm gonna let all y'all do the conversing in the comboxes. I'm verklempt.

Tom Piatak: "Be careful what you wish for."

Tom Piatak wisely cautions Catholics against putting confidence in the princes who run our state governments to help clean up the Catholic Church's abuse and corruption problems. Excerpt:

The Pennsylvania grand jury wanted the bishops to end their opposition to extending statutes of limitations for civil lawsuits. If this recommendation were accepted, the principal beneficiaries would include plaintiffs' lawyers and those hurt would be ordinary Catholics who harmed no one, but who would ultimately need to pay for the judgments and settlements and who would also see the infrastructure they built torn apart to enrich the plaintiffs' bar. Note that the Pennsylvania grand jury did not recommend any cap on damages to accompany a change in the statutes of limitations.

Other recommendations are likely to be bolder. The Royal Commission in Australia recommended an end to priestly celibacy and a removal of the seal of the confessional in certain cases. Some Australian jurisdictions have followed up with laws requiring priests to report certain confessions to the police.

How long before a grand jury investigating clerical sexual abuse recommends that the Church allow not just married priests, but gay married priests?

He ends with the admonition to "be careful what you wish for". I would add to this to be careful what you settle for in the way of secular justice. The state can regulate, tax, fine, imprison, etc. but it cannot change things. The people who want to dispose of Trump via an arduous impeachment process would get Pence as the "new boss" if they would miraculously find success. I would welcome punishment of Catholic clergy if their crimes would be uncovered, but I would not but too much stock in it.

The Crazy Left

Larry Elder's Anthem Protest Article

This article about the NFL national anthem protests by conservative talk radio host Larry Elder is worth revisiting now that Colin Kaepernike (kaepernike.com is already taken —  don't you hate it?) has been signed as a major endorser, symbol, icon, etc. Elder asks "Do facts matter?" Here are some of the facts he presents with the numbers; you can decide how to answer the rhetorical question best.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1968 police killings of blacks have declined nearly 75 percent. According to The Washington Post, almost 500 whites were killed by cops in 2015, an average of more than one a day. Two hundred fifty-nine blacks were killed by the police. Most suspects killed by police had a weapon.

Yes; more whites are killed by the police than blacks.

Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

Even the frequency of interactions with police are greater or the same for whites than for blacks:

According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.

Read the whole thing. Burning sportswear might be a dumb thing to do, but continuing to believe the false narrative of widespread police brutality against blacks is even dumber. It amounts to sacrificing everything we have learned by looking at the evidence.

Please Read Bishop Morlino's Letter

Bishop Morlino's letter on the abuse scandal is very good. (H/T RedState) Here are several highlights:

If you’ll permit me, what the Church needs now is more hatred! As I have said previously, St. Thomas Aquinas said that hatred of wickedness actually belongs to the virtue of charity. As the Book of Proverbs says “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate wickedness (Prov. 8:7).” It is an act of love to hate sin and to call others to turn away from sin.

The summary is the aphorism "Hate the sin; love the sinner," but the people advocating the second often do it at the expense of the first. It is very difficult to say "It's ok to be gay," and condemn the gay lifestyle as gravely sinful and destructive. But it is, and it needs to be done more especially by those who are called as teachers in the Catholic Church.

There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more. To fall into the trap of parsing problems according to what society might find acceptable or unacceptable is ignoring the fact that the Church has never held ANY of it to be acceptable — neither the abuse of children, nor any use of one’s sexuality outside of the marital relationship, nor the sin of sodomy, nor the entering of clerics into intimate sexual relationships at all, nor the abuse and coercion by those with authority.

We've known this, and we have constantly received reflexive disdain for pointing it out. From the Catholic League, 2010: "The conventional wisdom maintains there is a pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church. Popular as this position is, it is empirically wrong: the data show it has been a homosexual crisis all along. The evidence is not ambiguous, though there is a reluctance to let the data drive the conclusion. But that is a function of politics, not scholarship." But so many others have pointed it out. We're called bigots; we've become used to it. We're realists.

It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon this disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance, especially when it involves preying upon the young or the vulnerable. Such wickedness should be hated with a perfect hatred. Christian charity itself demands that we should hate wickedness just as we love goodness. But while hating the sin, we must never hate the sinner, who is called to conversion, penance, and renewed communion with Christ and His Church, through His inexhaustible mercy. 

At the same time, however, the love and mercy which we are called to have even for the worst of sinners does not exclude holding them accountable for their actions through a punishment proportionate to the gravity of their offense. In fact, a just punishment is an important work of love and mercy, because, while it serves primarily as retribution for the offense committed, it also offers the guilty party an opportunity to make expiation for his sin in this life (if he willingly accepts his punishment), thus sparing him worse punishment in the life to come. Motivated, therefore, by love and concern for souls, I stand with those calling for justice to be done upon the guilty.

If you get away with sin in this world, there is more likelihood that you end up in Hell. That is common sense applied to spiritual reality.

Obviously I advise everyone to read the entire thing. And when I say everyone I am including myself; I haven't finished it yet.  I need to get back to work now.

Thank you, Bishop Morlino.