Here are a few stories about some lesser-known people who made the news this week that I thought would interest you.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee (conservativereview.com)
ONCE DISAPPOINTED with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who was a never-Trumper, I was pleased to read that he told an audience at the Heritage Foundation this week that he sees an opportunity to reorient Trump’s populism toward a new type of conservativism, one specifically for “the forgotten man.” The Utah senator suggested that if Republicans embrace “a healthy dose of the president’s intuitive populism and nationalism,” it’s conceivable that Trump will accept the ideas of members of his House and Senate.
It appears to me that Lee has put his finger on something Trump has – the ability to understand the problems facing Americans in flyover country – while most of his fellow establishment Republicans are still viewed as being out of touch with regular Americans.
NY Times columnist Tom Freidman. (nytimesphoto)
TOM FRIEDMAN, the ultra-liberal New York Times columnist has really gone over the edge. After the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, Freidman said, “This is a moral 9/11 … only 9/11 was done to us from the outside and we did this to ourselves.” As if he recognized that no one took him seriously with that, he again surfaced it during an appearance on MSNBC’s left-leaning Morning Joe this week.
Drawing a connection between Mike Flynn and Russia, the Washington Examiner related how Friedman laid out a bizarre argument equating Flynn’s resignation to Russia’s attempt to sway voters in the presidential election not only to 9/1l, but the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even though the FBI has indicated that Russia did not hack into the voting process, Friedman is obviously still stewing over the hacking of the DNC computers and WikiLeaks embarrassing e-mails to undermine the Clinton campaign. Take a deep breath. Tom. Everything’s going to be alright.
THEN THERE’S TOM PERRIELLO, who it seems, thought Tom Friedman’s televised comment about the 2016 election and 9/11 was quite apropos. The next day, while at a campaign event in Virginia, where he is a Democrat candidate for governor, Perriello said, “The election of Donald Trump was a little bit like, you know, a political constitutional 9/11 for us, if I can be honest.” He later tweeted that he regretted the comparison and apologized.
HERE’S A DEAL PRESIDENT TRUMP must evaluate soon. While he isn’t a climate change denier, his past comments regarding the Paris Agreement have not been positive. “If everyone does all they promised and do it all the way through the century, we’ll reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit,” said economist Bjorn Lomborg during an appearance on Fox Business Channel’s Varney & Company on Tuesday. “The costs will be somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a year. Paying $100 trillion for no good is not a good deal,” he added. Just days before leaving office, President Obama gave the UN another half million dollars on his commitment to support the agreement. We have to stop pouring money down this hole.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, the occasional Republican, continues to disappoint me. I understand that he hasn’t forgotten President Trump’s insulting statement about him during the campaign. Month’s ago I suggested that’s the two should bury the hatchet. McCain, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, did the unthinkable, slamming our president in a foreign land. Shame on him.
