To celebrate Donald Trump's inauguration this week, I'm returning to my new favorite parlor game: quoting Republican consultants on the 2016 campaign.

It never gets old! Also, this exercise reminds us of the many things we are thankful for this week: Donald Trump, the cluelessness of his opponents, and Nexis transcripts.

Our featured GOP consultant this week is Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign and modern-day Mr. Magoo.

Nominally a conservative in a liberal business, Dowd couldn't pull off a full Arianna, so if he wanted to sit in a warm studio on Sunday mornings issuing pronouncements as if from Mount Olympus, he had to come up with an act. Read more >>

The Main Stream Media predicts Donald J. Trump will appeal for “national unity” in his Inaugural Address this Friday, but they’ve been mistaken before. One way he could wrong-foot the Narrative: by announcing an immediate pause in “refugee” admissions, currently surging, to be followed by a zero quota for the next fiscal year—something that, by a legal quirk, he has absolute authority to do. There would be hysteria, in which the major Jewish organizations would, almost certainly, join. My question: why would they do that?

The major Jewish organizations have certainly been in the forefront welcoming Syrian refugees [ For Jewish Groups, Syrian Refugees are a Reminder, Not a Threat By Ron Kampeas, JTA.org, November 24, 2015; As Anti-Refugee Sentiment Builds, Jewish Agencies Push for Settlement, Greg Salisbury, JewishExponent.com, November 25, 2015]. This seems bizarre, given the well-known anti-Jewish, anti-Israel sentiments common among Muslims.

The Jewish leaders’ own rationales Read more >>

Hoodlums will be out in full force this Inauguration Day weekend. Count on it.

I've covered the left's criminal anarchist element for more than 20 years—from the animal rights terrorists who have harassed, threatened and firebombed scientific researches across the U.S. and Europe to the anti-capitalist thugs who wreaked havoc on downtown business owners at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and the 2010 G-20 summit in Toronto to the ANSWER Coalition and Code Pink's not-so-peaceful peaceniks who disrupted congressional hearings and menaced veterans memorials and military recruiting stations throughout the George W. Bush years to the Occupy Wall Street vagrants and rapists of 2011-12 to the rent-a-rioters who hijacked Ferguson, Baltimore and other Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police.

My favorites over the years? I'll never forget the seditious mother in Olympia, Washington, who tied bandanas over her kids' faces and recklessly planted them in the middle of a street 10 years ago to block trucks carrying military shipments. She was so caught up in the excitement of her "direct action" that she dropped her baby on the ground as her anarchist compatriots threw rocks at police and soldiers driving around them. Read more >>

[ Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com.]

This is the Week of the Two Presidents—Donald Trump succeeds Barack Obama at noon on Friday January 20. Both men recently addressed major gatherings: Barack Obama made his official farewell to the nation, Donald Trump held his first formal press conference since being elected. Each event was highly characteristic. My take: I for one am glad we have heard the last of Obama. And Trump’s rumbustiousness is thrilling.

Obama stepped out in front of a huge audience in Chicago and delivered a long, gassy speech—51 minutes and 10 seconds. That’s 10 minutes longer than the Farewell Addresses of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan combined. Read more >>

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One is a Christian gentleman, loyal to his country,  who fought its government in the name of justice. The other is Martin Luther King.

Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His January 19 birthday was once widely celebrated across the South (it still is mentionable in Alabama) but during the Second Reconstruction has been quietly suppressed to the point where even such a devoted son of the Confederacy as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor was unaware, when I talked to him on Sunday night, that its local variant in his and Lee’s state of Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, was supposed to be celebrated last Friday. (Not surprisingly—it seems to have been recently crudely scrubbed from Virginia’s webpage).

But there’s a silver lining, sort of, in this tale of attempted historical lobotomy: it shows that public holidays come— and they go. Martin Luther King Day, rushed through Congress with Obamacare-style disregard of process in 1983, has been by now weighed in the balance for almost thirty years. It has inarguably (but unmentionably) been found wanting. It is time for it to go.

And in fact, I believe it will go, or at least be quietly suppressed like Robert E. Lee Day. The reasons:

• MLK Day’s 2027 Problem

It is obvious to everyone that there is a reason King’s FBI files were sealed for fifty years back in 1977, and only the Main Stream Media’s typically relentless Politically Correct air cover prevented this flagrant maneuver from discrediting the Martin Luther King Day legislation in 1983.

The problem that these sealed files pose, the MSM/ Ruling Class determination to repress it—and incidentally the unimpeachably reasonable nature of the MLK Day opponents’ position—emerged at President Ronald Reagan’s famous October 19, 1983 press conference:

[ Sam Donaldson, ABC News]. Mr. President, Senator [Jesse] Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist associations, was a Communist sympathizer. Do you agree?

The President. We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?

No, I don't fault Senator Helms' sincerity with regard to wanting the records opened up. I think that he's motivated by a feeling that if we're going to have a national holiday named for any American, when it's only been named for one American in all our history up until this time, that he feels we should know everything there is to know about an individual. As I say, I don't fault his sincerity in that, but I also recognize there is no way that these records can be opened, because an agreement was reached between the family and the government with regard to those records. And we're not going to turn away from that or set a precedent of breaking agreements of that kind.

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