Townhall Review | Commentaries

As Attorney General Bill Barr continues his investigation of the investigators, Democrats have repeatedly accused him of betraying his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in order to protect the president.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

By launching an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign, Barr is looking to protect the civil liberties of all Americans.

Barr has confirmed that the FBI did, in fact, spy on private citizens working for the Trump campaign. Getting to the bottom of whether this was done legally is crucial.

In addition, the American people deserve to know how the Obama administration partnered with the Department of Justice to go after a presidential political opponent. This is an issue every American should be working to prevent in the future. 

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On May 17th, America lost one of the 20th Century’s most significant, popular but under-rated writers, when Herman Wouk died just ten days before his 104th birthday. Author of “The Caine Mutiny,” “Marjorie Morningstar,” “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” nobody could deny this Pulitzer Prize-winner’s gifts as a story teller.

But as a World War II Naval officer, his America-loving, pro-military and richly religious themes led the critical establishment to frequently denigrate his work. His perennial best-seller “This Is My God” remains the best single-volume introduction to Jewish faith and Wouk, a Talmud scholar of profound insight, showed that vigorous observance and artistic achievement—in literature, on Broadway, and even in Hollywood—can flourish together.

Wouk will be deeply missed and richly deserves the traditional Jewish tribute—“Zecher Tzadik Livracha”–may the memory of the righteous be blessed.

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Hardcore Game of Thrones fans love to tell us how much better those books are than the Lord of the Rings. They think that George R.R. Martin presents a realistic view of war, whereas Tolkien presents a fairy tale. Here’s the problem: only one of those men actually saw war, and it wasn’t Martin.

Tolkien volunteered to fight in the First World War, in which he lost most of his friends. Martin, on the other hand, avoided the Vietnam draft by filing as a conscientious objector.

In Tolkien’s universe, evil is real, but there are genuinely good and noble characters fighting against it. In Martin’s universe, soldiers are almost invariably cruel and sadistic. Tolkien’s view of war, focused on heroism and self-sacrifice, came from manly personal experience. The man who fought found hope. The man who didn’t fight preaches hopelessness.

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Each year at this time, we are granted a three-day weekend and what amounts to a kick-off to the summer months ahead.

But let me encourage you to not miss perspective. This Memorial Day weekend take some time to reflect on the ultimate sacrifices made by so many who are interred at Arlington National Cemetery and other cemeteries around the United States.

But also to think about those who have paid very high prices, short of dying.

For some dozen years now, I’ve used my own program on the radio, on Memorial Day, to highlight the lives of people who’ve paid a heavy price in their service to the nation.

I turned to the group, Semper Fi Fund and I mentioned the Fisher House Foundation, both are not-for-profits that are helping the wounded warriors around the United States and the families that love and support them in ways that are so both efficient and winsome.

Look them up. Support them. Support—especially—the families in your world who’ve paid a heavy price for their service to the nation.

We are debtors to those who serve, those who die, those who fight, and those who are wounded.

Today, a grateful nation says, “Thank you.”

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As we pass the one year anniversary of President Trump officially pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, the Islamic Republic is proving exactly why he was right to do so.

Despite the pro-Iran deal and the claims of the Obama echo chamber, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism hasn’t changed.

They continue to pump money into terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas in the Middle East—but also in South America. They are also funding proxy groups—like those in Yemen who continue to attack civilian targets in Saudi Arabia.

They’ve operated in bad faith and lied about their intentions to obtain a nuclear weapon. Not to mention their role in the killing of at least 600 Americans in Iraq.

The Trump administration is right to respond with a maximum pressure campaign to punish Iran for its behavior—and it’s working. President Trump, unlike many before him, is working to deter behavior rather than enable it.

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The Trump administration deserves some credit for seeing Iran clearly.

President Obama did not. His efforts to lure Ayatollah Khomeini into changing the behavior of his rogue regime never had a chance because it began from the premise that appeasement works, but appeasement never does work.

Not with Iran. Not with Russia and the famous “reset” button. And not in the 1994 deal with North Korea.

The appeasement policies of Obama have been abandoned. Good!

Iran is dangerously close to provoking a conflict—and most U.S. media outlets are far behind the news curve.

President Trump has been ably served by National Security Advisor John Bolton—as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both rightly believe that Iran was, is and will remain a rogue regime as long as the radical theocrats remain in power.

It’s not about Bolton or Pompeo.

It’s about the mullahs in Tehran. It has been since 1979.

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The intensity of the abortion debate in the United States has reached a new level as Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, has signed a bill banning virtually all abortion in the state.

The overwhelming national response indicates that we have now reached a new moment in America’s conflict between the powerful forces for abortion and powerful forces against abortion.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the map of America when you look at the question of abortion reflects an intensity and a polarization hauntingly like the map of the United States before the Civil War.

In recent decades, the pro-life movement has sought to chip away the logic of Roe v. Wade. There’s no “chipping away” here: Alabama’s move is a direct challenge to Roe.

Stay tuned.

One way or another, the issue of abortion may well be before the Supreme Court, and very soon.

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Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, says “I want a safe haven for Jews.”

The question she hasn’t been asked and cannot answer is: where do you think that “safe haven” should be? She obviously doesn’t think it should be in Israel, the ancestral home of the Jewish people, since she favors the so-called “One State Solution”, meaning the end of any Jewish State in the Middle East.

The idea that any Arab Palestinian state could provide a “safe haven” for Jews or other non-Muslims is ridiculous, considering the terrible record in treatment of Jews, Christians and other minorities in all of the 22 existing Arab Muslim states.

If her Democratic colleagues continue to defend and excuse Tlaib’s incoherent extremism, then all voters who care about Israel’s security should work to end the Democratic House majority that shamelessly sanctions extremism.

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Those in the grip of an obsessive, irrational hatred can’t keep themselves from expressing it, even when they damage their own interests in the process.

For Louis Farrakhan, recently kicked off of Facebook for his bigotry, it clearly hurt him to denounce “satanic Jews” to a Catholic congregation in his latest unhinged diatribe.

For Rashida Tlaib, saying she always gets “kind of a calming feeling” when she thinks of the Holocaust, and suggesting that Palestinians created a “safe haven” for Jews in the Middle East, obviously undermined her already shaky position with her House colleagues. For Tlaib, she wasn’t even asked about the Holocaust, but brought it up in the context of her one-state opposition to any Jewish homeland, anywhere on earth.

Irrational anti-Semitic outbursts not only threaten Jewish people, but simultaneously menace the blighted obsessives who can’t stop themselves from uttering them.

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The leftward lurch of the Democratic contenders for the presidency continues. The latest idea? California Senator Kamala Harris has called for repeal of the Trump tax cuts. Not some of them. Or just the “tax cuts for the rich.” But all of them.

Millions of middle-income families have benefited from these tax cuts. And our economy is zooming, while unemployment is low and wages are rising. Repealing the Trump tax cuts would imperil the economic progress that we’ve made over the last several years, slowing job creation and threatening to put us back into economic malaise.

Democrats want to raise taxes to pay for their costly social spending plans, like free college tuition and government-run health care. But the tax hikes they are proposing won’t pay for even a fraction of their plans. And their policy proposals look a lot less attractive when you dig beneath the surface.

It’s up to all of us, the voters, to hold them accountable.

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