Putin May Be An Arrogant Authoritarian …but Americans Should ALSO Criticize U.S.Policy!

In launching the Iraq war and the war on terror, George Bush said, “you’re either with us or against us.”

We now know that the entire justification for the Iraq War was false from the get-go,  And addam Hussein – while an asshole and tyrant – did not pose a threat to the West.
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So what about Americans who protested the Iraq War at the time? Were we – as loudly proclaimed by those pushing for war – “Saddam-lovers”, “apologists for Saddam” and “propagandists” for Iraq?

No, of course not … they were loyal Americans trying to stop a very stupid policy mistake that ''War is good for the Economy''. They knew that myth would cause a lot of problems for Americans.

The same thing is true for the frothing-at-the-mouth warmongers and Putin

Specifically, Putin is an authoritarian narcissist.  The Russian government spies on everyone, and cracks down on free speech.   If someone living in Russia criticizes Putin, Lord only knows what would happen to them.  I’m very grateful that I was born in America, live in Australia and not Russia.

As I’ve noted in my previous post:

Putin is certainly no saint. A former KGB agent, Putin’s net worth is estimated at some $40 billion dollars … as he has squeezed money out of the Russian economy by treating the country as his own personal fiefdom. How much more money do you need Vladimir? I also mentioned that all sides appear to have dirt on their hands in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

But knuckleheads who label all Americans who criticize U.S. foreign policy towards Russia as “Putin-lovers” for Russia are as bad as Bush during the Iraq War.

Indeed, it’s virtually the same numskulls pushing the McCarthyite “we’ve got to stop them, because there’s a Rooskie under every bush” nonsense who pushed the Iraq War.

Those of us who criticized the Iraq War before it started have been proven right.  On the other hand, those trying to shut us up were wrong.

The same thing is true of the whole McCarthyite anti-Rooskie campaign.  Those of us pointing out that U.S. foreign policy towards Russia is stupid are trying to save America from further harm.

In Summary:  Those who love America are willing to criticize her actions when they are stupid. It's important to seriously stress the fact that US-Russia tensions are now more Dangerous than the Cold War, and I hope President-elect Trump can sort it out:

The Way I See it......that's what patriotism is all about:

“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error”
– United States Supreme Court in American Communications Association v. Douds

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”
– Teddy Roosevelt

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
– Teddy Roosevelt

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
– Mark Twain

“The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.”
– Mark Twain

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
– Attributed to Thomas Jefferson (but not confirmed)

“To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“All that is necessary for the forces of evil to prevail in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke, British statesman

“Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.”
– Woodrow Wilson

“Those who are willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.”
– Benjamin Franklin

The Backstory to the Russia-Ukraine Confrontation !

The Big Picture: The U.S. and NATO Have Been Trying to Encircle Russia Militarily Since 1991

The American press portrays Valdimir Putin as being the bad guy and the aggressor in the Ukraine crisis.

Putin is certainly no saint. A former KGB agent, Putin’s net worth is estimated at some $40 billion dollars..…(when is enough Enough Vald?) as he has squeezed money out of the Russian economy by treating the country as his own personal fiefdom. And all sides appear to have dirt on their hands in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

But we can only see the bigger picture if we take a step back and gain a little understanding of the history underlying the current tensions.

Indeed, the fact that the U.S. has allegedly paid billions of dollars to anti-Russian forces in Ukraine – and even purportedly picked the Ukrainian president – has to be seen in context.

Veteran New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer (below) notes at the Boston Globe:

From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States has relentlessly pursued a strategy of encircling Russia, just as it has with other perceived enemies like China and Iran. 

 It has brought 12 countries in central Europe, all of them formerly allied with Moscow, into the NATO alliance. US military power is now directly on Russia’s borders.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” warned George Kennan, the renowned diplomat and Russia-watcher, as NATO began expanding eastward. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies.”

Stephen Cohen – professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University who has long focused on Russia – explained this weekend on CNN:

We are witnessing as we talk the making possibly of the worst history of our lifetime. We are watching the descending of a new cold war divide between west and east, only this time, it is not in far away Berlin, it’s right on Russia’s it is time to stop asking why Putin – why Putin is doing this or that, but ask about the American policy, and the European Union policy that led to this moment.
borders through the historical civilization in Ukraine. It’s a crisis of historic magnitude. If you ask how we got in it, how we got into the crisis, and how therefore do we get out, 

***

I don’t know if you your listeners or views remember George Kennan left). He was considered a great strategic thinker about Russia among American diplomats but he warned when we expanded NATO [under Bill Clinton], that this was the most fateful mistake of American foreign policy and that it would lead to a new Cold War. George lived to his hundredth and first, died a few years ago, but his truth goes marching on. The decision to move NATO beginning in the 90’s continuing under Bush and continuing under Obama, is right now on Russia's borders.

And if you want to know for sure, and I have spent a lot of time in Moscow, if you want to know what the Russian power elite thinks Ukraine is about, it is about bringing it into NATO. One last point, that so-called economic partnership that Yanukovych, the elected president of Ukraine did not sign, and that set off the streets – the protests in the streets in November, which led to this violence in and confrontation today, that so-called economic agreement included military clauses which said that Ukraine by signing this so called civilization agreement had to abide by NATO military policy. This is what this is about from the Russian point of view, the ongoing western march towards post Soviet Russia.

Jonathan Steele writes at the Guardian :

Both John Kerry's threat to expel Russia from the G8 and the Ukrainian government's plea for
NATO aid mark a dangerous escalation of a crisis that can easily be contained if cool heads prevail. Hysteria seems to be the mood in Washington and Kiev, with the new Ukrainian prime minister claiming, “We are on the brink of disaster” as he called up army reserves in response to Russian military movements in Crimea. 

Were he talking about the country’s economic plight he would have a point. Instead, along with much of the US and European media, he was over-dramatising developments in the east, where Russian speakers are understandably alarmed after the new Kiev authorities scrapped a law allowing Russian as an official language in their areas. They see it as proof that the anti-Russian ultra-nationalists from western Ukraine who were the dominant force in last month’s insurrection still control it. Eastern

Ukrainians fear similar tactics of storming public buildings could be used against their elected officials.

Kerry’s rush to punish Russia and NATO’s decision to respond to Kiev’s call by holding a meeting of member states’ ambassadors in Brussels today were mistakes. Ukraine is not part of the alliance, so none of the obligations of common defence come into play. 

 Nato should refrain from interfering in Ukraine by word or deed. The fact that it insists on getting engaged reveals the elephant in the room: underlying the crisis in Crimea and Russia’s fierce resistance to potential changes is NATO’s undisguised ambition to continue two decades of expansion into what used to be called “post-Soviet space”, led by Bill Clinton and taken up by successive administrations in Washington. At the back of Pentagon minds, no doubt, is the dream that a US navy will one day replace the Russian Black Sea fleet in the Crimean ports of Sevastopol and Balaclava.

***

The Way I See It.......Vladimir Putin’s troop movements in Crimea, which are supported by most Russians, are of questionable legality under the terms of the peace and friendship treaty that Russia signed with Ukraine in 1997. But their illegality is considerably less clear-cut than that of the US-led invasion of Iraq, or of Afghanistan, where the UN security council only authorised the intervention several weeks after it had happened. 

[Indeed, top American leaders admit that the Iraq war was for reasons different than publicly stated. And the U.S. military sticks its nose in other countries’ business all over the world ] And Russia’s troop movements can be reversed if the crisis abates. That would require the restoration of the language law in eastern Ukraine and firm action to prevent armed groups of anti-Russian nationalists threatening public buildings there.

Again, I don’t believe that there are angels on any side.  But I do believe that everyone has to take a step back, look at the bigger picture, calm down and reach a negotiated diplomatic resolution.

Turkish President Turning into a Determined Bully-boy Autocrat !

Defending his quest for an executive presidential system Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan  cited Hitler's Germany as an effective form of government. Yes, he said, you can have the presidential system in a unitary state as in Hitler's Germany. His office later claimed that the president's "Hitler's Germany" metaphor had been "distorted" by the media. Erdogan's words on Hitler's Germany may or may not have been distorted, but the way he rules Turkey reminds one powerfully of how Hitler ruled the Third Reich.

With or without a distortion of Erdogan's words, a criminal indictment was filed against Sedat Ergin, editor-in-chief of the country's most influential newspaper, Hurriyet. Prosecutors demanded up to five years in prison for Ergin, for allegedly insulting Erdogan. The indictment claims that Hurriyet insulted the president by paraphrasing his Sept. 6, 2015 remarks about an attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on the Iraqi border, which killed 16 Turkish soldiers.

Such insane charges are no longer news in Erdogan's Turkey. On Jan. 11, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the host and the producer of a popular talk show on charges of "terrorist propaganda." The move came after a caller, identifying herself as a schoolteacher, protested the civilian casualties during recent security operations against the PKK. The caller was urging the public to raise its voice against the deaths of "unborn children, babies and mothers." She did not even mention the PKK.

500 journalists were reportedly fired in Turkey last year, while 70 others were subjected to physical violence.

According to a report by the Turkish Journalists Association, 500 journalists were fired in Turkey in 2015, while 70 others were subjected to physical violence. Thirty journalists remain in prison, mostly on terrorism charges. Needless to say, the unfortunate journalists invariably are known to be critical of Erdogan.

Journalists are not the only ones threatened by a judiciary and law enforcement apparatus staunchly loyal to Erdogan. On Jan. 15, police detained scores of academics whom Erdogan had labeled "dark people" for signing a declaration that denounced military operations against the PKK.

Over 1,100 Turkish and 300 foreign academics signed the declaration that Turkish prosecutors think "insulted the state and engaged in terrorist propaganda on behalf of the PKK." Just before the arrests, Erdogan decried the signatories and called on the judiciary to act against the "treachery."

"Just because they have titles such as professor, doctor in front of their names does not make them enlightened. These are dark people," Erdogan said. "They are villains and vile because those who side with the villains are villains themselves."

In their declaration, these "traitors" said they refused to be "a party to the crime" and called on the government to halt what they called a "massacre."

"For Turkish democracy (whatever that is) this is yet another low. It confirms that this is a 'democracy' with rapidly diminishing freedom of speech. It is 'democracy' where the 'voice of the nation,' which practically is the voice of the political majority and its glorified leader, intimidates and silences dissenting voices," wrote Hurriyet columnist Mustafa Akyol.


The Turkish Justice Ministry's statistics perhaps best explain the huge democracy deficit in the Turkey of Erdogan. Turkey's prisons have a total capacity to house 180,176 inmates. As of January 13, Turkey had a total of 179,611 inmates, meaning that there will not be any space if Turkish prosecutors detain just 565 more.

Europe, cherishing its "transactional" relations with Turkey, prefers to look the other way.

All of this is happening not in Germany of the late 1930s but in Turkey of the 21^st century.

Meanwhile, Europe, cherishing its "transactional" relations with Turkey, prefers to look the other way and whistle.

All the European Union could say about the prosecution of the academics who signed the declaration was that it is "extremely worrying." Brussels cannot see that Turkish affairs passed the threshold of "extremely worrying" a long time ago.

Prominent journalist Can Dundar, who has been in jail on terrorism charges since Nov. 26, was right when he wrote in an open letter to Italy's prime minister, Matteo Renzi, that "the rapprochement between Turkey and the European Union over refugees should not overshadow violations of fundamental rights and freedoms in Turkey during the country's EU accession process."

In reality, Turkey's irregularities are too big to be hidden behind the usual diplomatic words such as "concern" and "worrying." Ahead of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's meeting in London with Britain's David Cameron, more than two dozen prominent writers, including David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Hari Kunzru, William Boyd, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters and Monica Ali, called on the British prime minister to urge the Turkish government to halt its crackdown on freedom of speech.


 UPDATE:  
Turkey is now more than worrying with Edogen's ''overkill reaction'' to July's coup by the Army. Turkey's state-of-emergency is set to be extended by another three months and could be in place for a year if required, according to the country's president. 

Indisputably, in the aftermath of such a brutal coup that has claimed the lives of more than 265 innocent people, destabilised a democratic sovereign state, unprecedentedly attacked its parliament and presidential compound, and provoked horror among its citizens, precise deterrent measures have to be decisively taken.

"The government is in control," Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of people gathered upon his call in Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport in the early hours of Saturday, July 16.

He added "We are not going to compromise ... we will continue to cleanse the virus from all state institutions."

Without hesitation, in the following days, the Turkish government vehemently embarked on an unprecedented massive crackdown to purge the military of mutineers.

Erdogan pledged a conclusive army overhaul. However, the operation toll surpassed 50,000 civil servants, including judges, prosecutors, academics, deans, and journalists.

Turkey shakes up security forces after coup attempt

Some were suspended, others were asked to resign, while the rest were immediately taken into custody.

Moreover, eight top-level officials in the  Turkish parliament have been suspended, while two others were rotated.

All are believed to have direct links to the self-exiled cleric in the United States, Fethullah Gulen, who is blamed for orchestrating the foiled coup on July 15.

Turkey's prime minister also said his government could consider proposing a measure for a "limited" reinstatement of the death penalty amid public demands that the plotters of the failed coup attempt be executed.

The Way I See It......there is a real fear that further amendments to the constitution would lead to authoritarian rule. The Republican People's Party (CHP)  and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), have both said they would oppose the proposal.

“The outcome will be a single-person administration,” said Haluk Koç, the deputy head of the CHP. “The outcome will be oppression.”

TRUMP PUTS A SIDEWINDER UP THE F-35's EXHAUST

There is still simmering public anger over Australia’s purchase of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter but now that Donald Trump has joined the criticism of cost overruns and practicability, maybe some sanity might finally leak into our defence force? Ha, you’re kidding aren’t you!

Although I'd give my left testicle for ten minutes' flying time in one, my point has not been about the outrageous cost of an aircraft that hit the drawing board a quarter of a century ago but about the suitability of an aircraft that has already been superseded by the drone technology revolution. 

Any of today’s fighter jets can (and have been) converted to drone strikers whereby no pilot or technology is put at risk.

The days of dog fights over London or Dresden are long gone. Precision GPS guided Phantoms, or any aircraft, can deliver a hand grenade or a nuclear weapon into an enemy’s war room from the comfort of a lounge chair in the Pentagon. 

If it gets shot down, no worries, no pilot will be under waterboard pressure to disclose military secrets and anyway, weapons can be disarmed at any time, again from the Pentagon. And who wants to put a billion dollar aircraft in harm's way?

                                             Ministers Payne & Bishop seal the deal. (Suckers !)

Lockheed Martin has been given its own limitless cheque book by successive Administrations but the cost to Australia is prohibitive now that supporting orders from different nations are being cancelled, with Canada’s Julian Trudeau cancelling the entire order. 

Each cancelled order raises the unit cost of each aircraft, including to Australia, which has stood firm in the face of a collapsing farce that only Trump has had the balls to identify.

Australia’s Defence Force Chiefs, safely ensconced in their shiny arm chairs at Russell Hill, have also had their own cheque book when it comes to military procurement. These F-35s are nothing more than state-of-the art big boys’ toys to be used as calling cards and to show the Yanks that we are now, “all the way with DJT”.

Cabinet criticism of Marise Payne’s elevation to the Defence Ministry is now apparently justified as Turnbull looks to correct a facile appointment based solely on numbers of women in his Cabinet. But in true Turnbull fashion he has made matters worse by adding to the Defence Ministry the talkative little Christopher Pyne to help her out.

The trouble is that neither of these two equal "Defence Ministers" has power over the other. It was made clear by Turnbull that the two appointments were of distinct equality. This again shows Turnbull’s total lack of political nous. 

Now the wily Defence Chiefs will be playing "equal" Ministers off against each other in pursuit of their own personal ambitions.

The truth is that the Defence establishment will soon be having both Ministers for breakfast as they have always had every Defence Minister, including the two Abbott appointments of Senator David Johnston and Abbott’s Sunday school mate, Kevin Andrews. 

                                                      "I get all choked up thinking of the F-35?"

Marise Payne, as predicted here, was like a lamb being led to the slaughter and the co-appointment of Christopher Pyne is even more stupid as his re-election to the SA seat of Sturt was contingent on the order of $60 billion worth of submarines to be delivered in 50 years time. This guy is a hopeless BIG SPENDER !

t takes a special kind of intelligence to determine what is needed militarily in 50 years, or is it a special kind of vain overreach? Pyne has just proved he believes $60 billion is a wise investment when it comes to retaining his grinning mush on the front bench. 

So justifying these F-35’s should be a piece of cake for Pyne. 

The Way I See It........the estimated cost to Australia for 75 of the F-35s is around $1 billion each when (as is normal) the purchase price is more than doubled for maintenance, parts and on-going development costs. 

But the US Defence forces have ordered 2,400 of the aircraft for themselves and their costs are predicated on how many Lockheed Martin can flog to naive purchasers like Australia.

Trump has been the one to finally bell the cat on this farcical F-35 JS Fighter, so now let’s see which way Prime Minister Turnbull jumps, if any way at all.

More likely he will pull the covers back over his head and hibernate until the next sitting before facing the music. 

No Surprise: Aboriginal Activists now want a Treaty, even Apartheid !

by Andrew Bolt,
Journalist, 
Herald Sun Newspaper

Anyone "blindsided"  has not been paying attention and has no clue  how ''grievance politics'' works.

As I have often warned, this is precisely what must follow once you accept that dangerous claim that Australian Aborigines have a different legal status and different claim to the land. ( In a land they never accomplished anything of merit for 50,000 years ! )

Constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians has been blindsided by more radical demands, with an official forum in Hobart insisting that plans for a referendum must be accompanied by treaty talks. 

The gathering, the first of 12 such invite-only indigenous community meetings nationwide, concluded that all delegates were “firmly committed to pursuing treaty” and that this must deal with “among other things, sovereignty, a land and a financial settlement” as well as an agreed time frame. “A discussion of constitutional recognition (can) only take place simultaneously with a proper consideration of treaty,” states a written communique issued yesterday.. 

The 16-member Referendum Council, which has control of the consultations, will use its findings to report to Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten by July on the best way forward for a referendum proposal. 

Council co-chair and Lowitja Institute head Pat Anderson, (photo right) who was at the Hobart meeting, told The Australian treaty was “the No 1 topic” in a “very robust” discussion but praised conveners Rodney Gibbons and Wendy Moore, and said perhaps it was “time to have that uncomfortable conversation”. Ms Anderson said a treaty had been “put on the agenda” since the council’s formation last December

The 100-person Hobart summit also resolved that any so-called “minimalist” statement in the Constitution acknowledging the existence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders before ­European settlement “would be unacceptable” unless it was ­accompanied by substantive changes. These would include the insertion in the Constitution of a racial non-discrimination clause specific to indigenous Australians and the creation of a constitutionally protected indigenous represen­tative body that would be “stronger than just an advisory body to parliament”.

I warn again: these are unmistakable steps towards apartheid. Once the Left saw this for exactly what it is: racism. Now, astonishingly, it's the goal of people who claim to be "progressive". And note well: this will not improve Aboriginal development or race relations but cripple both.

For anyone claiming that these latest demands come as some surprise, here is what I wrote more than two years ago:

Changing the Constitution to divide Australians between the “first” and the rest — on the basis of the “race” of our ancestors — is not just immoral and an insult to our individuality.

Worse, it is socially dangerous. This will not “reconcile” us but permanently divide. It would do no good to a single Aboriginal in bush camps, but would concede a critical point: that Australians in our most fundamental legal document are now to be divided by “race” But once [Prime Minister Tony Abbott] concedes the principle he concedes everything.

He will not get the “reconciliation” he imagines, some shiny day when we all hug each other in happy tears. He will instead license demands from people, particularly race industry professionals, who will in some cases be satisfied with nothing less than apartheid.  Ridiculous !! 

What next? Well, Aboriginal leader Sol Bellear, chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern, spelled it out on the ABC: a future in which “no Australian court has the right to sit in judgment of my people.” The nerve of him !  

Indeed, we already have an “Aboriginal Provisional Government”, led by Michael Mansell, with such a separatist agenda. He wants to form a seventh state for Aborigines in the centre of Australia. So when exactly will we be “reconciled”? When our country is torn apart on ethnic lines, with more recently arrived groups demanding their own customary laws, too?  

Stop now ! Say no to racism. Say no to racial division. Say no to changing our Constitution.

The Way I See It.......once the principle of racial division is conceded, there will be no stopping the advocates of this newly tribalised Australia. How can we agree that Aborigines have a "unique" role as "original custodians" - a role entitling them to their own representatives and special constitutional powers - and then insist that nothing much flows from that? How can we then arbitrarily insist that they have no consequent right to their own nations, their own laws, their own compensation?

Obama Lobbies Against Legacy Obliteration by Trump !

WASHINGTON — You know how desperate President Obama is — as he contemplates all his accomplishments going down the drain at the hands of a man he has total contempt for — when he is willing to do something so

against his nature.

He tried to persuade Donald Trump !

We saw that unicorn glimpsed only fleetingly in the last eight years: the cajoling Barack Obama.

The president flattered the president-elect by letting Trump rack up the ego arithmetic.

“This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and we were just going to get to know each other,” Trump told reporters, afterward, as they sat in front of the Oval Office fireplace. But, he marveled, “The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half.”

And lo and behold, it worked — sort of. In his first post-election newspaper interview, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he would consider leaving in place the parts of Obamacare that allow children to stay on their parents’ health plan until they are 26 and that prevent people from being refused insurance because of existing conditions.

“I told him I will look at his suggestions, and out of respect, I will do that,” Trump said.

Of course, those are two very popular elements of the law that Republicans wouldn’t dream of killing anyway. Still, President Obama’s charm and civility clearly made a strong impression, though it’s impossible to say when a nasty tweet will come in the middle of the night.

“I want a country that loves each other,” Trump told the paper. “I want to stress that.”

Harry Reid wasn’t in a kumbaya frame of mind, calling Trump “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote.”

Out of a hailstorm of unfathomable things during the week, one sticks out to me: How can it be that in the end, Barack Obama did not understand the Obama revolution?

He came away from that elated whoosh in 2008 not comprehending that many voters viewed him as the escape hatch from Clinton Inc. It never would have occurred to anyone then — even the Clintons — that President Obama would be the one to brush away any aversions and objections, take us by the elbow, and firmly steer us back to Clinton Inc.

Voters waited in line for hours at those early Obama rallies because they wanted thunderous change. They wanted a newcomer who didn’t look like the old dudes on our money, someone who would bust up the incestuous system and give us, as the poster said, Hope.

But Obama lost touch with his revolutionary side and settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.

He was cozy with Silicon Valley and dismissive of working-class voters anxious about globalization, shrugging that “We’re part of an interconnected global economy now, and there’s no going back from that.” He was dismissive of Americans anxious about terrorism after the Paris attacks, noting that you’d be more likely to die from a bathtub fall.

He was dismissive of Bernie Sanders and his voters, treating Sanders as a fairy tale, just as Bill Clinton treated him in 2008 when he was a senator

with little record but with an army of passionate supporters who wanted to upend moldy politics.

Nudging Sanders and Joe Biden toward the exit, Obama was the ultimate establishmentarian. As he told the Rutgers student paper in May, “We have to make incremental changes where we can, and every once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary.”

The man who swept into the White House in a boisterous rebellion was dismissive of the boisterous rebellions in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. He insisted that an incrementalist and fellow Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hangs out with celebrities would be best to save his legacy.

Even Michelle, who understands the importance of the visceral in politics better than her husband and who said in 2007 that the bid to usurp Hillary was about “our souls,” tamped down hope. “Remember, it’s not about voting for the perfect candidate,” she told a crowd at La Salle University. “There is no such person.”

The leaked John Podesta emails showed how deluded the campaign was about the insurgent mood of the voters.

In January 2015, Hillary’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, advised Podesta: “Make a virtue of her longevity. Embrace all the Clinton-ness — the forty years in politics, the decades on the national stage.”

As late as February, Hillary’s Clinton's chief strategist, Joel Benenson, (photo right) was fretting that the candidate had no vision or message compared to Sanders: “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?”

As she cuddled up to Wall Street, Hillary forgot about the forgotten man — and woman. Bill complained in meetings that campaign manager Robby Mook was ignoring white working-class voters, according to Politico, but his concern was waved off as the plea of “a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map.”

They should have listened. Bill ousted the first President Bush by focusing on “you” rather than “I,” what the voters wanted. Hillary’s campaign message boiled down to “It’s my turn, dammit.”

President Obama, trying to hoist Hillary over the finish line, offered a solipsistic message, saying it would be “a personal insult” if African-Americans did not vote for Hillary, and an accusatory message, suggesting that sexism was stopping men from voting for Hillary.

In September, Hillary stumbled when she dismissed half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”  Tellingly, the snooty remarks were made at a high-dollar fund-raiser hosted by Barbra Streisand and other sparklies at Cipriani Wall Street.

The Way I See It......Hillary should have spent less time collecting money on Wall Street and more time collecting votes in Wisconsin.