The Crumbling of Merkel's Legitimacy in Germany Is a Warning to America, Whose Constitutional Compact Is in Grave Danger

The real Donald Trump showed up at Wednesday's debate -- a serious, prepared, dry-witted businessman -- and he walloped Hillary Clinton with her memorized set pieces and deadpan sick laugh. ~~~~~~ Of course, the mainstream media is reporting just the opposite -- and it only reinforces Trump's charge that the media is rigging the election against him and for Hillary. But, consider the USC-LA Times daily "Daybreak Poll" poll released Thursday morning after the debate -- it shows Trump slightly ahead and rising, while Hillary is behind and falling. Throughout this election, the USC/LA Times Presidential Election Poll has been an out-lier, giving Trump better results than other polls, often by substantial margins. It uses a radically different design intended to show trends. The poll describes itself as a "pioneering approach to tracking changes in Americans' opinions throughout a campaign for the White House. Around 3000 respondents in our representative panel are asked questions on a regular basis on what they care about most in the election, and on their attitudes toward their preferred candidates." The "Daybreak poll" is updated just after midnight every day of the week, and it shows that on Thursday morning Trump reversed his decline and is ahead by a half percent, 44.4% to 43.8%. Trump's lead is statistically insignificant, but the trendlines show that Trump has led by statistically significant margins for most of the time since July. The consensus in the media -- 95% of them want Hillary to win -- is that Trump needs to be killed off as soon as possible. But nobody has a clue as to what turnout will be, how much vote fraud there will be, or whether unenthusiastic Hillary supporters will bother to vote. And if new voters flock to support Trump, the turnout models used by traditional polls, based on past experience, may be worthless. Nobody knows. ~~~~~~ But we do know that one poll showed Trump and Clinton in a dead heat just before the debate. The prestigious Rasmussen poll conducted between October 16 and 18 interviewed 1,500 likely voters and shows Trump and Clinton tied at 42%. That's an improvement for Trump, who was trailing Clinton, 42% to 41%, in the Rasmussen poll published last week. A large 84% of respondents are sure about how they will vote, with both candidates getting equal preference (47%). And, even among voters who are likely to change their minds, it is a statistical tie with Clinton getting 35% and Trump 34%. The margin of sampling error was +/- 2.5%. ~~~~~~ Here is something to think about. It wasn't raised during Wednesday's debate, but on that very day, US Treasury statistics showed that the federal debt has ballooned $236,991,525,500 in the 22 days since the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The data shows that at the close of business on September 26, the federal debt was 19,529,588,502,748. At the end of Tuesday's business day, it was 19,766,580,028,249. CNS News reports the debate-period debt rise is more than all the debt the federal government accumulated between the founding of the US and the end of fiscal 1944. According to CNS News, the hike translates into a daily increase of $10,772,342,068 -- and $1,843 for every person who voted in the 2012 presidential election. ~~~~~~ The media doesn't like to talk about debt, but one topic always discussed by the media and the two candidates is the question of immigration. Unfortunately, it is always discussed as a matter of how to 'vet' refugees, and whether Hillary's view that women and children must prevail as an indication of "who we are" as Americans -- the phrase that I think should be banned from US political debate. ~~~~~~ Europe has a different, more profound, view of refugees and immigration. On Thursday, the Gatestone Institute published an article titled "Germans Leaving Germany 'In Droves'" by Soeren Kern. You can read the full article at https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9154/germans-leaving-germany. Its essence is that many highly educated Germans have left Germany during the past decade. The newspaper Die Welt reports that a growing number of Germans are leaving Germany for good, as mass immigration transforms parts of the country beyond recognition. Data from the German statistics agency, Destatis, shows that 138,000 Germans left Germany in 2015. More are expected to emigrate in 2016. In a story on brain drain, Die Welt reported that more than 1.5 million Germans, many of them highly educated, left Germany during the past decade. [Germany has a popuation of 80 million.] The statistics do not say why Germans are emigrating, but anecdotal evidence shows that many are finding insupportable the true cost -- financial, social and cultural -- of Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to allow more than one million mostly Moslem migrants to enter the country in 2015. At least 300,000 more migrants are expected to arrive in Germany in 2016, according to Germany's migration office. Mass migration has contributed to a growing sense of insecurity in Germany, which is facing a spike in migrant crime, including an epidemic of rapes and sexual assaults. Mass migration is also accelerating the Islamization of Germany. Many Germans appear to be losing hope about the future direction of their country. Kern offers a startling October quote by Aras Bacho, an 18-year-old Syrian migrant in Der Freitag : "We refugees... do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. And please take Saxony and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with you.... Why do you not go to another country? We are sick of you!" This outburst was removed from German media, but with aggressive words like these from refugee migrants, one can understand the success of AfD, the conservative movement and political party challenging the center German political coalition by supporting the popular German desire to halt Moslem immigration and turn around Chancellor Merkel's open door policy. A real estate agent in a town near Lake Balaton, a popular tourist destination in western Hungary, said that 80% of the Germans relocating there cite the migration crisis as the main reason for their desire to leave Germany. Open letters printed by German newspapers from Germans who have left their country include the following comments : "I believe that Islam does not belong to Germany. I regard it as a foreign entity which has brought the West more problems than benefits. In my opinion, many followers of this religion are rude, demanding and despise Germany." -- "I believe that immigration is producing major and irreversible changes in German society. I am angry that this is happening without the direct approval of German citizens....I believe that it is a shame that in Germany Jews must again be afraid to be Jews." -- "My husband sometimes says he has the feeling that we are now the largest minority with no lobby. For each group there is an institution, a location, a public interest, but for us, a heterosexual married couple with two children, not unemployed, neither handicapped nor Islamic, for people like us there is no longer any interest." These comments must resonate with American Trump supporters who see their way of life being destroyed by Progressive elites trying to de-construct the United States. ~~~~~~ Many Germans have noted the trend toward reverse integration, in which German families are expected to adapt to the customs and attitudes of migrants, rather than the other way around. Kern quotes an October 14 letter by a Munich mother to the Munich newspaper Tageszeitung -- a mother of two, who wrote about her decision to move her family out of the city because migrants were making her life there impossible. In the letter, addressed to Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter, she wrote: "Today I want to write you a kind of farewell letter about why I and my family are leaving the city, even though probably no one cares. I am 35 years old, living here with my two young sons and my husband in an upscale semi-detached house with parking. So you could say we are very well off for Munich standards....We live very well with plenty of space and next to a green park. So why would a family like us decide to leave the city?....I assume that your children do not use public facilities, that they do not use public transportation, and that they do not attend public schools in 'problem areas.' I also assume that you and other politicians rarely if ever go for walks here. So on a Monday morning I attended a neighborhood women's breakfast that was sponsored by the City of Munich. Here I met about 6-8 mothers, some with their children. All of the women wore headscarves and none of them spoke German. The organizers of the event quickly informed me I will probably find it hard to integrate myself here (their exact words!!!). I should note that I am German. I speak fluent German and I do not wear a headscarf. So I smiled a little and said I would try to integrate myself. Unfortunately, I brought a salami and ham sandwich to the breakfast, to which everyone was asked to bring something. So of course I had even less chance of integrating. I was not able to speak German to anyone at this women's breakfast, which is actually supposed to promote integration, nor was anyone interested in doing so. The organizers did not insist on anyone speaking German, and the women, who appeared to be part of an established Arab-Turkish group, simply wanted to use the room. I then asked about the family brunch....I was advised that the brunch would be held in separate rooms. Men and women separately. At first I thought it was a bad joke. Unfortunately, it was not....How can the City of Munich tolerate such a thing? In my view, the entire concept of these events to promote integration must be called into question. I was informed that I am not allowed to include pork in my child's lunchbox!!! Hello?! We are in Germany here! In summary, I find conditions here that make me feel that we are not really wanted here. That our family does not really fit in here. My husband sometimes says he has the feeling that we are now the largest minority with no lobby. For each group there is an institution, a location, a public interest, but for us, a heterosexual married couple with two children, not unemployed, neither handicapped nor Islamic, for people like us there is no longer any interest. When I mentioned at my son's preschool that we are considering moving out of the city and I told them the reasons why, I was vigorously attacked by the school's leadership. Because of people like us, they said, integration does not work, precisely because we remove our children. At least two other mothers have become wildly abusive. The management has now branded me 'xenophobic.' This is exactly the reason why people like me lose their patience and we choose to vote for other political parties....Quite honestly, I have traveled half the world, have more foreign friends than German and have absolutely no prejudices or aversions to people because of their origin. I have seen much of the world and I know that the way integration is done here will cause others to come to the same conclusion as we have: either we send our children to private schools and kindergartens, or we move to other communities. Well then, so long!!!!!!!!!!!" ~~~~~~ Does that remind Americans of some areas in the United States where English is no longer used and American customs are suppressed -- where immigrants have co-opted America instead of integrating into it. These personal German accounts of life in today's Merkel-created-and-led open-door Germany are often said to be coming from "the ubiquitous 'far right'" which has increased its vote-share in Germany recently. An example of this is that Chancellor Merkel suffered a serious defeat in her own home state, where her Christian Democratic Party placed second to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which received 22% of the vote. But, despite all the hateful comments in the German media about “the far right,” many supporters of AfD have come fromtraditional German parties, including the 23,000 from Merkel's very own CDP. AfD sees itself as an “alternative” party -- it is nationalist, populist and anti-mass migration. But, it would be difficult not to be 'far right' after your own country's political/economic elite has imported one million immigrants and refugees in a single year. ~~~~~~ What is Merkel's view on this matter. She says : “We took nothing away from people here. We are still achieving our big goal of maintaining and improving the quality of life in Germany. We did not reduce benefits for anyone in Germany as a result of the aid for refugees. In fact, we actually saw social improvements in some areas.” This is Marxist “economism,” perhaps a leftover from Merkel's USSR-controlled East Germany upbringing. As Frauke Petry of the AfD put it : "Angela Merkel defeats herself. Merkel and the SPD deceive the citizens, whether it be on the financial crisis or the migrant crisis. They are destroying this country and that’s why people are voting for AfD.” Even if it were true that Germany has an endless pot of gold for both refugees and native Germans, Merkel conspicuously ignores the Cologne mass sexual-abuse case, islamic terrorist attacks on Germans, the support for ISIS in German cities, Germany's many Moslem ghettoes, and the increasing cases of German courts refusing to uphold German law when Moslems are involved -- making decisions based on Sharia, especially in cases where underage girls are married off to older men, illegal under German law but condoned by some German courts. In a recent case, a couple arrived at a refugee shelter in Aschaffenburg in August 2015. The Youth Welfare Office refused to recognize their marriage and separated the 15-year-old girl from her 21-year-old husband. The couple filed a lawsuit and a family court ruled in favor of the Youth Welfare Office, which claimed to be the girl's legal guardian. But, the court in Bamberg overturned that ruling, determining that, according to Sharia law, the marriage is valid because it has already been consummated, and therefore the Youth Welfare Office has no legal authority to separate the couple. The ruling -- which has been described as a "crash course in Syrian Islamic marriage law" -- ignited a firestorm of criticism. Some accused the court in Bamberg of applying Sharia law over German law to legalize a practice that is banned in Germany. Merkel and her coalition are now vowing to outlaw child marriage by annulling Sharia marriages that do not comply with German law. ~~~~~~ These stories may seem to Americans to be impossible in the US, but if Hillary and the Progressive Democrats win, they have promised to follow the Merkel model and open the doors to Syrian refugees and other migrants, despite the American majority opinion that Trump is right in demanding border control and deportation of at least criminal illegal immigrants. There are also EU countries that reject the Merkel open-door model for migration. Hungary, The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, all former Communist countries, oppose the EU plan to relocate 160,000 "asylum seekers," which they say is an "EU diktat" that infringes on national sovereignty. The EU 'diktat' at stake is the the European Commission's ironclad rule that "One of the principals underpinning the system is the primacy of EU law." To these eastern EU countries, the EU position must feel a lot like the USSR regime that obliterated all their local rights and laws. On October 2, Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected the EU's mandatory migrant relocation plan in a referendum, but failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to make the referendum legally binding. More than 97% of those who voted in the referendum answered 'no' to the question: "Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly?" But, since voter turnout was only 40%, short of the 50% participation required to make the referendum valid under Hungarian law, it has no political effect. In an address to Parliament on October 3, Hungarian President Orbán reiterated his plan to amend the Hungarian Constitution to ensure that the EU cannot settle migrants in Hungary. What was Brussels' response to the Hungarian referendum? Margaritis Schinas, chief spokesperson for the European Commission, the powerful [unelected] administrative arm of the EU, said that regardless of the referendum, EU law still takes precedence over Hungarian law : "On the referendum, if it had been legally valid, our comment would have been that we take note of it. Since it was declared legally void by the Hungarian electoral commission, we can now say that we also take note of it. One of the principals underpinning the system is the primacy of EU law." In a September 3, 2015 essay published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán wrote : "Let us not forget that those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Moslems. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? If we lose sight of this, the idea of Europe could become a minority interest in its own continent." And, Americans must feel the pain in Hungary's cry both for independence from the faraway Brussles elite and for survival of its Christian culture and heritage -- America has had eight years of a President whose unelected federal bureaucracy simply ignores the Constitution and laws when it cannot get its Progressive plans enacted by legal means. ~~~~~~ By studying Germany's experience, Americans will see a preview of what is coming to the United States if Hillary Clinton is elected. In both countries, members of the left (not only the Marxist Revolutionary Left but also the Progressive Democrat left) have deliberately fuelled political fires by promising to, or actually carrying out, massive increases in immigration, with its inevitable increasing islamisation. On Thursday, the day after the last US 2016 presidential debate, American Thinker's analyst Peter Skurkiss, asked, "Can the American Center Hold?" He quoted William Butler Yeats' 1916 poem, the prophetic 'The Second Coming,' where the Irish poet wrote just after the 1916 Irish Uprising against British rule : "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /...The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." ~~~~~~ Nothing could better describe 2016 America. Pew polls show that only 18% of Americans trust the government 'always or most of the time,' 81% do not trust the government, and 74% say public officials put their own interests ahead of the nation's. Constant bungling at the VA where civil service rules have priority over care for America's veterans; the FBI's shameful whitewashing of Hillary Clinton's email actions that are, or border on the, criminal; and, the Wikileaks dumps showing how Hillary Clinton peddled influence for what looks to any objective observer like donations to her Clinton Foundation. In the presidential campaign, the Wikileaks dumps and FBI reports have shown Hillary Clinton to be an extremely corrupt government official and an unrepentent liar -- all contribute to the American public's distrust of the federal government and feed the erosion in the cohesive constitutional "compact" that binds Americans together in a society where the core belief is that hard work and attentive citizenship lead to personal happiness and prosperity and good government. However, current accusations against Hillary Clinton are so solid that she has been labeled a liar to her face on the national stage. Trump even called for her prosecution and jailing. How could Trump get away with that? Because only 11% of the American public believe Hillary Clinton is trustworthy. Even Hillary's supporters accept the fact of her inherent crookedness -- the media and its talking heads are now saying "it doesn't matter" about her criminality and lies, mimicking a notorious Hillary line : "What difference does it make." Unfortunately, many will still vote for her anyway for the flimsy reason that she's a woman or a Democrat. Others want 'free stuff,' hoping that she's not lying to them, too. For over a generation, the media's severe liberal bias has been noticeably increasing. In 2016, Trump has finally fully exposed mass media as the propaganda arm of the Clinton campaign. It was just recently reported by the Center for Public Integrity that, of the money journalists have contributed to the campaigns, 96% went to Clinton. Skurkiss says : "Trump has driven this point home with a such a vengeance that the mainstream media has been stripped of its pretense of objectivity, balance, and fairness. It now stands as naked as the fabled emperor without clothes. This explains why Gallup estimates that only 32% of Americans have trust in the media, an all-time low. And as the revelations in the Wikileaks dumps sink in and Trump's charges resonate, this approval rating can only sink further." In addition, the growth of alternative news sources -- talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet -- have broken the old mainstream media's monopoly on public opinion. Skurkiss adds : "As for Trump and the matter of his legitimacy, the Clinton campaign is not running on Mrs. Clinton's achievements. How could they, as the woman's record as Secretary of State is one failure after another? As for her six-year stint in the Senate, Hillary did little more than take up space and prepare her run for the presidency. So instead, the Democrats and their accomplices in the media are directing their energy at trying to demonize Trump and his supporters, much like the Obama campaign successfully did to Mitt Romney in 2012. [Much like the European media is doing to those who oppose mass migration.] Whoever wins the White House in November will find their legitimacy tainted. This will make it extremely hard to govern. Even the legitimacy of the election process is doubted by 41% of the country, who think the presidential election is rigged to favor Clinton, much like the primaries were." ~~~~~~ Dear readers, America lives under a democracy that requires the consent of the governed. With the legitimacy of Congress, the presidency, government agencies (VA, FBI, DOJ, IRS), the mass media, and even the election process itself in question, it is critical to ask : "Can the American center hold?" The glue that helped the ruling elite hold things together in America is being destroyed by corruption and lies. And that brings us to the Trump comment that fired up the entire media on Thursday -- his statement that he will decide when the election results are counted if he will support them. Hillary was "horrified." The media says it has finally eliminated any chance Trump had of winning. And who was the last presidential candidate to challenge the election result? The media is not talking about this -- it was Al Gore, a Democrat, in 2000. Should Donald Trump have said he would support any election result -- knowing that there are fake, dead and non-citizen voters registered in every state, that Hillary has proven that she has only contempt for democratic processes, that George Soros money to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary's campaign fund is paying for the disruption of Trump rallies by hired thugs using violent attacks on his supporters? Only a fool would agree to support results in such a situation without first analyzing them for corruption. And Donald Trump is no fool.