Merkel and NFL Socialists Lose while Trump, the Bulldozer President, Keeps on Rolling -- So Did Jacques Chirac

THE REAL STORY ABOUT FRENCH PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC. Let me tell you a story about conservative French President Jacques Chirac. It happened in 2002 at the cup final of the French Football Federation. I know this story is absolutely true because I was watching the match on TV when it happened and saw the live coverage. • • • FRENCH PRESIDENT CHIRAC DEMANDS RESPECT FOR THE MARSEILLAISE. The match was between the northern French team of the city of Lorient and the Corsican side of the city of Bastia. Corsica, the island south of the French mainland that is part of France but has a nationalist movement that wants greater autonomy, freedom from some French laws and the use of the Corsican language. It is a long-running dispute that has resulted in French officials being murdered and French government buildings being vandalized. • The French national anthem, the Marseillaise, is played before cup finals. • To fully appreciate what happened on that September evening in 2002, it is important to know that while the French are not as devoted to their Tricolor flag as Americans are to their Stars and Stripes, the Marseillaise is the very symbol of the French Republic and the French stand and sing along whenever it is played. Often, at a time of great stress or at a gathering that has national significance, the French spontaneously break into singing the Marseillaise. Think of that famous scene in Rick's Cafe in "Casablanca" when the Free French sing the Marseilliaise to drown out Nazis singing German songs -- it is in no way an exaggeration of the devotion the French have to their national anthem, the Marseillaise. • At the September 2002 French cup final, President Chirac and the entire stadium audience stood up when the Marseillaise started and began to sing. Then, something unusual happened. Booing was heard. The booing appeared to come from the Corsican section of the crowd at the Stade de France. • A furious President Chirac demanded a microphone and told the live television audience and all the spectators that the booing and whistling was an insult to France. Here are President Chirac's words : "A few foolish people have thought it fit to boo the Marseillaise. It's unacceptable and intolerable. I will not tolerate it and I will not accept something that undermines the values of the Republic. I have asked for the start of the game to be put off and asked the French Football Federation to apologize to France, which has been humiliated by this gesture." • Then, the President left the presidential box and the players returned to their dressing rooms while French Football Federation president Claude Simonet asked the crowd to stop booing or the game would not start. Mr. Simonet addressed the crowd with a microphone saying : "the French Federation wishes to apologize because the Marseillaise was booed. It's our national anthem and everybody must respect it. The game will only start when tranquillity returns." • Francois Nicolai, the president of the Bastia club, also apologized to President Chirac, who eventually returned to his seat to watch the game. • • • PRESIDENT TRUMP DEFENDS THE AMERICAN FLAG AND NATIONAL ANTHEM. President Trump gave an interview to Fox News "Fox & Friends" program on Thursday morning, and once again said that NFL owners are “afraid” to act against their players protesting the national anthem at games across the country. President Trump told Fox News : “The NFL is in a box and they have to do something about it. I think they’re afraid of their players, if you want to know the truth." The President said the NFL has a wide range of rules, suggesting the league should apply new rules to those who would protest the anthem by kneeling : “They have rules for everything -- you can’t dance in the end zone, you can’t wear pink socks relative to breast cancer -- they have rules for everything. Why aren’t they honoring this country by enforcing a rule that’s been in existence for a long time?” Trump suggested that stadiums are “losing” fans amid the controversy : “The stadiums are losing -- there are a lot of empty seats, I couldn’t even believe it.” Trump concluded : “The NFL cannot disrespect our country, they cannot disrespect our flag, or our National Anthem.” • • • THE MEDIA COVERS UP FAN BOOING. American Thinker's Rick Moran reported on Thursday that : "Networks broadcasting NFL games refused to allow camera shots of angry fans booing kneeling players during the National Anthem. The Sporting News also reports that one behind-the-scenes TV employee said that networks told the camera operators not to pan the crowd during the Anthem which would have showed what viewers could easily hear, booing fans. 'Networks typically do not televise the National Anthem except for the Super Bowl and other special occasions, but they recognized there would be intense viewer interest this past weekend. Some fans, if they reacted at all, happily clapped and cheered during protests, but others did not, and they angrily let their home teams know it. The audio mics picked up the boos. Yet the TV networks mostly avoided crowd shots Sunday, so there was never a chance for viewers to see fans jeering players. A segment of Patriots fans in Foxborough, Mass., for example, nearly booed their own players off the field when some Pats sat or kneeled, with some screaming, 'Stand up!' " One behind-the-scenes TV staffer at another stadium told Sporting News that camera operators were ordered to avoid crowd shots in case they showed fans counter-protesting the protests. Moran says : "Anyone who had the sound up during the playing of the Anthem last Sunday could hear the outpouring of anger and booing at the players. It really doesn't matter if the media shows angry football fans booing players for kneeling during the Anthem. I think there's a growing realization that this is an issue Trump can't lose on. The more the media dotes on kneeling players, the more resentment of ordinary fans is stoked and the more likely that marginal fans -- the fans that the league and TV networks depend on for about 1/3 of their audience -- will change channels or not bother to turn the game on at all. That would be a catastrophe for the league and the networks. Opposition to the protest will continue to build week by week. And if teams and the league don't believe that, they will be in for a very rude awakening." • • • IS THE NFL SOCIALIST? Blogger Gary Gindler thinks so. He wrote for American Thinker on Thursday : "Quasi-socialism is one of the reasons that American football has not spread to the entire planet, as soccer did. Most professional sports leagues in the US are quasi-socialist enterprises within capitalist corporate America. Outwardly, the NFL looks like a successful corporation, but from within, this corporation has implemented principles of doing business that are alien to America. Sooner or later, the conflict between the quasi-socialist paradise inside the NFL and its capitalist encirclement was bound to happen." Gindler cites the NFL's collective agreement with advertisers to distribute profit from advertising evenly, the draft in which the worst teams get the first picks, and the wage controls. Gindler says : "The minimum salary for all gladiators is set in advance. If the player is drafted into the team, he automatically becomes a millionaire, regardless of the quality of the game. This, as we know, is one of the main features of the socialist economy. What is surprising is the fact that not only the minimum but also the maximum salary in the NFL is also limited. How well a person plays, how many points he brings to his team does not matter. There is a salary ceiling that you will not jump over. Even in the Soviet Union, there was no such restriction -- world-class athletes and show business stars earned without any artificial restrictions. • It is clear, says Gindler, that initially the protest of NFL players was inspired by political opponents of Trump. But when it came down to the disrespect of the national flag and humiliation of the National Anthem : "Even the Democrats realized that this boomerang would hit hard on return. After all, professional sports do not produce anything materially necessary and exist only at the expense of their long-standing reputation. A remarkable confirmation of this is the loud silence of the Democrats on the issue of the humiliation of the National Anthem. They immediately realized that Trump's position in this matter was one hundred percent winning, and they prudently decided to keep quiet. In fact, in the United States, there are several million patriotic Democrats who decided not to vote in 2016 because they did not trust the candidate for their party, Hillary Clinton. The patriotic position of the Republicans on the issue of the American Anthem will inevitably push many patriotic Democrats toward Trump’s camp." Gindler says : "As everybody knows, the wave of protests began with football player Colin Kaepernick last year. It was he who first refused to stand during the performance of the National Anthem, and instead knelt. Why did this athlete, who prefers T-shirts with Fidel Castro, go for it? Allegedly because of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter. But in fact, he knelt down to impress his new girlfriend, who is known to be a radical left supporter of BLM. But after the numerous pogroms committed by BLM in various cities across America during the past year, and the total absence of BLM members in areas hit by recent hurricanes (where it was just plain necessary to save the lives of black Americans), it became clear to all that BLM folks are just ordinary bandits who took cover as fighters against racism." Last Sunday, only 12% of all NFL players did not stand up during the performance of the American Anthem, and 88% did, and Gindler says this is proof "that the attempt to turn the sport into a political weapon has failed, as have other leftists' attempts to use non-standard political weapons." • Certainly, the soccer-football world is not socialist. Salaries are negotiated and can be breath-takingly high for the best players. Gindler feels that "quasi-socialism is one of the reasons that American football has not spread to the entire planet....That’s why the final championship game of the American football -- the Super Bowl -- is watched by about 100 million people (about a third of the whole country). And the final game of the World championship in soccer is watched by more than three billion people (about half of the entire planet)." • • • DID SOCIALIST IDEAS SINK MERKEL ON SUNDAY? Handelsblatt, the leading German business newspaper, wrote on Monday that "many disgruntled Germans chose the AfD mainly as a protest vote, despite its xenophobia not because of it." Thomas Sigmund, Handelsblatt's political chief, wrote : "It was more than a warning for Germany’s big-tent parties. For the first time since World War II, a party on the far right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), succeeded in making the leap into the federal parliament. Nearly one in seven German citizens did not actually vote for the AfD full-heartedly, but protested the obfuscation strategy of a ponderous and tired government. In the refugee crisis and the seemingly never-ending Eurozone crisis, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), who have been in a coalition for the past four years with the center-left Social Democrats, were never able to perceive, let alone understand, many people’s feelings. The AfD, like a vacuum cleaner, sucked away votes from the CDU/CSU and above all the SPD." Sigmund says : "the A in AfD no longer stands for Alternative, but for the German word “Aufstand” (revolt) in the polling booth. In the past, disgruntled voters vented their frustrations among friends and at their local pubs. On Sunday, they gave their resentment a vote in the Bundestag." For Sigmund, the vote for the AfD was an economic and social vote : "All those who will repeat again and again in the coming days that Germany has never been as well off as it is today are both right and wrong. Former German President Roman Herzog once said : 'Let’s talk about people, because a living being is more valuable that all the treasures of this world.' You can come up with rosy statistics on growth, jobs and tax revenues if you like, but that’s not enough to soothe the anxieties many citizens feel as a result of immigration, fear of job loss due to technology, and more generally the sorry state the world is in.' " Sigmund insists that AfD top candidates Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel "were not elected because of their anti-Semitic outbursts and xenophobic provocations, but in spite of these repugnant utterances. How many citizens had to overcome their own conscience to vote for a party that seeks to rewrite the dark history of both world wars with a stroke of the pen? Many did so despite their revulsion for the AfD. The silent revolt of many citizens stems from the firm belief that the German parliament, the Bundestag, is no longer dominated merely by a mega-coalition of the CDU/CSU with the SPD, but that the Green Party and the Left Party are often also involved in that coalition. Many voters felt that their last resort was to strengthen the fringes, knowing full well what the consequences will be in the Bundestag in the next four years, when many AfD members of parliament allow their crude thoughts to flow freely at the lectern....the new administration will have to address the pressing questions anxious citizens ask." • Socialism dies hard once installed. It is, as the old truism says, hard to take away from people gifts the government has given them. They begin to see the perks as their 'right' and not as a drain on their pocketbooks because of the ever-growing taxes required to keep paying the perks and increasing them in order to entice voters to vote for the politicians who give the perks. There have been signs for more than a year that German voters are tired of paying for the rest of a Europe that has become the recipient of the German perks. If the Sunday rise in votes for the AfD really means that Germans are fed up with the status quo in Germany -- where Merkel's migrants take more and more German tax Euros -- and are fed up equally with the EU -- where the German taxpayer checkbook is the unofficial treasury -- it would spell a watershed change, not only in the chances for a future collapse of the socialist-welfare EU, but also in the chances for Merkel and her open-door open-wallet policies to continuen, even in the mid-term. • • • IS TRUMP ACTUALLY RIGHT??? To come back to where we started, there is a resonating truth to President Trump's plain speaking confrontation of the issues and groups that are way out of sync with ordinary Americans and their 250-year-old value system. • Former New York mayor and billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg just told CBS "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert, who had asked him why he didn't run for President in 2106 : "Well, my advisors told me that a New York billionaire who's changed parties a number of times couldn't be elected. So I fired them." Colbert asked Bloomberg if he has any regrets about not running, and Bloomnberg answered : "No, I never look back." Bloomberg was once a registered Democrat before becoming a Republican shortly before running for mayor of New York in 2001. He then became an Independent, and would go on to serve three consecutive terms. • Bloomberg and Trump have a lot in common. But, Donald Trump had the guts to put his conservative American values on the line in a presidential race, while Michael Bloomberg -- one of the best mayors New York City has ever had by any measurement -- stepped back and turned to regulating the size of soft drink cups and the environment as his issues of preference. • American Thinker published an article on Thursday by James Arlandson, who begins with a list : "It's tough to admit that one is wrong, but not if one can learn from it. First the miscalculations, and then a new perspective. I was wrong when I treated his entry into the race as a publicity stunt. I was wrong when I thought his wisecrack about McCain's non-heroism would cause his campaign to implode. I was wrong when I thought his rough personality and discourteous speaking would sink him. I was wrong when I concluded that his missing detailed policy knowledge would edge him out of the debates with the GOP contenders. I was wrong when I believed he would fade in the primaries when he called people names ("Lying Ted" and "Little Marco"). I was wrong when I believed that his business dealings would make voters turn away in droves. I was wrong when I thought he should turn over his tax returns or else lose the nomination and elections. I was wrong when I believed that his comments about the wall and disparaging remarks about immigrants would lead to election losses. (He got 29% of the Hispanic vote.) I was wrong when I thought the October Surprise about groping was about to doom his victory chances. (I didn't want the news media to win, but I didn't think he would, either.) I was (happily) wrong when I thought Hillary would make mincemeat of him in the policy debates. I was (happily) wrong when I thought Hillary would defeat him in the election." • Arlandson then asks : "What am I supposed to learn from the brute reality embodied in that list? Populism wins? America has been degraded? It goes deeper. Let's flip the Trump Phenomenon 180 degrees. Here are just a few items in my thought experiment : What if his bombing the Syrian airfield was the right thing to do in international relations (leaving aside the moral question, which can be used to support the action)? What if his progress against ISIS is right? What if his Afghanistan speech and new military policy there show wisdom, sorely lacking in the last administration? What if he is hitting the right notes in his 'Rocket Man' slams? (Think of Reagan's Evil Empire and Bush's Axis of Evil.) What if his hard denunciation of nations in his UN speech was right, though traditional conservatives thought he was wrong? (He sounded a lot like an Old Testament prophet to me.) As to the NFL protests, what if his calling out the angry left that has insinuated itself into the wonderful and church-going black community was the right thing to do? What if his SOB comment, though inartful, won't sink him politically because it expresses what millions of people are feeling, though traditional conservatives tut-tutted him? What if he is right on the trade deals? (I saw a report on NHK World News, a Japanese news and culture broadcast, that says Japan does indeed slap tariffs on our products.) How am I supposed to react when I have heard many Christian leaders say in public, but not in the mainstream news media, that this man is doing God's work in bulldozing the old ways and knocking things around, just like an Old Testament prophet -- that he's a 'chaos candidate'? (At first I thought they were crazy, but what if they're right?) How am I supposed to react when I saw a report from a woman who serves on Trump's spiritual advisory committee, which said that he wants his White House to be known as prayerful -- the most praying White House in history? What if all the tut-tutting from traditional conservatives (like me) is one big miscalculation, while Trump, in the main, is touching a nerve that needs to be touched?" • Those are powerful questions coming from a traditional conservative. And, Arlandson's last question is the key : "But what if the general trend of a bulldozer President is what the doctor ordered at this time in our nation's history, at this time? He knows how to fight the left, regardless whether one sees America embroiled a culture 'war' or just an intense discussion. There is an undeniable Teflon quality to him. That to me is a sign that he is a cultural phenomenon that could benefit this country greatly. We shall see how this thought experiment goes, when people vote in 2018 and 2020." Arlandson's website is Live as Free People. • • • DEAR READERS, Donald Trump has been pummelled so much and with such hatred that it's amazing that he is still standing. But not only is he still standing, he is fighting back and winning. Compare the mainstream media's witch hunt to burn Trump at the stake with its hero worship of Barack Obama, who some MSM types seem to believe is still President. We have heard not one peep from these propagandists who call themselves journalists about Obama's speeches to Wall Street, for which he's pulling in $400,000 a pop. But, Joseph Curl at the Washington Times has put together reports on what the MSM don't cover -- raking-in of mega-dollars by former Democrat Presidents (and their wives). For example, Bloomberg reported that Obama spoke to clients of Northern Trust Corp. for about $400,000 and he “reminisced about the White House for Carlyle Group LP, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms.” And he would “give a keynote speech at investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP’s health-care conference,” which happened last Monday. The wire service Agence France-Presse reported the Cantor Fitzgerald speech was worth about $400,000. These three speaking engagements we know about put $1.2 million in Obama's bank account. And, that's fine -- if the Wall Street Bow-Tie Brigade wants to toss its money at a President who failed at everything he touched, it's none of our business. • BUT, it is our business that the media's hypocrisy covers up Obama's speaking fees while it excoriates several Cabinet officers who are using private planes to do the People's business. Did they complain about Nancy Pelosi's request a few years ago when she was Speaker of the House for a larger military jet to take her home to San Francisco on weekends. Records obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Judicial Watch show in January 2011, show that Pelosi used the Air Force aircraft for a total of 43 trips, covering 90,155 miles, from January 1 through October 1, 2010. Other records obtained by Judicial Watch through FOIA show the former Speaker’s military travel cost the USAF $2,100,744.59 over one two-year period -- $101,429.14 of which was for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol. For example, purchases for one Pelosi-led congressional delegation traveling from Washington, DC, through Tel Aviv, Israel to Baghdad, Iraq May 15-20, 2008 included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Crème, Maker’s Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine. • Where is the fairness?? It doesn't exist. And that is why a Bulldozer President is just what America needs. For tax reform. For immigration control. For repealing the disastrous Obamacare. And for saving the American Flag and National Anthem from the clutches of BLM and its NFL foot soldiers. MAGA -- Make America Great Again.