By DEXTER DUGGAN
The 12-month calendar on your kitchen wall probably didn’t have space enough on the little square for the 18th of April to enter everything happening that day to help the conservative agenda of Donald Trump.
Not only did the president underline his positive pro-American economic agenda by traveling to a Kenosha, Wis., manufacturer to speak, but also the anti-Trump media’s swooning love song for a liberal political hopeful in Georgia hit a sour note when Democrat Jon Ossoff was forced into a June runoff election for a U.S. House seat.
The same day, an unfortunate double reminder of the dangerous times of terrorism that Trump fights against occurred when a gunman with a Muslim name and rhetoric allegedly killed three men in Fresno, Calif., while French police arrested two men identified as radicalized Muslims, with a cache of firearms and explosives, who allegedly planned a violent attack as French presidential voting loomed.
Like the United States, France and other nations have been the scenes of radical Islamist deadly assaults.
Despite Trump’s two recent attempts to enhance U.S. security by vetting new arrivals to the U.S., judges exceeding their authority have rebuked the president’s orders.
Fresno police took into custody Kori Ali Muhammad on April 18, who shouted “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.” In addition to the three victims shot near a Catholic Charities office, the suspect had been sought for the killing of an unarmed security guard a few days earlier.
The Fresno police chief said early indications were that the killings weren’t related to terrorism but only to racism against white people. Feel better now?
One day before these newsworthy events, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, took his place hearing attorneys’ arguments at the nation’s High Court and was said to demonstrate his competence and knowledge early on.
A key campaign pledge by candidate Trump had been to put proven conservatives on the Supreme Court, and he appeared to have fulfilled that pledge with Gorsuch.
Conservative voters wanted judges who honored traditional legal foundations instead of “rights” mysteriously created from nowhere by liberal judges who couldn’t get the results they wanted unless they violated their judicial oath.
The U.S. has been dragged along that disastrous judicial path on various issues, from killing tens of millions of innocent unborn babies to shielding criminals convicted of serious offenses.
Trump, speaking at the Kenosha office of tool and diagnostics manufacturer Snap-on, Inc., on April 18, said, “No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days — that includes on military, on the border, on trade, on regulation, on law enforcement — we love our law enforcement — and on government reform,” according to the White House text.
“Today, we’re building on that optimism, and I’m proud to announce that we’re about to take bold, new steps to follow through on my pledge to Buy American and Hire American,” Trump said just before signing an executive order favoring American workers and jobs.
The president also said that NAFTA “has been a disaster for the United States, a complete and total disaster,” and if it can’t be improved, it’s gone.
This makes for a winning kind of connection with voters that the dominant anti-Trump media try to minimize, even while these media obsess on putting more left-wing Democrats into Congress who even turn out to be serious embarrassments in their campaigns.
A 30-year-old left-winger in Georgia, Jon Ossoff, was all but proclaimed by media cheerleaders to be a new member of the U.S. House of Representatives as he ran in a special election to fill the Sixth District vacancy created when conservative GOP Cong. Tom Price became Trump’s new secretary of Health and Human Services.
That was premature media overconfidence.
And even as late as the April 18 election day, Ossoff didn’t have a good answer as to why he doesn’t live in the Sixth District (and therefore wasn’t eligible to vote for himself).
CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza noted that although it’s not illegal to live outside his district, Ossoff “looked decidedly uncomfortable” giving an answer that included the statement: “No one knew there was going to be an election coming” for the district.
So how many other districts might he decide to run for without having residence if he thinks he has an opportunity and plenty of Hollywood cash?
Ossoff also said he’d been living for 12 years with his girlfriend, a medical student, to support her career. However, when asked by a reporter about marriage plans, Ossoff wasn’t ready to say when he’d be giving her that kind of dedicated support.
The Atlanta-area election was called a “jungle primary” because of the thicket of 18 candidates — 11 boisterous Republicans, five Democrats and two independents. If one of them could manage to come in with 50 percent plus one of the vote, that person would go straight to Congress.
Even though Ossoff was the specially anointed one among the Democrat hopefuls — drawing more than $8 million in contributions, much from out of state — he still fell about two points short of the minimum for victory, meaning a June 20 runoff for the top two vote-getters.
The number-two finisher, Republican Karen Handel, received about 20 percent of the vote.
Including Handel, the six Republicans immediately trailing Ossoff won a total of 51 percent of the vote.
Opinion was split even among pro-lifers as to whom to favor in the “jungle.”
On February 21, the website of the Georgia Right to Life PAC endorsed state Sen. Judson Hill of Marietta for the congressional seat, while the national pro-life activist Susan B. Anthony List organization, based in Washington, D.C., favored Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state.
Upon Handel’s Number Two finish, SBA List hailed her advance to the June runoff and recalled she had been a whistleblower against Planned Parenthood. In an April 19 news release, SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said:
“Karen Handel is the only candidate with the courage to stand up to the abortion lobby. While working at the Susan G. Komen Foundation, she was instrumental in exposing Planned Parenthood’s deception and failure to provide mammograms. We need principled pro-life leaders like Karen in Congress to fight for women and children and get American taxpayers out of the abortion business.”
LifeSiteNews.com reported on April 19: “Handel is well-known to the pro-life movement for her role at Susan G. Komen for the Cure when it announced in 2011 it would stop funding Planned Parenthood. Handel’s job was to cut ties between the abortion giant and the breast-cancer foundation.
“Planned Parenthood responded with a media blitz that led Komen to retract its decision. Handel quit and wrote Planned Bullyhood: The Truth Behind the Headlines About the Planned Parenthood Funding Battle With Susan G. Komen for the Cure,” LifeSiteNews.com said.
The Washington Free Beacon conservative website posted early April 19 that before the vote results were known, Handel said she was glad there’d been a “competitive campaign” among Republicans, but only a “coronation” among Democrats for Ossoff’s candidacy.
“There was no (GOP) coronation, which is what occurred on the Democratic side,” the Free Beacon quoted Handel. “Everyone brought great ideas and new perspectives to the table and I appreciated that.”
The SBA List statement also said: “We are encouraged to see Karen Handel, a fearless champion of unborn children and their mothers, move forward in this critical race for the pro-life movement. Handel is by far the best qualified to replace recently confirmed HHS Secretary Tom Price. Her opponent, Jon Ossoff, is an extremist backed by America’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood.”
No Cigar
The liberal Politico website on April 19 noted that Democrats hoping to ride a wave of resistance to the supposedly hated Trump instead have to be asking themselves, “When does the winning start?”
Democrats already lost an April 11 Kansas congressional special election outright for a seat that had been vacated when conservative Republican Mike Pompeo was named by Trump to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Politico story said, “Ossoff’s moral victory — capturing 48 percent of the vote in a conservative-oriented district — was welcome, but after two successive close-but-no-cigar finishes in House special elections in Georgia and Kansas, a new worry is beginning to set in.
“For all the anger, energy, and money swirling at the grassroots level, Democrats didn’t manage to pick off the first two Republican-held congressional seats they contended for in the Trump era, and the prospects aren’t markedly better in the next few House races coming up: the Montana race at the end of May, and the South Carolina contest on June 20,” Politico said.
National radio talk host Hugh Hewitt said early on April 19 that there’s no effective “Resistance” movement to Trump despite the left turning out some marchers
“Ossoff will get blown out” by Handel in the June election, Hewitt said. “. . . She will be terrific.”
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