A game-changer for theologian and Church history if true. 🙂

While so much attention was focused on John McCain’s funeral, Aretha Franklin’s turned out to be pretty God-awful as well. More Trump-bashing, breast-grabbing, and the kind of truly-inclusive audience only the Left could appreciate: vile racists and lecherous old rapists. I’m not sure Aretha would have been happy at that. Smokey Robinson sure wasn’t.

Taken together, the two funerals just underscore the fact that everything is now politicized. And the folks responsible for arranging both events ought to be ashamed of themselves. There was plenty about John McCain’s life, and certainly Aretha’s, to be celebrated. But this is what happens when the Left gets desperate – they’re like the child at the supermarket taking the greatest tantrum until everyone is forced to notice them. As Michael Walsh writes:

As the fall elections approach, it’s clear that the Left side of the aisle is getting nuttier by the day. The public spectacles of the two funerals, Aretha Franklin’s and John McCain’s, brought forth the usual characters from our long-running American sitcom-cum-political soap opera, including a lecherous Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan in Detroit; and the leading lights of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman, in Washington, almost all of whom seemed not to have the dearly departed on their minds, but their bete noire in the White House, Donald Trump. Old feuds, such as that between Bush and McCain, were forgotten as, like Marc Antony over the bleeding corpse of Julius Caesar, they delivered their orations designed not so much to praise McCain but to bury Trump.

When even funerals are politicized — and let’s face it, McCain got the ball rolling on that score well before his death — then we have come to the end of Civility Road, for there is literally nothing sacred any more, even on the secular Left. But this is what happens when your entire world revolves around politics, and the politics of the moment are not going your way. When all you believe in is a quasi-religious ideology then you are going to be frequently frustrated when their Satan beats your God every few years. By investing every bit of psychic and emotional and misplaced spiritual energy into something as definitionally changeable as who occupies the White House, you are doomed to perpetual frustration.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Why is the that the Left are the ones that equate African-Americans with monkeys? As the saying goes, only dogs hear dog whistles.

Leave it to the great Victor Davis Hanson to tell it like it is on this Labor Day – quite different than what you’ll hear on the mind-numbing and brain-frying cable news networks:

I am now on a brief annual teaching stint at Hillsdale College in southern Michigan, in one of the poorer areas of the state. Here, too, things strike the stranger as far better than they were five years ago. There are more factory jobs in this greater automotive circumference. The food lines seem shorter, people more confident. There are more roads being paved, houses painted, and stores spruced up.

Abroad, for all the hatred of Donald Trump, there is a quiet, though usually repressed, recognition that the United States is doing what it long should have been doing—leading the world to an economic recovery, despite Trump’s trash-talking tariffs, and going to the mat with China. Critics concede that China is culpable of all sorts of trade violations. They add in the past that nothing much worked to persuade them to follow the global norms of currency, labor, environmental, and safety regulations, as well as copyright and patent laws. And while they abhor tariffs, they nonetheless have no ideas otherwise how to nudge China to follow the rules of global citizenship.

For all the op-eds condemning a polarizing Trump who has wrecked American foreign policy, there are also more silent concessions among many analysts that the team of Mike Pompeo, Jim Mattis, John Bolton, and Nikki Haley is impressive. They are more likely than imagined alternatives to stop any more Iranian nonsense on the seas of the Persian Gulf, or tune out the periodic ultimatums of the Palestinians, or take seriously the nuclear threats of North Korea, or get tough when Putin deserves tough treatment—and they have the will and, increasingly, the means to do what they say. The policy is to be ready for a fight, but neither to prompt nor to welcome one. For Trump, who values ratings and money most of all, wars can quickly lose viewers and cost too much.

In sum, we are witnessing one of the great ironies of the modern age. Minorities who are not Trump supporters are doing better under Trump than any past president, liberal or conservative. Environmentalists who despise him know that America has become more effective than its green European critics in reducing carbon emissions, largely through the breakneck production of natural gas. Diplomats who loathe Trump find their good cop talk and soft power has more resonance once it is backed up by a better military, a better national security team, and an unpredictable commander-in-chief who might just be capable of doing anything at any time to anyone anywhere in the defense of American interests and sovereignty.

NeverTrump legal scholars are perplexed that never has a Republican president appointed so many qualified judges and seen them confirmed so quickly. They wonder how that could be so, without at least one David Souter or Harriet Miers. They despair that it might become true that a president who enlists the best and brightest of the “you can’t dare do that” administrative state and the revolving Washington and New York diplomatic and financial elite, is a president who will be rendered inert.

How can things be getting concretely better than they were during the Obama years when expert opinion insists things are getting worse?

Read the whole thing and be amazed.

Nike is about to find out the hard way that Republicans and conservatives buy sneakers too. I guarantee this will not end well.