posted February 19, 2017 11:45 PM            

Many less than delectable looking bare bottoms were aimed at the Trump towers in recent days. In the White House briefing room, the media tried to follow suit and got a lesson in how Trump trumps haters.

For a full week, the press stories -- funny how they all seem alike -- charged that the White House was a scene of “turmoil and chaos.” Once again, they prematurely pronounced Trump dead. Rasmussen told another story altogether. Voters indicated by 45% that we were heading in the right direction, “a higher level of optimism than found during any week of the Obama presidency.” He had a higher approval rate than Obama had for his entire second term and most of his first term, save for the few first months of his honeymoon period and the last 10 days of his term, (when apparently under cover he was planting IEDs for his successor). One Wednesday’s tracking poll showed “53% of likely voters approve of his performance.” A day after his solo press conference his ratings soared higher: “The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 55% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance.”

And well his ratings should improve. He’s made remarkable progress in his first month of office. At the NY Sun, Conrad Black details how much Trump has already accomplished, and looks ahead to what will come next:

The president is running well ahead of the Democrats in the polls, has twice the approval rating of the Congress, which has risen since the end of gridlock, and three times the approval rating of the media. If he can produce a tax system that enriches the lower-income families while spurring business reinvestment, he can generate between 3% and 4% percent economic growth, which would itself reduce the deficit by $400 to 500 billion a year.

The Obama war on business and the (Hillary) Clinton ambition to flatline the economy by making the voting majority of Americans members of some category of benefit recipient would go with it. It will be a mighty accomplishment if Donald Trump can bring the country back from President Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth around” by increasing the size of the public sector and forcing more people into forms of welfare, and refocus it on the entitlement of people to their incomes, as surely as they are entitled to enjoyment of their property -- tempered only by the need to provide what the government must have to function, as opposed to buying votes with public money and inciting class warfare.

If at the same time, or right on the heels of it, he can produce a health-care plan that is universal, but based on tax credits for those with adequate incomes, and assistance for those who do not, he will have ended 20 years of stagnant, mainly gridlocked government. He will also coopt the entire center of the political ground. At the same time, he will have assisted the moderate Democrats to regain control of their party and make it again a centrist reform party capable of governing without reducing the country to shambles, as it did under LBJ, President Carter, and Mr. Obama.At that point, the popularity of the administration will cow even the more overwrought sectors of the media.

The confected hysteria is subsiding, and Democrats must now face the fact that many of their cherished mistaken policies are about to be torched and the ashes dispersed over the country.

Hardly a partisan Republican, Glenn Greenwald notes that the rout of the Democrats is far more than skin deep.

The party has collapsed as a national political force," Greenwald said, adding that in addition to losing control of Congress and the White House, they are one state legislature away from allowing Republicans to hold unilateral Constitutional conventions, which require support of two-thirds of the 50 legislatures.

Democrats are so "obsessed" with calling Trump names, Greenwald said, they have failed to hold "autopsies" of their own electoral losses, as Republicans did in 2012 after former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) lost to Obama.

As if to underscore his point, this week, a Republican candidate for the Minnesota House, Anne Neu, trounced her opponent despite a concerted effort by the Democrats.

Donald Trump narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in the contest at the top of the ticket in Minnesota this year, but in other respects Republicans had an astoundingly good year. They amplified their majority in the Minnesota House to an unprecedented number in a presidential election cycle, when the turnout advantage usually accrues to Democrats, and took the majority in the Minnesota Senate. Republicans haven’t held a majority in the state Senate in a long time. As Star Tribune legislative reporter Patrick Coolican put it: “Senate Republicans have endured the indignities of minority status for all but two of the past 44 years [.]”

Of course, the forced withdrawal of the president’s choice for Labor Secretary gets more coverage than the Democrats’ losses across the board, but a quick peek at history shows there’s nothing unusual about losing a cabinet member or so:

Fox News Research Retweeted Special Report Team

•Obama: 3

•GWB: 2

•Clinton: 5

•Reagan 1

As to public sentiment about deporting criminal illegal aliens -- an effort now ongoing -- and threats to cut off funds to sanctuary cities, despite all the tales of woe on your front pages, these policies seem to have substantial public support, even among Hispanic voters whom the Democratic Party was surely counting on to oppose them:

"Trump voters approved 93 percent to 4 percent, but Clinton voters also approved 53 percent to 35 percent. Republicans gave near unanimous support 92 percent to 6 percent; independents 66 percent to 18 percent, and Democrats approved 50 percent to 37 percent. The majority of Hispanic voters also approved the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants 56 percent to 31 percent."

The numbers might even be better for Trump since more weight was given in the poll to Democrats, 36 percent to 33 percent Republican.

On cutting off federal grants to sanctuary cities,” 46 percent of Hispanic voters agreed, 43 percent opposed. Overall, the margin was 59 percent support to 29 percent oppose.”

And speaking of the front-page stories designed to tug at your heartstrings and make you ignore facts, recall all those stories (CNN, Reuters, NYT) of the innocent “dreamer” caught up in the sweeps? Turns out he was a gangbanger. Don’t bother to waste time looking for updates.

Just par for the course of fake and distorted news -- as this compendium by the Washington Examiner demonstrates.

The press continues to beat the drum about Trump and the Russians despite the FBI’s stating that General Mike Flynn committed no crime in his discussions with a Russian official.

And the innuendo that Trump has some personal, as opposed to national interest, in trying to develop better ties with Putin is ludicrous. As David Goldman notes in a Facebook comment:

The left-wing mantra about "Trump and Putin" is lunatic on the face of it. Russia's main ally-of-convenience in the Middle East is Iran, which is doing Russia's dirty work on the ground in Syria, and getting top-of-the-line Russian air defense systems. Who empowered Iran? Who took down the sanctions that allow Russia to sell high tech weapons to Iran? Not Trump. Who is threatening to put Iran on the spot? Not Obama. We are in the Red Queen's court

The leaking of classified and confidential information continues, and I’ve no doubt that those involved will rue the sabotage. It shouldn’t be hard to find them. As Charles Martin says:

So now, like Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe in the library, pieces have come together: this has to have been authorized under the Obama administration, by someone pretty high up (or else they wouldn't have access to the compartmented information), and leaked by someone pretty high up, also, almost certainly, either a civil service permanent employee held over from the Obama administration or a political appointee very high in the intelligence community. One who was pretty confident they also have friends in high places.

Why? It seems it must have been to make trouble for the incoming Trump administration.

This is going to get a lot more interesting.

If you’ve spent years fussing about presidential press conferences where fan girls of the press lay roses at the feet of Democrats and fling poo and gotchas at Republicans, this week we had a welcome turnabout where the president fully exposed the press perfidy and bias. If you missed it, pour yourself a glass of something you like, put your feet up and read the transcript, watch the video. (A video of highlights is also available.)