Canadian Cincinnatus

The significance of the Tea Party movement and its rise

As most know who have been following the race, the result of the special election in New York’s congressional district 23 was that the Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman lost in a safe Republican seat to Democrat Bill Owens, even though the official Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, had withdrawn. At first sight, this ‘civil war’ among the right bodes poorly for conservative chances in 2010 and beyond.

But I contend that in the long run it bodes extremely well for conservatism. For what the events of NY 23 show is that a grass-roots conservative movement has developed in the US that is separate and distinct from the Republican Party.

This is good because, for an ideology to progress, it needs both partisan and nonpartisan wings. The partisan wing - a political party – is needed for the obvious reason that they are the ones who will enact the agenda. But a nonpartisan wing – the ‘movement’ – is also just as necessary. This is because a politician’s most important priority is re-election, not issues.

The movement is important because the popularity of issues with the electorate changes over time. When an issue, say deregulation, is popular, the conservative politician is happy to embrace it. But when it is unpopular, he will, in the interest of self-preservation, drop it like a hot potato. This is where the movement comes in. The movement advances the issue in good times and defends it in bad times. In the long run, one of the biggest factors in getting a policy adopted and accepted by society is persistence. Movements do persistence well, politicians don’t.

While the politician cares very deeply about who gets to be driven around in the ministerial limo, the movement doesn’t care at all about that. The movement cares about issues and principles. It doesn’t care which party affects the desired changes. In fact, a right wing leader of a left wing party can sometimes be preferable to a left wing leader of a right wing party. One movement that ‘gets’ this is the NRA. If both candidates in an election race are pro-gun, the NRA doesn’t get involved. Ditto if both are anti-gun. They don’t have a dog in those fights. But if the Republican is pro-gun and the Democrat is anti-gun, the NRA will step in. But - and this sometimes happens – if the Democrat is pro-gun and the Republican is anti-gun, then the NRA will support the Democrat over the Republican. That is because the NRA is pro-gun not pro-Republican.

The possession of a ‘movement’ is an advantage that the left long held over the right – until recently. The Democrats were always kept faithful to their left wing principles by a constellation of left wing activist groups. With the exception of the NRA and anti-abortion groups, the Republicans aren’t kept in line by anyone, which is why GOP politicians tend to start out conservative and drift leftwards in the time they spend in Washington.

With the rise of the conservative and libertarian blogosphere, talk radio and the tea party movement, this is changing. There is now a force out there to keep the GOP true to its small government principles. The mainstream media, obsessed with trying to paint the Tea Partiers as the activist wing of the Republican Party, have completely missed this critical development. A number of Republican politicians who supported the stimulus bill were booed when they tried to speak at Tea Parties over the summer. It was the same Tea Partiers who pushed the stimulus-loving Arlen Specter out of the GOP. And of course, it was the conservative movement who revolted when the unprincipled backroom boys in the New York Republican Party decided that a RINO, who was well to the left of her Democrat opponent, be the GOP candidate in NY 23.

In the short run, this situation can create problems. Arlen Specter’s vote would have been nice to have now that Obamacare is entering the Senate. And it would have been good to see a Republican elected to NY 23. But it is much more important for the Republican Party to respect conservative principles. In the long run, not only will this result in many more conservative policies being implemented, it will also result in more electoral success for the GOP.

The reason for the GOP’s decline in 2006 and 2008 was that they strayed too far away from their roots. The Republican dominated Congress passed the free speech threatening McCain Feingold campaign finance reform bill. It also passed pharmacare and the No Child Left Behind Act. And it also tried to amnesty illegal aliens. Republicans also failed to reign in the Community Reinvestment Act, at a time when they held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, which was the central cause of the 2008 financial meltdown. They failed to act because unprincipled party strategists thought ‘affordable housing’ was a winner of an issue. So how much of a winner do they think it is it now? Republican congresscritters also became addicted to pork, resulting in things like Ted Steven’s famous Bridge to Nowhere.

None of this would have happened if the Republicans in Washington had not been corrupted by expediency and a go-along-to-get-along attitude. In all probability, if a conservative movement had existed all along to keep them honest, the Republicans might have remained in power to this day.

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Yesterday evening, I was in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, attending a rally commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a person of Estonian heritage, the emotions this anniversary elicited were mixed.

(Incidentally, representatives of all three federal parties were there and spoke. David Miller was nowhere to be found even though the event was held in front of his city hall.)

On the positive side, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the fall of Communism and the regaining of independence by my homeland, was without question the single most positive political event that has impacted my life. As Reason magazine noted, the defeat of communism was the most liberating moment in all history.

 On the negative side, the freedom and independence of all the new Eastern European republics has never been in more danger than now. One the one side, you have a ruthless KGB thug occupying the Kremlin. As the Economist reported, the Russians recently completed huge military maneuvers in White Russia, whose only obvious purpose was to practice reinvading and recapturing Eastern Europe.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the White House is occupied by a man who seems to possess deep leftist sympathies and who, in 9 months of office, has already compiled a lengthy record of ignoring the aspirations of freedom loving people around the world – in Iran, where he has determinedly ignored the Iranian people and their still ongoing Green Revolution; in Honduras, where he has sided with a Chavez-like thug over the forces of constitutional order; and most relevantly, in Eastern Europe, where he unilaterally pulled the missile shield out of Poland and the Czech Republic (without even giving them the courtesy of advance notice), opposes the entrance of the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO; and now has turned down an invitation to attend a ceremony in Berlin commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Kremlin, such symbolism is noted.

What to do?

First, hope and pray that in 3 years, Barack Obama will be replaced by a responsible adult who actually believes that freedom is a good thing.

Two, the countries of Eastern Europe have to realize that the Lord helps only those who help themselves. NATO is developing a rapid reaction force. The Eastern European wing of NATO has to establish a rapid reaction force of its own, composed of only Eastern European armies, a force that has only one purpose - to defend the sovereignty of Eastern European countries. Their first act should be to hold exercises of their own, to counter the ones that Putin just held. The guiding principle of Eastern European countries in these perilous times should be the saying by Benjamin Franklin, “We hang separately, or hang together.”

AS AN ASIDE: Washington University in St. Louis shut down a rally commemorating Berlin Wall anniversary because it was "too offensive".

Toronto Doesn't Need Another Hero for Mayor

Ontario's liberal Deputy Premier George Smitherman jumped into the Toronto mayoralty race today, portraying himself as the man who can become the "strong mayor" that Toronto needs, a hero in other words.

The last thing that Toronto needs is another extremely left-wing mayor who is determined to fix things that aren't broken.

David Miller has already spent over $100 million dollars supposedly fixing St. Clair by removing two lanes of traffic.  And that's just the start.  Look out Scarborough and Don Mills, David Miller has already had the plans drawn up to fix your neighborhoods too.  He's already "fixed" Lansdowne, Runnymeade, Bloor, Dupont, Rogers Road and Jarvis, just to name a few, all of which have had traffic lanes removed at great expense on the weakest pretenses.

Why am I so sure that Smitherman is just another David Miller, despite Smitherman's claim to be a "candidate of the broad centre?"

Well it could be that until this week he was deputy premier of a liberal government that has spent so heavily that they make Bob's Rae's NDP government back in the early '90s look like a pack of fiscal conservatives.

It could be that Smitherman is the man who oversaw the e-health debacle, getting out of the health portfolio with just enough time left to let his successor, David Caplan, take the fall. Or perhaps it's Smitherman's love of wind mills, solar power and expensive electricity while he has been Energy and Infrastructure minister that has me concerned.

But what really made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end was the Obamaesque quote that Smitherman wanted to bring a "post-ideological" consensus-building approach to city hall.

Yeah right.  Sentiments like that from left wing politicians can usually be translated to read: I'm reasonable.  As long as the Right Wing does everything I say we'll all get along.  If not all the fighting from here on is their fault.

Worse, Smitherman has promised to fix Toronto's massive budget shortfall with a "dose of fiscal reality," when what it really needs is several massive cuts.  Tweaks on the budget won't cut it.

Toronto needs a realist, not a hero.

Mike Downtown.

Why would Maj. Hassan go on a killing spree in Fort Hood?

Maj. Nadil Malik Hassan, a psychologist with the US Army, and scheduled for deployment in Iraq, went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas yesterday, killing 11 and wounding 30. At the time of this writing, the reason why he would do such a thing remains an inscrutable mystery.

One possible clue is that he yelled, “Allah Akbar” during the attack. Allah Akbar means God is Great and is a popular thing for jihadists to scream when they attack infidels. The easy conclusion from this is that he is an Islamic terrorist, but since Islam is the religion of peace, this explanation is improbable.

There are also reports that Hassan had previously made “outlandish” comments condemning US foreign policy, claiming that Iraqis and Afghanis “should stand up and fight their aggressor”, i.e. the US Army that he serves. However, since these reports are unverified, the prudent thing to do at this point is to discount them completely and assume they never happened.

There are also reports, again unconfirmed, that when he was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he got poor performance evaluations that may have resulted in his transfer to Fort Hood. Since the likeliest explanation for his poor evaluations is that he is a level headed man with a deeply spiritual side (which kept him serene), and that the bad appraisals were only the result of spontaneous and unprovoked racism on the part of the white Christians he worked with, this doesn’t shed any more light on the matter.

I don’t know. I’ve got to say, this whole thing has got me stumped. A real mystery.

UPDATE: New York Post's Ralph Peters seems to have solved the riddle.

Toronto's Year of Living Financially Dangerously

Mayor David Miller set himself free when he announced that he wouldn't run for mayor again, free to do anything he wants with Toronto without trivial concerns like voter anger.  Thanks to the "strong mayor" powers McGuinty granted his buddy Miller, that means there's a lot of potential for damage.

Miller has started by issuing 30 year debentures for his capital spending plans.  That means I might not live to see Toronto's new debt paid off, and I'm in my forties.  He's also committed Toronto to contracts for TTC streetcar right-of-ways (AKA car blockers) in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and new streetcars in the billions.

Toronto's next mayor will find his hands tied, and the city's bank account way overdrawn.

But it gets worse: the Millerites are now talking about a City of Toronto sales tax!

The timing is stunning.  The province's manufacturing industry has taken a major body blow from the recession, McGuinty's HST is about to drive up the cost of fuel, natural gas, heating oil, electricity and numerous other essentials by 8%, and Miller figures this is a good time to tack on more!  I thought everyone wanted to get the economy moving and consumers spending?

But I bet this isn't the end.  I foresee road tolls suddenly coming back up for discussion before April 2010.

The next mayor of Toronto will have to be a truly strong mayor, and not because the province grants him/her that power, but because they come by it naturally.  The next mayor will have to cancel contracts for bike lanes and streetcar right-of-ways.  All road construction must only be essential maintenance, not needless narrowing to constrict cars, like the narrowing of Jarvis and Bloor.  Speed bumps will need to be dropped from the plan.

Will these decisions be easy or popular?  Easy: no.  The greens will scream and protest.  Popular: if the new mayor is clear and strong, voters will surprise everyone, as they did when they elected Mike Harris to a second term.

My vote was for Karen Stintz, but she has dropped out.  So the question for the Right: take the easy way out and hope John Tory doesn't blow it, or find a better leader?

My hope is that either Denzil Minnan Wong or Case Ootes jump into the fray, but not both.

Toronto needs a strong mayor.

Mike Downtown

A nuclear Iran is in Russia’s direct self-interest

At this point it is clear that Iran is receiving much help from Russia, both diplomatically and technically, to further its goal of having operational nuclear weapons. What is less clear is why would Russia do this? Angering America, having a nuclear-tipped madman next door, all of these things and others besides have been held up as reasons why it is in Russia’s best interest to cooperate with the US on preventing Iran from getting nukes.

I contend that these things are viewed as small potatoes to the current occupants of the Kremlin. They have bigger fish to fry. Even the profit Russians makes from selling Iran their nuclear expertise and anti-aircraft systems like the S-300 sirface-to-air missile are piddling.

The real reason is that Russia wants to goad Iran into starting a nuclear war with Israel. Sure 100,000 Jews will die in Tel Aviv and 20,000,000 Persians will die in the inevitable counterattack, but just think how high the price of oil will go if there were nuclear war in the Persian Gulf region! If oil rises to $300 per barrel, imagine how much money Gasprom will make. And those rich, effete Europeans? They will lie prostrate at Vladimir Putin’s feet. Stalin was able to take Eastern Europe, Stalin-worshiper Putin will be able to extend Russia’s empire to the French Riviera. That’s their goal.

And if you think that the Putin gang doesn’t think in such horrible terms, you are almost naive enough to be President of the United States.

The rise of the BNP in Great Britain

Warning signs have been growing about the increase in popularity of the British National Party (BNP), a group with significant National Socialist leanings. In the last round of elections to the EU parliament, two BNP candidates were elected. In a recent poll, 20% of Britons say that they will consider voting for this party. And the political classes do not know what to do about it.

The political classes are, of course, precisely the problem.

The reason such an extreme party has come from nowhere to be a contender is that they are able to cater an underserved market –white working class people. This group used to vote Labour overwhelmingly but the paths of England’s working people and the Labour Party has diverged in the past 20 years. The Labour Party was at one with the working class in the 1920’s and 30’s when the predominant problem facing workers was the stratified class structure in Great Britain (and most of Europe). Labour was the party of workers, the Liberals were the party of the middle class and the Conservatives were the party of the aristocracy. As a result, the rhetoric and issues championed by the Labour party reflected this fact. We in North America cannot imagine how much of a problem this was for ordinary people back then, not ever having a formal class structure. But to working class Britons in the 1930’s, the class structure was to them what Jim Crow was to blacks in the Southern US in the same time period.

However times change, and so has the Labour Party - and so has the white working class. These days, working class whites are worried about a different form of apartheid: affirmative action. They are also increasingly at odds with the Muslim underclass whose numbers grow as they become ever more truculent and less interested in assimilating with English society. Britain’s working people feel a genuine patriotism for their English heritage and worry about the EU’s encroachment on English sovereignty, a patriotism which the multi-culti Labourites increasingly hold in open disdain. This was made clear in recent revelations in the Telegraph, where a Labour party operative admitted that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country.” In short, Labour politicians decided to choose a different set of voters, one they felt would be more congenial than their previous supporters, the indigenous working classes. This has created the situation where new Labour voters are at odds with old Labour voters. In contrast, the Labour aristocracy is above the fracas because they largely live in Tony flats in the fashionable quarters of London, where their love of immigrants can remain safely theoretical. Working class whites have increasingly come to the inescapable conclusion that Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ doesn’t include them. They are the uncool in Britain.

In the US, a similar process has also occurred, but the Republicans have generally picked up the slack when the Dem’s moved on. For instance, the coal miners in West Virginia used to be the staunchest Democrats. But when then-presidential candidate Al Gore promised to take away their guns and ban coal in the 2000 election, they switched to the GOP and haven’t returned. If West Virginia had stayed Democrat, the recount in Florida would have been irrelevant.

Has this happened in the UK? Have the Conservatives picked up the working class votes that Labour has discarded? Sort of, at least under Margaret Thatcher. In spite of her free market philosophy that was at odds with their trade union institutions, working people at least knew where she stood on cultural issues. With things like the Falkland Islands war, you know Mrs. Thatcher was an English patriot. When Tony Blair remade Labour into his own image, he kept the free market policies but canned all the patriotism stuff – the worst of both worlds from the perspective of the working class. And David Cameron, the new leader of the Conservatives? He apes Tony Blair the way Blair copied Thatcher, except that Cameron is closer to Blair than Blair ever was to Thatcher. Cameron’s big idea for revitalizing the Conservatives last year was making the Conservatives the green party of the UK.

So from the perspective of working class whites, the major parties in Britain today are Tweedledee and Tweedlededum, neither of which represents their interests.

As far as minor parties go, the Liberal Democrats are another identical choice. There is also the UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. However, this reasonable anti-EU party has been unjustly tarred for so long with the ‘fascist’ label that a real fascist anti-EU party has come along – the BNP - and they are doing well.

This is what happens when the leaders of the liberal order (both Conservative and Labour) become insular and corrupt. The only way the BNP threat can be eliminated is if the Conservatives start challenging the increasingly unsustainable status quo and begin to offer real solutions to the working people’s legitimate problems. The Conservatives don’t have to go all the way. Deep down, people don’t want to vote for extremist fringe parties but they do vote for them when they are desperate and no one else will listen to them. If the Conservatives acknowledge 80% of their grievances, they will happily vote Tory because the Conservatives have the respectability that the BNP lacks.

This is what John Howard did when he won his fourth term as Prime Minister in 2004. He was able to increase his share of the popular vote by 3.4% even though the voter share of his principal opponent – Labour – hardly budged. He got those votes from the fringe parties, whose supporters flocked to Howard’s strong leadership and his red meat platform.

Can the Conservative Party of Great Britain do the same? Well, the first obstacle is their leader, David Cameron, who is temperamentally disinclined to go that route. So I guess we will see more of the BNP in the future.

The Real Reason Toronto's Mayor Quit

Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty's massive deficit.

Yes, those two men have gone hand in hand for the last seven years, the best of friends.  The City of Toronto act that McGuinty shoved through could have been called the "Everything David Miller Wants Act" and led to many new taxes for Toronto, including the $60 per year vehicle tax and the Land Transfer Tax.

I even wondered if it was quid pro quo when David Miller chose to resign his NDP party membership before the last provincial election and refused to support NDP leader Howard Hampton, despite the fact that his platform was designed to give Toronto absolutely everything that a lefty politician could desire.

But now that friendship, while still strong, has reached a limit.  Dalton is out of money.  The province of Ontario posted a massive $24 billion dollar deficit, double the bad old days of Bob Rae's provincial NDP government.  The province is already spending 45 billion more per year than when McGuinty took office, so there is absolutely no wiggle room left.

Since Toronto depended on a $400 million dollar hand out from the province last year to balance its budget, as well as raiding the LAST of the reserve fund for another $20 million, it all adds up to a tax blood bath at city hall next spring.

The budget chief is already asking for 5% cuts across the board on THIS year's budget. Yes, the same budget that approved 1300 new hires a scant six months ago.  The Millerites have amazingly blamed the recession, as if they didn't notice the financial crisis last fall, a full year ago, until now.

Miller probably got all the bad news in September: he lost his fund-raiser (who was unhappy with Miller's performance over the strike), he lost the support of the unions, again because of the strike, his popularity plummeted over the summer (you guessed it), and council had called for an inquiry into when Miller knew about the $200 million dollar error in liability of the sick days, and whether he withheld this critical information from council before they voted on the union's contract after a strike that was all about sick days.

That's a lot of heat.

But I'm guessing the nail in the coffin was a quiet word from Dalton that there would be no money for Toronto's budget next year.  In fact, it's amazing how all the left-wing councillors are suddenly discussing cuts and none are loudly calling on the province to bail them out.  It's because they already know the answer.

David Miller has chosen to leave while he is still the progressive mayor, the green mayor, and not the mayor who will bring about the most punishing tax increases the city has ever seen.

Instead of facing the music on election day a year from now, he has chosen an easier path: to take over as CEO of Invest Toronto, a post vacated when former liberal attorney-general Michael Bryant was charged in the death of a bike courier.

Indeed, maybe that was the final incentive, a chance road rage argument that turned the course of local history.  Whatever the case, Miller doesn't need to be mayor of Toronto anymore.  He's already got another fashionable job, and if a left-wing candidate is elected mayor next year, I bet Miller gets to keep that job.

Either way, Mr. Miller will land on his feet.

Toronto, however, will have to live with the hangover of his party.

Mike Downtown

Why isn’t Obama as tough on Iran and Russia as he is on Limbaugh and Fox News?

It constantly amazes me how liberals like Obama and Bill Clinton can act so effectively against their domestic foes while simultaneously being such pussies around America’s foreign enemies.

Asked about the Afghanistan War at the UN, Obama blithely declares that he “doesn’t care about victory”, doubtlessly expressing his deeply held view that concepts like “victory” are ‘simplistic’ and too ‘black and white’ for the complex world in which we live, the unstated background assumption being that victory is a stupid concept believed in primarily by those ignorant, rural white people who “cling to their guns and religion”. But when it comes to fighting domestic foes like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, all the nuance goes out the window. Here, Obama and Rahm Emmanuel charge for victory with the single-mindedness of a panzer division in Northern France. With Ahmedinejad, Obama gullibly buys all of Iran’s stalling tactics as evidence of good faith - tactics that are transparently obvious to any disinterested bystander. But when confronted with tea parties, his mindset changes to that of a paranoid, conspiracy theorist, ready to accept the worst rumour as incontrovertible fact.

Bill Clinton was the same way. At the time when Clinton was running procedural circles around Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, Saddam Hussein was making Clinton into just as much of a fool as Obama is being made of currently by Vladimir Putin. As Rush put it at the time, “Saddam Hussein is doing to Bill Clinton what Bill Clinton is doing to the Republican Congress”.

As an admirer of Machiavelli, I can respect somebody’s skill at dispatching his opponents, even though I may disagree with the ends. However, why is it that these people never seem to be able to employ these same skills when they are running the country’s foreign policy? At least we’d get some good use out of the skill-set that these people evidently do possess.

I think the simple answer is that liberal surrenderists view fellow citizens who disagree with them as the real enemy, and foreign anti-American madmen with nuclear weapons as fellow travelers, people they have something in common with. Damn those white Bible belt Christians!

Well, this is what America gets when it votes in left-wing, anti-American schemers, wedded to defeat. Heaven help us.

Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s foreign policy: “It is amateurishness, wrapped in naiveté, inside credulity.”

Charles Krauthammer gave the best one sentence summary of the Obama approach to foreign policy I have yet run across.

Look at Obama’s approach to Russia. First his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives Russian Foreign ministry a symbolic “overcharge” button, which meant to say “reset” but was mistranslated. If this had happened under the Bush administration, the incident would have entered public consciousness as an example of Bush’s provincialism and stupidity. But because the MSM is running cover for him, it is conveniently forgotten. But what did he mean by reset? We found out when he unilaterally decided (without consultation) to remove the missile shield being set up in Poland and Czech Republic. This was a project near and dear to George W Bush’s heart, as was the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. Whatever his other faults, Bush knew that the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe need American protection to keep them from being swallowed up by the rabid bear to the east. The next phase in NATO’s expansion was to have been Georgia and the Ukraine. What Obama is really doing by cancelling this largely symbolic missile shield (nobody in Eastern Europe cares about Iran and the installation was too limited to really deter an all out Russian nuclear attack) is to say, to hell with you. I don’t care that you are sending troops to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, I want to cozy up to the big boys in the Kremlin. The Eastern Europeans felt betrayed. The Champaign was flowing in the Kremlin.

So what concession did Obama get in return from the Russians?

To find out, let’s examine Hillary’s recent and disastrous foreign policy trip to Russia. As Krauthammer relates,

 

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that ‘threats, sanctions and threats of pressure’ are ‘counterproductive.’ Note: It's not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

 

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved -- to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? ‘We are not at that point yet,’ she averred. ‘That is not a conclusion we have reached . . . it is our preference that Iran work with the international community.’”

 

In other words, Hillary was humiliated. To add insult to injury, while she was there, the Russian Duma publicly declared that Russia has reserved the right to pre-emptively strike its (as yet unspecified) enemies with nuclear weapons if it feels threatened by them. Hillary didn’t comment.

In short, Obama got nothing at all from the Putinistas.

Of course, Russia could have probably done better in the long run if they had not humiliated the US so publicly, but had, instead, played along with them employing soothing, empty rhetoric of their own, while doing exactly what they wanted to do anyway. However, the current inhabitants of the Kremlin are thugs and goons who can’t help themselves but let their true nature out

I think Bill Whittle, over at PJTV also said it right, “Obama isn’t Hitler, he is Neville Chamberlain.”

And as long as such a weak fool inhabits the White House, I will remain fearful of my homeland Estonia’s independence.