AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 9/22/17

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To MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, President Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly this week “lowered the bar for human decency.” ABC’s Terry Moran said that Trump’s vow to “totally destroy” North Korea if it ever attacks the United States amounts to threatening a “war crime.”

Indeed, the president’s speech to the UN is being roundly criticized by the Left and the establishment media. But in the heartland of the American continent – to the people who put Donald Trump in office – the speech was a ray of clear, bright, beautiful sunshine. It was perhaps his best speech so far.

No president in recent memory has spoken to the world in such plain and unmistakable language. The speech was a resonating defense of Trump’s ‘America First’ policy that he has been advancing since the first days of his campaign. Said the president,

The United States will forever be a great friend to the world, and especially to its allies. But we can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return. As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.”

When did you last hear a U.S. president say anything remotely like that? Certainly you did not during the Obama years. In the eight years of the Obama presidency, the rhetoric was all about the need for the United States to atone for its many transgressions. Nothing that Obama did on the world stage ever put the United States first.

RELATED: What an American president is supposed to sound like.

Decades of dissembling and procrastination have presented the United States and the world with a huge problem in the form of North Korea. On that highly fraught topic, the president spoke with muzzle velocity.

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

It was this passage that gave ABC’s Terry Moran the vapors. As we noted above, he likened it to threatening to commit a war crime.

Moran’s pearl clutching notwithstanding, given the fact that decades of observing the traditional diplomatic niceties with North Korea have yielded nothing save for a growing threat of nuclear attack or blackmail, what would Mr. Moran prefer that the president say? The perception by North Korea born of the gentlemanliness that Mr. Moran would no doubt prefer from someone like Barack Obama is precisely what has delivered the United States and the world to this dangerous pass.

Tough talk, on the other hand, appears to be working. On Thursday, two days after the speech, China’s central bank ordered the country’s banks to honor UN sanctions against North Korea and to halt business with the Kim regime. To my cynical eye, the timing seems to be much more than mere coincidence.

Throughout the 50-minute speech, the president sounded a clear, consistent theme and used one particular word triplet multiple times.

“Sovereignty, security, prosperity,” he said.

It’s about time somebody did.

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