RUTHFULLY YOURS

The insufferable, morally preening former FBI Director James B. Comey Jr., intentionally gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign a boost last year by deciding to sabotage the email investigation by exonerating the then-candidate before key witnesses had even been interviewed, new evidence suggests.

Citing Comey’s bungling of the Clinton email investigation, President Trump unceremoniously fired him by press release on May 9, three-and-a-half years into his 10-year term. Trump was attacked in the media for not caring about Comey’s presumably hurt feelings. He based his decision on a U.S. Department of Justice memo authored by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein that found Comey had, among other things, usurped then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s authority by taking it upon himself to unilaterally clear Clinton.

Rosenstein excoriated Comey, whose side of the story has long been championed by the media. “I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.”

Comey’s endless posturing and palace intrigues damaged the FBI, causing morale to plummet. As a result, “the FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice,” Rosenstein asserted. “That is deeply troubling to many Department employees and veterans, legislators and citizens.”

Of course, critics savaged Trump’s rationale for axing Comey at the time, claiming as the supremely silly Russian collusion conspiracy theory was gaining traction in the media, that the president was obstructing justice to save his own skin.

Exploding in huge, scary fireballs of anger visible from orbit, they ridiculed him, calling him a budding dictator. They claimed he had created a dire constitutional crisis. They demanded his impeachment and imprisonment – or worse.

But once again it appears Trump was right about a media-saturated, manufactured matter of public controversy, one in a series that over the president’s brief time in office has whipped the yet-to-exhausted Left into a frenzy.

Upon Comey’s dismissal, Trump said the FBI “is one of our nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement.”

Exactly right.

As Americans are now painfully aware, the congenitally devious Clintons had created a hacker-friendly, slap-dash private email system while she headed the U.S. Department of State to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to the international cash-for-future-presidential-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The “homebrew” email servers Mrs. Clinton used are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead.

Hillary thought she was above the law. Apparently, the new evidence shows Comey thought she was, too.

That the Left could besmirch the gentle heroism and kindness depicted in this picture should be evidence enough of the malignant growth that is now casting a pall over America. It is time for Americans to put the vile genie back in its box.

In his slim volume titled A Trumpet for Reason, written in 1970, Leo Rosten gives a “ringing answer to the New Left, the New Right, the militants and extremists and romantic demagogues who have been tearing our country apart.” He writes that America stands “in peril of being stampeded by the over-simplifiers, however honest; the fanatic, however idealistic; the unstable, however eloquent; and the naive, however appealing.”

Why did we not learn that the “glittering nostrums of spellbinders” such as Obama would prove so disastrous to this country? Rosten wonders if “each generation [must] learn for itself that “when altruists turn militant they become self-righteous tyrants.” Thus, “a few days prior to the January 20, 2017 inauguration of Republican President Donald J. Trump, James O’Keefe’s investigative journalism organization, Project Veritas, released undercover video footage exposing a cohort of hard-left, self-described ‘anarchists,’ ‘anti-capitalists,’ and ‘anti-fascists’ who — in an effort to undermine Trump’s presidency and strike back at the ‘Nazis’ who they said supported him — were plotting to disrupt the inaugural festivities with a massive protest dubbed ‘DisruptJ20.’ Specifically, the conspirators planned to: (a) create a series of ‘clusterf**k blockades’ sealing off ingress points all over the capital; (b) shut down the Washington, DC Metro lines by chaining the trains to other physical structures; (c) inject butyric acid into the vent shafts of the National Press Club; and (d) physically assault Trump backers with well-placed, debilitating punches directly to the throat.”

In fact, “one of the activists… told the Washington Post, the violence ‘was purposeful in its symbolism’ – meaning… that ‘vandalism at a Starbucks shop and a Bank of America branch were executed as attacks on capitalism and corporate greed.'”

Antifa members dress entirely in black, and their faces are covered by black masks, hoods, and scarves. According to organizers ‘Antifa combines radical left-wing and anarchist politics, revulsion at racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes, with the international anti-fascist culture of taking the streets and physically confronting the brownshirts of white supremacy, whoever they may be.'”

Actually, “[a]t its heart, the Antifa movement is… a communist phenomenon whose adherents – consisting predominantly of upper-middle-class white males — believe that conservatives, particularly those who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, are the moral equivalent of Nazis and are therefore not entitled to the free-speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Moreover… the movement has a strong element of anarchism as well; thus its members are commonly seen waving the red and black flag of anarcho-communism.” Their intent is to totally destroy America.

Sadly, “[m]ainstream media outlets have typically refrained from acknowledging just how radical and revolutionary Antifa’s objectives and practices are, portraying the movement instead as a well-intentioned alliance of idealists who seek nothing more than to thwart the evils of right-wing ‘fascism.’ The Washington Post, for instance, has benignly referred to Antifa and its allies as ‘antifascist groups'” as has the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News. Other sources — both mainstream and far left — have painted Antifa in openly complimentary tones. For example, an April 2017 Esquire magazine article lauded the movement’s ‘anti-fascist’ vigilantes for crashing pro-Trump demonstrations [.]”

In his blog, theologian and scholar of Islam Dr. Mark Durie states:

It is remarkable that the daily prayers of every Muslim, part of the core of Islam, include a rejection of Christians and Jews as misguided and objects of Allah’s wrath.

Devout Muslims repeat this Surat al Fatiha (Qur’an, 1:7) at least seventeen times daily during the five calls to prayer – over 5,000 times a year.

On Friday, August 4, 2017, I attended the weekly Jummah prayers at the Chautauqua Institution Hall of Christ. The Abrahamic Program for Young Adults (APYA) leads the service each Friday with full support from the Institution’s department of religion. Each summer, the department selects four college-age students to serve for the season as the “face” of interfaith dialogues at Chautauqua: one liberal Jew, one liberal Christian, and two Muslims – one Sunni (male) and one Shia (female).

At the Hall of Philosophy, prior to introducing the various speakers, the department of religion director proudly invites a large audience (anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000) and residents to join the Friday Jummah, ostensibly to show how people of all religions can celebrate together through this Islamic service.

In this instance, some 50 people attended. About 20 actually participated in the prayers – about half of the them non-Muslims. All willingly bowed and prostrated themselves according to Islamic tenets. Roughly 30 spectators sat, listened, and watched the ritual unfold. Texts of the prayers were handed to the entire audience.

The Shia female asked participants to remove their shoes in that “sacred” space, which she called the Hall of the “Prophet,” despite its actual name, Hall of Christ. She didn’t elucidate which prophet she meant.

The APYA Sunni Muslim, Omar, led the prayers. He completed his undergrad at the Zaytuna College, Calif. – the first Muslim university in the U.S. – and plans to attend the Hartford Institute before enrolling in the U.S. military as a Muslim chaplain.

During prayers, Omar and few other Muslims recited the phrase “Allahu akbar” a few times. It was explained that god is greater than any of us. The event included Quranic chants in Arabic between prostrations. Participants followed Omar’s lead, bowing to the floor, then kneeling. They repeated this ritual a few times.

Omar served as the imam, preaching a long sermon. Since nothing in the world is going in the right direction, he stressed, “we need to look into a different direction,” be kind to others, to our neighbors, and look inside ourselves and be connected to our spirituality. Until 2010, he told the audience, he was a confused person, but now he feels good. He suggested we can all also turn around our lives.

Omar displayed Da’wa activity in full. His sermon effectively served as an invitation to Islam, albeit indirect. For now, the Chautauqua Institution prohibits official invitations to Islam (or other religions) and requires all denominational leaders to sign statements that they may not proselytize. Yet I wonder how long these APYA Muslims will restrain themselves about their real intention, since Islam requires Muslims to invite all “infidels” to join them and “revert.”

Then the female Shia Muslim young adult explained that during the Jummah prayer, she would stand behind Omar; she claimed that in her Shia tradition, she wouldn’t have done so, and this was “just” a simple cultural difference. She then explained that this tradition prevents the men from getting looks at the “women’s booty.” The spectators approvingly laughed. If there were feminists among the audience, they were silent.

Imagine if a conservative Christian said something similar about his religion. All hell would break loose. Muslims, however, get a free ride on most anything they say or do.

The young Shia woman sang a melodic chant in Farsi. Then came the Q and A segment. The Sunni, Omar, said we had only six minutes. I raised my hand, received the microphone from the male Jewish APYA young adult, and calmly stated:

“I am a student of Islam [at which Omar smiled with pleasure] – not the Islam that you are teaching here at Chautauqua, but the real Islam. [All smiles faded.] As such, I learned that Surat al Fatiha verse 1:7 in effect vilifies the Jews and Christians. Those who go astray are the Christians, and those who earned Allah’s wrath are the Jews.”

In May 2014, a broad collection of thinkers and politicians gathered in Washington to celebrate a new conservative “manifesto.” The document called for replacing stodgy old Reaganite economics with warmer, fuzzier handouts to the middle class. Donald Trump must have missed the memo.

The president formally opened the tax wars on Wednesday with his speech in Missouri challenging Congress to meet his principles for reform. The media almost uniformly applied to the speech its favorite (though misused) descriptor: “populist.” But the real news was that Mr. Trump wants to make Reagan-style tax reform great again.

The left saw this clearly, which explains its furious and frustrated reaction to the speech. “Trump’s New Tax Scam: Selling Plutocracy as Populism,” ran a headline in Vanity Fair, bemoaning that “Trickle-down is back, baby.” Democratic strategist Robert Shrum railed in a Politico piece that the “plutocrat” Mr. Trump was pitching a tax cut for “corporations and the top 1 percent” yet was getting away with a “perverted populism.” Trump voters had been “tricked into voting against themselves,” and now Mr. Trump was pulling a similar con with taxes.

Nonsense. Mr. Trump is selling pro-growth policies—something his party has forgotten how to do. And there’s nothing very “populist” about it, at least not by today’s political standards. The left has defined the tax debate for decades in terms of pure class warfare. Republicans have so often been cast as stooges for the rich that the GOP is scared to make the full-throated case for a freer and fairer tax system. It was precisely the right’s desire for a more “populist” tax policy that gave us the Reformicons and their manifesto for buying off the middle class.

Mr. Trump isn’t playing this game—and that’s why the left is unhappy. The president wants to reduce business tax rates significantly and encourage American companies to repatriate billions of profits held overseas. He wants to simplify the tax code in a way that will eliminate many cherished carve-outs. He wants tax relief for “middle income Americans,” though he also praised to the sky the 1986 Reagan reform that reduced the number of tax brackets and significantly lowered top marginal rates.

Mr. Trump did sneak a nod to Ivanka into the speech by including her proposal to hand out taxpayer money for child care. But his address was largely a hymn to supply-side economics, stunning Democrats who believed they’d forever dispelled such voodoo.

What made the left even more apoplectic was the president’s manner of sales pitch. What journalists always fail to note is the difference between “populist” policies and a “populist” delivery (of which Reagan was a master). Mr. Trump has defined himself as the protector of America’s forgotten man, an outsider to the swamp, an America Firster. The result is that he is uniquely qualified to sell a tax plan decried as “elitist” to average Americans. CONTINUE AT SITE

Amid so much bad news out of Texas, our vote for hopeful story of the week goes to Gilead Sciences ’ bid to buy Kite Pharma Inc. for about $11 billion. That’s a big bet on a new type of cancer therapy based on genetically modifying a kind of immune cell known as T-cells.

Our Allysia Finley recently wrote about the so-called CAR-T treatment in an interview with Carl June, one of the cancer researchers behind the discovery. The treatment shows remarkable results in many patients, and the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Gilead, a leading biotech firm, is paying a steep price for Kite’s CAR-T technology. But Gilead has the means to do so thanks to the success of its Sovaldi drug in curing hepatitis C in thousands of patients. But other companies are also moving fast to exploit CAR-T treatments, including Novartis AG , and there’s no guarantee that Gilead-Kite will be first to market. That’s a risk for Gilead shareholders.

The exciting news for the rest of us, especially the many who will get cancer over our lifetimes, is the vote of confidence the merger signals for improving survival rates. Not too long ago academic and media scolds were dismissing U.S. drug research as providing little more than marginal gains. And major newspapers were claiming little or no progress against cancer. Now they’re fretting about the costs of breakthrough drugs that have the potential to cure deadly diseases.

Whether or not Kite works for Gilead as a business, it’s good to be reminded that drug research means taking risks in the hope of saving lives and making money in the process.