RUTHFULLY YOURS

On December 13, former vice president, Joe Biden, appeared on CBS with the hosts of “This Morning” where he peddled his new book and showered his former boss with praise. During the course of the interview, he was asked about his relationship with Obama and responded with the following; “I’ve served with eight presidents and I’ve gotten to know four of them very well. I’ve never met any president that has more character, more integrity, and more backbone than this guy does.” Then he went completely off the rails when he absurdly added; “And eight years, not a hint — not a hint — of a scandal.”

What was perhaps even more outrageous than the statement itself was the fact that none of This Morning’s hosts challenged the veracity of that statement and allowed it to pass without a scintilla of scrutiny, exposing yet again an extreme bias existing within elements of the establishment media. In fact, the Obama administration was among the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in recent memory. Biden’s comment merits further examination so let’s buckle up and take a stroll down memory lane.

Solyndra Scandal – The Obama administration provided this failing solar company with a $535 million stimulus-funded loan, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Taxpayer money kept pouring in despite the fact that the Office of Management and Budget warned that Solyndra was not a profitable or viable company. But it gets worse. The family foundation of billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fundraiser, was one of Solyndra’s main investors. Can you say quid pro quo?

Veterans Affairs Scandal – Over 40 veterans needlessly died while waiting to be seen by doctors at a Phoenix VA facility. Another 1,700 veterans were forced to wait for months before being seen by medical personnel. An audit of the VA confirmed that VA officials systematically altered records and appointment schedules in a deliberate and methodical VA scheme to manipulate data to meet fabricated goals.

Operation Chokepoint Scandal – The Obama DOJ utilized the power of big government to pressure banks to cease doing business with industries with which the administration had ideological differences. Gun manufacturers and gun stores were prime targets even though they had not violated any laws. Eventually, the FDIC admitted to misconduct, bowed to pressure and significantly curtailed the discriminatory regulations after affected businesses threatened legal action.

Gibson Guitar Scandal – Armed federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., seizing guitars, electronic files and other inventory including wood that was purchased in India and Madagascar. The DOJ alleged that Gibson’s had violated an obscure law known as the Lacey Act which made it a crime to violate the environmental laws of another country. Gibson produced an affidavit from government officials in Madagascar stating that Gibson had violated none of that nation’s laws. Gibson also alleged that the DOJ was misinterpreting Indian law. Gibson’s CEO was a major donor to the GOP but his competitors, who purchased the same materials and were not GOP donors, were untouched by Obama’s DOJ. As part of a settlement to drop criminal charges, Gibson was required to pay a $250,000 fine and was required to donate $50,000 to an environmental group. Gibson was eventually able to retrieve its inventory from the clutches of the DOJ.

President Trump’s first year ended with the biggest tax reform since 1986, the most consequential of a list of achievements that have made a good start at rolling back Barack Obama’s runaway expansion of the Leviathan state. At the same time, the hysterical “resistance” of the Dems and progressives, abetted by Republican NeverTrumpers, continues its bizarre attacks on the president, feeding off his blunt twitter commentary and obsessing over his brash style rather than focusing on his notable actions.

As year two of the improbable Trump presidency begins, this conflict remains central to our political drama. But what does it portend for Trump’s program and the critical midterm elections?

Lost in the anti-Trump media frenzy has been, according to the White House, 81 significant rollbacks of the progressive assault on the Constitutional order. The most important was the appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. That win, along with 12 Appeals Court appointments of similarly minded judges, will shape our government for decades, and survive any future swing back to the Dems. Tax reform will also likely survive, since the left almost never repeals tax cuts to the middle class. Cutting the regulations that metastasized under Obama has saved $8 billion so far, and encouraged the economy’s “animal spirits,” leading to three quarters of more than 3% growth in GDP, 1.7 million new jobs, a stock market up 28%, unemployment at its lowest since December 2000, and economic confidence at a 17-year high.

Throw in opening up more than a million acres to oil exploration and drilling, hastening Obamacare’s demise by eliminating the individual mandate, discarding the economically toxic Paris Climate Accords, reining in the job-killing EPA, getting serious about border enforcement, deporting thousands of illegal aliens, paring back our suicidal open-door immigration policies, and challenging political correctness almost daily, and Trump’s record on the domestic front points to a good start on growing the economy and getting the dead hand of big government out of the country’s business.

On foreign policy, Trump has begun to repair the damage to our international prestige wrought by Obama’s subjection of our country to the one-world, naïve internationalism favored by progressives, who want to diminish America’s global clout and reduce the U.S. to a “partner,” as Obama said in Cairo, “mindful of his own imperfections.” He increased sanctions on Iran and refused to recertify Obama’s disastrous agreement with the nuke-hungry mullahs; bombed a Syrian airfield and destroyed a fifth of Assad’s jet fighters; took the gloves off our military and ended ISIS’s “caliphate”; rolled back Obama’s cringing concessions to Cuba; put Russia on notice by recommitting to the Magnitsky Act and increasing sanctions on regime oligarchs; began work on strengthening military readiness and antimissile defence; gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization in Poland; visited world capitals to project America’s renewed confidence and willingness to defend its security and interests; unleashed U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to scold and scorn the anti-American pygmy states infesting that “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” to borrow Churchill’s phrase; and announced that the U.S recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and promised to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Under Trump, America seems to be getting its international mojo back.

Merriam-Webster named “feminism” its Word of the Year for 2017—not 1971, as might have been more appropriate. The reference company’s shortlist for consideration included “Antifa,” “White Fragility” (two words?), and “Broflake,” defined as “a man who is readily upset or offended by progressive attitudes that conflict with his more conventional or conservative views.” At the risk of sounding like a broflake, or telegraphing my white fragility: someone at Merriam-Webster really, really wanted the Word of the Year to serve (in terms best understood with the assistance of Merriam-Webster) as a brickbat to ensanguine mossbacked atavists.

Oxford Dictionaries selected a similarly politically charged term, albeit one more obscure than the ubiquitous “feminism.” The company defines “youthquake” as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.” That seems neutral enough, until one understands that it was UK Labour Party gains, fueled by the youth vote, that led to the company’s elevation of a term that, as a befuddled Washington Post pointed out, nobody really uses.

Urban Dictionary, a newer competitor of sorts to the OED, includes in its entries “lexiconnoisseur,” defined as “a person who makes up words, and then tells everyone about said word.” Surely as neologisms go, lexiconnoisseur beats youthquake—and describes its boosters.

Dictionary.com went with “complicit,” which initially appears to be a perfectly cromulent and un-weaponized word. But in explaining its choice, the popular website cited the complicity of various politicians in aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s agenda. “Climate change has been thrust into the spotlight this year with President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement,” Dictionary.com claims. “Additionally, the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt has been complicit in his refusal to acknowledge that humans play a primary role in climate change.”

Do we remember today the media hysteria between 2003 and 2007 that surrounded the special counsel’s investigation, prosecution, and trial of Scooter Libby?https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/26/back-to-the-future-from-scooter-libby-to-donald-trump/

During the progressive furor over the Iraq War, media-driven charges arose that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had deliberately leaked the covert status of Valerie Plame—a supposedly undercover CIA operative.

Soon all hell broke loose. Remember, these were the unhinged years of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the Bush-Hitler slurs, snuff Bush novels and films, and “Bush lied; people died” gospels.

Sensing a chance to embarrass or wound the Bush Administration, the political and media opponents of Cheney and Bush advisor Karl Rove first went after Libby. They apparently had hopes that he could be charged with something to leverage confessions and thus indictments of his superiors as co-conspirators in the supposed Libby leak of Plame’s CIA status. The leak purportedly was a way of punishing Plame’s stridently anti-Bush husband, Joseph Wilson, who had made unsubstantiated accusations of conspiratorial wrongdoing against the Bush White House.

Finally, the Bush Administration bowed to the growing media-driven pressures. We may forget now that it was none other than acting Attorney General James Comey on December 30, 2003, who appointed his friend Patrick Fitzgerald (sound familiar?) as special counsel. He had appointed Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation “into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee’s identity.”

If we review news stories from this year alone that did not warrant a special counsel investigation—FBI investigators assigned to Robert Mueller’s legal team exchanging venomous texts about the target of their supposed disinterested inquiry; the Obama Administration secretly shutting down government investigations of the terrorist organization Hezbollah’s global drug-trafficking to enhance its signature Iran deal; or the Clinton-funded phony Steele/Fusion GPS file that was peddled to the FBI and may have been used as an argument to get a FISA order to surveille Trump campaign officials and leak their names during and right after the 2016 election—we can remember just how hysterical those times were. The entire country was set afire over the ambiguous status of a single CIA employee and the loud, unfounded conspiracies theories of Plame’s often buffoonish spouse, Wilson.

A conservative cynic from birth, I foolishly thought I had seen it all when it came to leftist madness. But then I saw, posted on CNN’s website, “Why kids love ‘fascist’ cartoons like ‘Paw Patrol’ and ‘Thomas’.” The article referenced several other articles that described Thomas as “a premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia,” “imperialist racist and sinister,” and “classist, sexist, and anti-environmentalist.”

This caught my attention because my six-year-old boy — like children all over the world — loves stories of Thomas the Train. I recently took my children to Thomasland in Massachusetts and now my boy wants to visit the Thomasland in Japan. The Thomas cartoon is so popular that 1 billion dollars of merchandise related to the show is sold every year.

Reverend Wilbert Audrey, creator of Thomas the Train, has recounted how, when his 3-year-old son was ill with the measles, he told him stories about trains. Audrey says that in his own childhood he had to read boring books about perfect children so that he would learn from their moral example. He decided to write interesting books about engines with human characteristics in a fictional island he called Sodor. The trains would push the envelope until they got in trouble, be punished, and after making amends would be “bought back into the family so to speak.” Morality in the world of Thomas was making oneself useful to society, being a good friend, and keeping the railroad functioning smoothly. The human aspect of his trains is part of their appeal to children and the moral aspect of his stories was part of their appeal to the adults who read the stories to their children.

Now left-wing critics label the Thomas the Train show “racist” because the diesel villain is black. They call it totalitarian because trains are supposed to do what the manager of the rails, Sir Topham Hat, tells them to do. They call it sexist because there are more male trains than female trains. (In 2013 the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary actually called out Thomas for its lack of females.) When Thomas is awarded two female passenger cars to pull because of good behavior, the feminists call this sexist too.

Late on Christmas Eve, the 2017 finalist for Twitter’s most unhinged leftist compared House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to Judas Iscariot, the notorious traitor who delivered Jesus Christ into the hands of the authorities leading to the Crucifixion. Ryan’s crime? Tweeting about Christmas.

“paul ryan — don’t talk about Jesus after what u just did to our nation — u will go straight to hell u screwed up fake altar boy #Judasmuch,” O’Donnell tweeted.

O’Donnell’s tweet referred to the Republican tax reform bill, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday. While tax reform was passing the U.S. Senate, O’Donnell sent a barrage of deranged tweets, well documented by PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser.

“call 911 — crime in progress US SENATE,” O’Donnell tweeted Tuesday night.

Also that evening, she sent out a bribery offer, explicitly offering “2 million dollars” to Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) if they “vote NO NO I WILL NOT KILL AMERICANS FOR THE SUOER RICH DM me susan DM me jeff so sh*t 2 million cash each.”

Contrary to her deranged ravings, the tax bill will not kill anyone. The biggest count against it — from a liberal perspective — is that it will repeal the hated individual mandate in President Obama’s signature health care law, also known as Obamacare. This repeal has led to the charge that tax reform will result in 13 million people “losing” health insurance. In reality, the tax law merely removes a penalty for not signing up for insurance. This frees people who would not normally purchase health insurance from choosing between paying a hefty fine and buying something they would not normally buy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Remember that scene in “The Blues Brothers” when the dimwitted siblings, portrayed by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, enter a honky-tonk where they plan to play a show?

“What kind of music do you usually have here?” says Mr. Aykroyd.

“Oh, we got both kinds,” replies a chirpy barkeep. “We got country and western.”

The exchange came to mind last week when the best-selling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates quit Twitter in a huff after an argument with fellow black author Cornel West. Both men are committed liberals, but Mr. West, the veteran activist and Marxist academic, thinks that Mr. Coates’s writings don’t go far enough. Hard as it may be for some readers to fathom, Mr. West critiques Mr. Coates from the left.

What so upset Mr. Coates was a recent op-ed for the British newspaper the Guardian in which Mr. West praises his younger rival’s use of books and essays to highlight “the vicious legacy of white supremacy—past and present” and its “plundering effects” on black people. But he faults Mr. Coates for not connecting “this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.”

Ultimately, Mr. West writes, “Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable.” Mr. Coates’s focus on white absolution, in Mr. West’s view, is necessary but insufficient. “The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, U.S. military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading.”

Mr. Coates’s defenders in academia and the media dismiss these attacks as little more than jealous rage. Back in the 1990s, they contend, Mr. West was one of liberalism’s black intellectual darlings, but his star has since faded (along with his scholarly output), and now he’s lashing out in frustration at a younger generation of black thinkers. CONTINUE AT SITE