RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/17/can-the-fbi-be-salvaged/

The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids’ schools.

In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news—and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light.

The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton’s email leaks. In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that Comey had allowed Hillary Clinton’s own private computer contractor, CrowdStrike, to run the investigation of the hack. The private firm was allowed to keep possession of pertinent hard drives central to the investigation. How odd that CrowdStrike’s point man was Shawn Henry, a former high-ranking FBI employee.

During the Robert Mueller special investigation, the FBI implausibly claimed it had no idea how requested information on FBI cell phones had mysteriously disappeared.

It was also under Comey’s directorship that the FBI submitted inaccurate requests for warrants to a FISA court. Elements of one affidavit to surveil Trump supporter Carter Page were forged by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who later pleaded guilty to a felony.

The FBI hired the disreputable ex-British spy Christopher Steele as a contractor, while he was peddling his fantasy—the Clinton-bought dossier—to Obama government officials and the media.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker was reportedly the subject of a federal investigation. He allegedly conducted prominent meetings both with media outlets that later leaked lurid tales from the Steele dossier. He also met repeatedly with the now-indicted Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussman.

Comey himself, through third-party intermediaries, leaked to the media his own confidential memos detailing private meetings with President Trump. His assurances both to Congress and to Trump that the president was not the current subject of FBI investigations were either misleading or outright lies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/stumbling_bumbling_kamala.html

Ooh-la-la!, oui, oui!  Kamala Harris has finally gone to Europe — and at taxpayers’ expense.  Yet despite CNN’s glowing description of the “chumming chemistry” between the vice president and France’s President Emmanuel Macron that “signaled a relationship back on track” after the canceled submarine contract crisis, the meeting did little by way of burnishing the vice president’s image.

Of course, nobody who has seen Kamala hovering behind the president like a straddle-legged, uniformed prison guard would expect her to sweep onto the continental scene with the same panache as, say, a Jackie Kennedy or Princess Di — and certainly not swathed in the same head-turning, headlining haute couture.  Nor does Kamala, pantsuits notwithstanding, generate the same interest as someone like Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the intention of her boringly severe tailored “look” is to make her appear to be a no-nonsense woman of business.  The only problem is that thus far, Kamala has come across as all nonsense and very little business.  As for the outcome of the Paris meeting, Harris summed it up eloquently by saying, “We have a lot of follow-up stuff.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/adam-schiff-steele-dossier-death-shame-jonathan-turley

The famous philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once declared that “the only shame is to have none.” The problem with shame is it assumes a sense of guilt over one’s actions. In the age of rage, there appear fewer and fewer actions that are beyond the pale for politics. 

Take Adam Schiff and the Steele dossier. While even the Washington Post has admitted that it got the Russian collusion story wrong in light of the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is still insisting that he was absolutely right to promote the discredited Steele dossier.

Schiff’s interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” may be the final proof of the death of shame in American politics.

Schiff was one of the greatest promoters of the Steele dossier despite access to briefings casting doubt about Steele and the underlying claims. However, Schiff recently has attempted to defend himself by claiming that Steele was a respected former spy and that he was lied to by a Russian source.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/17/the-1619-project-books-goal-is-to-keep-slandering-america/

New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein recently introduced the forthcoming book version of the 1619 Project in a long essay that attempts to head off well-deserved criticism of the original project and the new book. Silverstein’s motive is to explain in advance that the nay-sayers have it all wrong. I don’t yet have the book, so it is possible that Silverstein is right, but judging from his preamble it looks like the new, expanded version of The 1619 Project is woven of the same wish fulfillment as the original.

Silverstein’s essay is meant to clear a path for readers who have heard some of the criticisms of that original and want to be reassured that the critics can safely be ignored. His approach, however, is not so much to refute the critics as it is to draw a map showing 1619 supporters how to evade them.

Think of the editor strapping on his silver skates to glide past a lot of the awkwardness that accompanied the 1619 Project’s early days. In the interests of keeping the record straight, let’s revisit 2019 and 2020.

At the Start

I covered this era pretty thoroughly in my book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. But there are other good sources, including Phillip Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique; Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project; and David North and Thomas Mackaman’s edited volume, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and Racialist Falsification of History.

The 1619 Project has never faded from public view since The New York Times published it on August 18, 2019. On the opening page, Silverstein wrote it was an effort “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” “Doing so,” he added, “requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a county.”

Several statements by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author and architect, jumped out as contrary to established facts. The six biggest errors are (1) that slavery was somehow new to America in 1619; (2) that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery from the threat of emancipation; (3) that Abraham Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites; (4) that blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights; (5) that plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism; (6) and that the nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy.

Dig into The 1619 Project and you will find an abundance of other errors, but these are the tent poles that hold up the entire circus tent of falsehoods.