RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/10/16/brain-freeze-biden-says-economy-strong-as-hell-during-ice-cream-stop-n1637517

During a campaign stop at a Baskin-Robbins in Portland, Ore., on Saturday, Joe Biden declared the economy to be “strong as hell” under his administration.

“Our economy is strong as hell,” Biden claimed while going to town on his ice cream, before adding, “the internals of it.”

What internals is he talking about? Historic inflation? Record gas prices? The weakening dollar? Economic contraction?

“I’m not concerned about the strength of the dollar. I’m concerned about the rest of the world. Does that make sense?” he said, before blaming other countries for America’s economic woes.

“The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries, not so much ours,” he insisted. “And that’s having, it’s worldwide inflation, and it’s consequential.”

Well, it’s appropriate he was in a Baskin-Robbins because that’s 31 flavors of stupid right there.

https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/decade-later-obama-admits-he-made-mistake-failing-support-2009-iranian-uprisings

Former President Barack Obama is belatedly acknowledging he erred by failing to embrace the Iranian uprising in 2009 known as the “Green Movement” as a new round of protests and strikes rage in Tehran more than 13 years later.

“In retrospect, I think that was a mistake,” Obama, said Friday, referring to his administrations tepid response to the 2009 movement. “Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out.

“We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it,” the 44th president told the Pod Save America podcast operated by some of his former advisers.

A new uprising has been underway in Iran for 30 days, ignited by the beating death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Islamic morality police.

Obama said it is “hard to predict” whether the current protests will achieve regime change, but that the West needs to stand with the demonstrators in the face of a brutal crackdown.

He hailed “the incredible courage that is taking place in Iran and those women and girls who are on the streets knowing that they’re putting themselves in harm’s way to speak truth to power.”

Obama added it was important “to affirm what they do and I hope that it brings about more space for the kind of civic conversation that over time can take the country down a better path.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3689785-tulsi-gabbard-a-voice-of-reason/

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party. It’s now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.”

That was former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) earlier this week announcing why she left the Democratic Party. Except one could reasonably argue that the Democratic Party left Gabbard.

One thing’s certain: These aren’t your daddy’s donkeys anymore. President Kennedy won the approval of the nation based largely on a platform of lowering taxes and strengthening the U.S. military. Jimmy Carter was pro-life and god-fearing. And Bill Clinton was conservative on illegal immigration, crime and spending.

Clinton said things one would never hear almost any Democrat say today when it comes to decreasing the size of government, ending the welfare state and not spending what we don’t have. Not coincidentally, Clinton left office with the highest approval rating of any Democratic president of the television era.

But then the party went so far left that its most popular lawmakers on social media embrace socialism. President Biden and most other Democrats seem to believe that spending trillions of dollars is the best way to lower inflation. So much for not spending what we don’t have.

Some in the party also believe cashless bail laws that allow violent criminals onto the street somehow lower crime, or the opposite of the approach taken by the 1994 crime bill Biden once championed.

https://victorhanson.com/the-unmentionable-unspeakable-and-unutterable-part-one/

What best characterizes an Orwellian or Soviet society?

The silent, collective acceptance of the truth that never can be spoken, and the lies of the apparat that everyone else knows are not true.

Think of some of the astounding truths that we simply ignore.

Hillary Clinton

We have spoken about Clinton before, but the degree of her transgressions seems to increase with every recent disclosure. In 2015–16 Hillary Clinton for the first time in U.S. history hired a thuggish hit team of oppo researchers to manufacture dirt on her opponent Donald Trump.

Then she trumped that crime by hiding her payments behind three paywalls. Then her team enlisted a corrupt FBI to hire her own two hirelings, Christopher Steele and Igor Danchenko, as informants to spread their lies, smears, and dirt throughout the apparat, deep state, and fusion media.

In other words, Hillary Clinton was the first presidential candidate in history, who, hand-in-glove with the FBI, almost won the presidency by systematically violating a myriad of laws (hiring two foreign nationals to work in a presidential campaign, destroying subpoenaed records and devices, racketeering, and conspiracy to deceive the government, etc.) in her efforts to destroy Donald Trump.

Then without a hint of shame, Hillary Clinton immediately became the nation’s most prominent election denier by declaring Trump illegitimate. She insisted that he was not the true winner of the 2016 election, as her minions did their best to warp electors to reject their constitutional duties to vote according to state tallies.

Then licking her wounds in defeat, she bragged that she was joining the “Resistance.” And she would go on to advise Biden in 2020 not to accept a popular vote loss.

Think of it: Hillary Clinton sought to destroy the integrity of the entire 2016 election.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/15/the-dishonest-and-dishonorable-disagreements-of-former-friends/

Most of us, at some point or another, fall out with friends. It’s a painful and, perhaps, inevitable part of life. It’s especially disquieting when former friends turn on you suddenly and publicly, devoid of any goodwill, charity, or benefit of the doubt that one might think were warranted by years of amity. All this, however disagreeable, is at least “normal” in the sense that it has been going on forever—though it massively intensified in the Trump Derangement Era. 

About four years ago, I was finishing a small book, the centerpiece of which was an article I had already published. The new material consisted of a shortish defense/explanation of the classical idea of “natural right”—that is, the doctrine or assertion that good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, etc.—exist by nature and are not mere products of human will or preference. This idea undergirds not merely the regime of the American founders and the very idea of “human rights,” but also the entire notion that anything political can be good or bad, right or wrong. For example, when Never Trumpers speak of the alleged danger from Donald Trump to “Our Democracy™” and declare this to be bad, they are—wittingly or not—endorsing natural right. 

You’d think this would be, if not uncontroversial, at least well within the bounds of civic discourse. Nonetheless, I predicted to some friends that at least one of our former friends would denounce natural right simply because I had defended it. 

I didn’t need to wait long for that prediction to come true. Shortly after the book’s publication, it was scathingly reviewed by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a man I had known for something like 20 years. We were never the best of friends, but we had been friendly, meeting occasionally for meals or otherwise seeing each other at events in Manhattan’s small but close-knit community of conservative intellectuals and fellow travelers. 

Needless to say, Gabe and I no longer speak. Trump, naturally, is the reason. Still, given that long history, one might have assumed some charitable consideration in a review by a former friend. A good review was not necessarily expected; reviewers of course ought to say what they think. But it was odd, to say least, to see a review so jaundiced as to reject out of hand a core foundation of Western Civilization out of anti-Trump spite. 

I let that review go at the time, and wouldn’t even mention it now, were it not for similar attacks from the same quarter. I am half-persuaded to let those go, too, but another friend pointed out that a continuous stream of libels not responded to eventually constitutes a kind of public record. 

I’m also motivated to respond because, irrelevant or distasteful as one may think these people are, they are actually quite powerful. They, and many others like them, form authoritative opinion in our time. In an age, and a regime, in which propaganda and censorship are foundational sources of rule, the power to police opinion is quasi-governmental. They are information warfare specialists, backed by big money, and their role is to constrain what you get to hear in part by smearing and slandering dissidents. One may not pay them much heed, but others who also have power over what the public gets to hear do, hence their vitriol matters. 

Viciousness and Vitriol Demanding a Handshake?