RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/25/how-it-might-end-act-i/ 

It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them. 

A couple of years ago, I had the honor of publishing American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by Frank Buckley, a prolific author and law professor at George Mason University. Buckley began by noting the obvious: that we in America are more divided now than at any time since the 1850s. We know how that Disunited States of America worked out, and the horror of the Civil War—what Buckley calls Secession 1.0—has led many of us to conclude that we’d put up with almost anything rather than risk a repeat of that disaster. 

“Almost” anything. 

Buckley does not predict a second American secession, exactly, but he shows, convincingly, I think, how it might come about. “The bitterness” of our life together, “the contempt for opponents, the growing tolerance of violence, all invite us to think that we’d all be happier were we two different countries.” There is something to that. And something to Buckley’s admonitory conclusion: “In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations, just as much as in 1861.”

I hesitate to spoil the ending, but it is probably worth noting that in the end, despite his warnings and various scenarios of how the divorce might happen, Buckley turns out, again like most (but not all of us) to be a unionist. The United States may be too big and too powerful for its own or anyone else’s good, but might, while it doesn’t make right, does or at least conduce to stability. 

And consider the alternative world orders on offer: Communist China? Islamic fundamentalism? European socialism? 

No thank you. 

At the same time, some current events lead me to suspect that some of the scenarios Buckley imagines have a lot of divisive life left in them. At one point, he observes, “A state that uses every means at its disposal to neuter a federal law might render it unenforceable within its jurisdiction, at least until the Supreme Court is able to rule on the matter. That might be years later, however, and that may be all it takes, if during the interim a new president has been elected and the new administration takes the state’s view of the question.” 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/24/biden-isnt-facing-challenges-biden-is-the-challenge/

Well-known Washington creature Amy Walters wrote this week on the “challenge” that Joe Biden is facing early in his presidency: “The former senator and vice president looks more like a helpless bystander than an experienced Capitol Hill deal maker…”

That, in a nutshell, is the national media’s preferred framing of the absolute breakdown we’re witnessing under Biden. A collapse that he created and is wholly responsible for.

The media want Biden to look like a “helpless bystander,” a victim of circumstances out of his control. He’s not. He’s the perpetrator of nearly every disaster anyone with eyes can see, from the obscenity at the southern border, to the loss of 13 service members (not fighting, but leaving a war zone), to the stratospheric inflation of household necessities.

We’re led to believe these are simply “challenges” Biden is facing rather than the results of his own deliberate screw-ups.

These are things happening to Biden.

CNN did a remarkable job handicapping Biden’s presidency earlier this week. In a Sept. 20 segment on Jake Tapper’s show, correspondent Phil Mattingly said Biden was “grappl[ing] with one of the most consequential weeks of his first year in office.” The graphic on screen noted that Biden was “faced with foreign policy turmoil…” Mattingly later said Biden was in “a key moment, particularly in the wake of a bumpy last several weeks.”

Let’s take stock of what’s happened during those “bumpy last several weeks”: On Sep. 20, there had been a total of 676,718 COVID-related deaths. Roughly 270,000 of those happened under Biden.

Pretty bumpy!

Also, on Aug. 26, 13 members of the U.S. military were killed during a suicide bombing attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, where operations were underway to withdraw from our decades-long effort in that sandpit. Eleven of the brave men and women were under the age of 24.

That feels bumpy, too.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/effort-spread-discredited-russia-collusion-theory

The efforts to disseminate a now-discredited theory that the Trump campaign had secret computer communications with the Kremlin extended beyond the FBI, CIA, and State Department to the U.S. Senate.

Under the late Sen. John McCain, the Armed Services Committee engaged a former FBI official and his progressive-funded nonprofit to produce a report on the matter, according to court records obtained by Just the News.

The Senate committee, now under Democrats’ control, successfully waged a secret federal court battle this summer to quash a subpoena that would have forced one of its staffers, Thomas Kirk McConnell, to turn over documents and testify about his dealings with former FBI analyst Dan Jones and his nonprofit, The Democracy Integrity Project, the records show.

A spokesman for George Soros confirms the progressive megadonor was one of the financial backers of The Democracy Integrity Project. Tax records show the group raised more than $7 million in donations in 2017 and hired Fusion GPS — the same firm that produced the debunked Steele dossier for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — to pursue allegations of foreign interference in elections.

The episode, recounted in hundreds of pages of federal and D.C. Superior court records, provides extraordinary insight into how current and former government officials in multiple branches of government were able to sustain a Russia collusion theory on artificial life support for years after the FBI first dispelled it.

The legal skirmish with the Senate also provides new context to allegations filed last week by Special Counsel John Durham, who indicted a former DOJ lawyer named Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI during his efforts to peddle the same debunked story about the Trump campaign, a computer server at the Alfa Bank in Moscow and the Kremlin. Sussmann was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he pitched the allegations to the bureau, court records show. He has pleaded not guilty.