RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/covid-is-becoming-the-afghanistan-of-pandemics-opinion/ar-AAOJOhX

We are suffering tremendous losses in blood, treasure, mettle and might, with no end to the intervention resulting in these losses in sight.

Our response to COVID over the last 18 months has shown that we have failed to heed the lessons of Kabul over the last 20 years.

If Afghanistan should have taught us anything, it is this: When confronting an enemy, we need a clear set of goals, a reasonable plan to achieve those goals as efficiently as possible and an ironclad exit strategy. How one addresses these matters hinges on knowing both ourselves and our enemy.

Yet with COVID, as with the Afghanistan boondoggle, the stated goals have been ever-shifting and often nebulous. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” evolved into “defeating the virus”—whatever that means—and of course “building back better,” which is to say, exploiting the pandemic to forcibly impose a full-spectrum progressive agenda. Routing al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harbored it evolved into making Zurich out of Kandahar. And if “zero-COVID” is the implicit goal, it is equally as farcical. The totalitarian means that would be employed in a bid to achieve that would only compound the disaster. In both cases, mission creep was baked in from the beginning by dint of the mission itself.

The measures by which to achieve these vague goals have proven similarly haphazard. With COVID, our authorities conjured social distancing rules almost out of thin air; urged us to wear no masks and then up to three at a time, despite their questionable efficacy; and imposed on-again, off-again lockdowns—all selectively enforced based on political ideology. The politicians that have inflicted the most pain on their constituents—from the elderly consigned to their deaths in nursing homes, to the children kept out of school—have hidden behind public-health bureaucrats, as insulated as the national security and foreign policy establishment officials behind Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, that establishment oversaw the development of a sharia-subordinate political regime, bribed thugs and warlords, poured billions into bridges-to-nowhere, imposed on our soldiers suicidal rules of engagement and demanded they turn a blind eye to bacha bazi and all manner of other awfulness—all in service of liberal, moralistic nation-building.

The facts and figures necessary for Americans to assess whether policies have “worked” and to what extent they were justifiable, in the case of COVID, have been hard to come by. It requires considerable effort to find information on items as basic as how and how accurately COVID deaths have been coded, statistics on deaths with COVID versus deaths by COVID, the severity of COVID hospitalizations, breakthrough infections, vaccine adverse events and state-versus-state comparisons on relevant virus-fighting metrics. Neither the federal government, nor the states collectively, have run a grand postmortem on the efficacy of mask mandates and lockdowns. In Afghanistan, at least there was SIGAR to catalogue failure and corruption. But all the same, year in and year out, our leaders continued reporting success, and the war persisted.

Critics would say that, at minimum, the development of vaccines counts as a standout achievement. Insofar as they have saved the lives of those who would have otherwise died and turned acute cases into mild ones—and that these benefits outweighed the costs of any adverse events, and the foregoing of the benefits of natural immunity—they are correct.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/09/when-science-becomes-a-truncheon/

I should like to make a personal confession that will probably disappoint some readers, and perhaps please others. I have now had both doses of AstraZenica. I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer’, nor a conspiracy theorist. But I also have good, intelligent, well-informed and rational friends who strongly oppose the vaccine and I do not like to see them punished by the infliction of civil disabilities or verbal abuse.

Some Christians and other religious people have grave reservations about vaccines as this letter to the PM from the Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox archbishops of Sydney clearly shows. Such qualms about abortion and the use foetal tissue in the vaccines’ development are perhaps not shared by most people, but they ought to be treated with respect in a civil society.

Whether to make use of research derived during WWII from experimentation on prisoners under conditions of terrible cruelty was once a grave moral question. To wish to avoid the use of vaccines that have been developed, even remotely, from aborted human ‘materials’ is a legitimate and understandable moral stance. Yet as one of our readers points out, it is virtually impossible to isolate oneself in this complex world from evil: if you pay taxes you support Medicare, and Medicare funds abortions.

I agree that COVID-19 has caused great suffering and many deaths.  That is beyond dispute. But for more than a year and a half we have been bombarded by many health ‘orders’ that claim a scientific basis yet are clearly motivated less by science than by ease of law-enforcement. In particular, some absurd strictures about the use of masks in public and private places have been given the force of law. I am not a scientist, but I know enough to affirm that science is never ‘settled’ and that those who claim it is are usually not scientists.  It is extremely hard for a non-scientist to extract reliable scientific information from the internet, but we must do our best to separate good science from false claims that pretend to a scientific basis but merely make it easier for governments to police the behaviour of their citizens.