RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/what-dems-prospects-are-without-donald-trump-bruce-thornton/

Like last year’s Congress, the new 116th failed ignominiously to get Donald Trump convicted of their impeachment charge. Some federal court investigations into Trump’s businesses are still ongoing, but it’s likely, though not certain, that Trump will become less and less useful for distracting voters from the Democrats’ sharp turn to the left both on domestic and foreign policy.

If the Dems fail to hold on to power as they did in 2016, history will have a lot of suspects to investigate in order to explain their inability to attract voters without the bogey of Donald Trump and a fortuitous pandemic. But if they succeed, then we will have turned a dangerous corner on the road to dismantling the Constitution’s structure of ordered liberty and unalienable rights.

Start with Biden himself. We can pass over his obvious cognitive impairments and endless gaffes. He overcame those campaign-ending deficits because the party, with a compliant media, marketed him as an old-school centrist who could neutralize the toxic socialist Bernie Sanders.  Upon election he indulged the dull clichés “working together,” “healing the wounds,” and “no blue America, no red America.” But the House negated that rhetoric with an even more preposterous article of impeachment that charged the president with “insurrection,” based mainly on creatively editing the footage of his speech at the Ellipse, and taking literally a “fight” metaphor that Trump’s lawyers used video clips to showed numerous Democrats repeatedly using over the past four years.

So much for “healing.” But worse has been Biden’s flurry of executive orders that make down- payments on the Green New Deal disaster dear to the party’s socialist wing. On foreign policy, he has stacked his administration with old retreads from the “rules-based” global order that has failed serially since World War II, and which blew the opportunity presented when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. This means returning to the creaking global diplomacy institutions that favor summits, conferences, photo-ops and empty threats. Hence Biden is undoing the necessary corrections made by Trump in order to make it clear to our rivals and allies alike that the U.S. is putting our own national security and interest ahead of the mythic “new world order.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/black_lives_matter_leader_openly_supporters_the_israel_haters.html

One of the constants with leftism is anti-Semitism.  Before Israel’s existence, the anti-Semites associated Jews with using capitalism to secretly control the world.  After Israel came into being, the socialists added a new sin: Israel was a colonial occupying power.  It should therefore come as no surprise that activist groups associated with the increasingly socialist Democrat party are anti-Semitic Israel-haters.  A few years ago, the Women’s March become openly anti-Semitic now, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement is doing the same.

Hatred for the Jews is nothing new.  In pagan times, they were hated for refusing to bow down to the pagan gods.  During pre-Enlightenment Christianity, they were hated for their role in convicting Christ, for refusing to recognize His divinity, and for the fact that a handful of them were moneylenders.  This last was because Catholic Church officials selectively criminalized the sin of usury among Christians while tolerating it among Jews, leading to jealousy among the Christian faithful when Jews accumulated wealth in ways forbidden to Christians.

With socialism, a new hatred for Jews developed.  Christianity had gone by the wayside.  However, the Marxist obsession with capital meant that the Jews’ age-old association with capital made them a target for leftist hatred.  Additionally, Karl Marx, a self-loathing Jew (his father converted to Christianity for business reasons when Marx was a child), spouted anti-Semitic venom that would have made Hitler proud.

Speaking of Hitler, it’s important to remember that his hatred for Jews was also a byproduct of his socialism.  After all, he was the leader of the National Socialist Party.  It was leftist hatred for Jews that justified slaughtering six million Jews, most of them desperately poor, merely poor, working-class, or middle-class.

With Israel’s emergence, the left got a new reason to hate Jews: now they’re accused of being colonial occupiers, stealing land from the indigenous Arabs.  This version of events is a historic lie.  Jews are the region’s indigenous people with the Arabs coming in as recent interlopers.  Truth, however, has never stopped leftists.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2021/02/16/turley-one-of-raskins-claims-about-trump-was-breathtaking-and-chilling-n2584741

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley followed last week’s impeachment trial against former President Trump very closely. Turley was the only witness called by Republicans to participate in the first trial against Trump in 2019, when the president faced charges after discussing the Bidens and corruption on a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. At the time, Turley explained that “impeachment has to be based on proof, not presumptions.”

Turley found several more glaring holes in the Democrats’ arguments last week as they tried to convict him on inciting an insurrection. One argument in particular Turley found to be “breathtaking” and “chilling” – when lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (MD) suggested that Trump was guilty because he refused to show up and testify. 

“If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Raskin wrote to Trump, essentially arguing that the former president needed to testify or his silence equals guilt.

On his blog, Turley explained that Raskin was misleading senators because Trump’s decision is not unprecedented:

“Presidents have historically not testified at impeachment trials.  One reason is that, until now, only sitting presidents have been impeached and presidents balked at the prospect of being examined as head of the Executive Branch by the Legislative Branch. Moreover, it was likely viewed as undignified and frankly too risky.  Indeed, most defense attorneys routinely discourage their clients from testifying in actual criminal cases because the risks outweigh any benefits. Finally, Trump is arguing that this trial is unconstitutional and thus he would be even less likely to depart from tradition and appear as a witness.”

Turley said that Raskin’s statement “conflicts with one of the most precious and revered principles in American law that a refusal to testify should not be used against an accused party.”

https://spectator.org/desantis-florida-covid/

At the end of January I watched a video message from the commissioners of the suburban Philadelphia county where my wife and I reside. According to them, it may take Pennsylvania up to a year to administer COVID vaccinations to all persons over the age of 65. We oldsters (my wife and I are 76) were told to register with the county and prepare for a long wait.

This information decided the issue of whether or not we should take up residence in Florida for the remaining winter months. Not only would the weather be more congenial, according to our Florida friends, but our chances of receiving the COVID vaccine in a timely manner also would increase exponentially.

And, in fact, within 11 days of our arrival in Florida, we received our first jabs of the Moderna vaccine and will receive our second doses in mid-March. We are now among the 2,355,792 persons who have been vaccinated in Florida as of February 13, 2021.

The comparison between Florida’s efficient handling of COVID vaccinations, under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and that of Pennsylvania, under Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, could not be more telling. And the favorable comparisons don’t end there.