RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16715/us-elections-unasked-questions

The initial success of America’s recent economic policy was based on three factors: a substantial tax cut, energy independence, and a more level playing field in foreign trade…. Will there be a high tax scenario at a time the economy is grappling with the crippling effect of Covid-19? Will he stop or curtail fracking and lose the status of number one global energy producer that the US has won for the first time since the 1960s?

Will the US re-join the so-called Paris Accord on climate change even though none of the remaining signatories has complied with it?

Will the US simply apologize and resume signing cheques for UNESCO and the World Health Organization (WHO) without insisting on reforms that most member nations regard as urgently needed?

Will the US dismantle the build-up of troops and materiel that has bolstered the allies in Central and Eastern Europe?

On strategic arms limitation schemes, will there be abandon recent demands to expand any agreement to include China or will he insist on a Cold War style check with Vladimir Putin? Will the US give the two fingers to Jair Bolsonaro and Narendra Modi, instead, hug Nicolas Maduro as Obama did with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro?

On the Middle East, will the US simply revive the Obama “nuke deal” with the Islamic Republic in Iran, lift sanctions and help the mullahs feed the monsters they have created across the globe in the name of exporting revolution? Will the US resume smuggling crisp greenbacks to Tehran to help “the moderate faction” smile more tooth-fully while “the radical faction” massacres Iranian protesters in the streets?

Will the US stab long-term allies in the back in the hope of turning deadly foes into friends, as Obama tried to do with his infamous speech at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University?

As millions of Americans prepare to go to the polls on Tuesday, joining the estimated 50 million who have already cast their ballots, they might take a few moments to ask themselves a simple question: What are we voting for?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/31/a-hardcore-leftist-makes-the-case-for-trump/

To eject Trump now would be to rejuvenate the neoliberal order at a time of showdown and to accord it the legitimacy it desperately needed after its failed response to the last economic collapse.

The dominant view on the Left is to press the urgency of voting Donald Trump out of office, claiming he is an existential threat to democracy, and then work with a Democratic administration to push for a more progressive agenda. Trump is to be seen as an unprecedented disaster, and we are asked to think of Joe Biden as a temporary measure, the lesser of two evils. 

But all of this seems to be driven by a fundamental misunderstanding of where we stand today as an empire, and what this might mean for the actual possibility of change in a populist direction. 

Behind the upset feelings caused by Trump’s “vulgar” rhetoric and style, the substance of his policies versus those of the Democrats goes unaddressed. What if Trump could be shown to be less destructive than the Democrats in every single policy dimension? On immigration, trade, inequality, surveillance, civil liberties, and even the environment, what if reelecting Trump actually would prove less harmful than returning a Democrat to the White House?

Such a case, in fact, can be made. Trump is the first president in modern American history not to start a war. It appears that he tried his best to unwind the existing wars, but faced unrelenting pressure from the deep state (let’s call it that, rather than the military-industrial complex, because it better captures the passionately symbiotic alliance that’s formed between all the liberal institutions and the war machine) against international retreat. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/31/a-momentous-choice-faces-us-today-as-in-1776/

As the historian David Hackett Fischer shows in Washington’s Crossing, his magisterial study of the opening months of the Revolutionary War, by Christmas 1776 things were looking exceedingly grim for the colonists. The British army, the mightiest in the world, had taken over three colonies, including New York, and were threatening Philadelphia, seat of the fledgling American government. 

Everyone knows now that, after several more years of brutal fighting, the story had a happy ending, for the colonists and for the world. But in the winter of 1776, the war was almost lost. There is a reason that Washington’s Crossing is part of a series about “Pivotal Moments in American History.” Had the chips fallen just a little differently, had George Washington made different choices about whom to attack, and when and how, the revolution would have been suppressed in its infancy. 

Fischer emphasizes the place of choice in the drama of history. His book, he says toward the end, “is mainly about contingency, in the sense of people making choices, and choices making a difference in the world.” 

It is a pregnant detail that Donald Trump kicked off the first of his four rallies in Pennsylvania on Saturday with a stop at the site of Washington’s headquarters, now private property, for his fateful crossing of the Delaware River. It was, in comparison with most of Trump’s rallies, a small and subdued affair. (Though with about 500 people attending, it was huge by Joe Biden’s standards.) 

The president spoke for about 30 minutes, short for him though, again, garrulous by the standard Biden has set for himself. The talk was not his usual off-the-cuff, rev up the crowd spiel but a thoughtful summary of what is at stake in this election. Like Washington’s crossing in 1776, the presidency of Donald Trump is about contingency, about choices. In 2016, the American people voted to elect Donald Trump president of the United States. That choice tore the tattered bandage off the façade of the deep state. It revealed a suppurating wound beneath, a septic disaster the reality of which Americans had somehow concealed from themselves for decades. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/31/2020-must-be-a-trump-landslide-a-total-knock-out-against-the-unscrupulous-left-n1112183

Voter fraud is a distinctively American problem with deep roots in the Democratic Party. One might say, twin roots, for a complementary radicle has sunk into a significant portion of the voting public who approve of the illegal manipulation of electoral results. And there is not the slightest doubt that the “week in ballot shenanigans” is upon us once again: ballot harvesting, voting rules changed overnight, ballot dumping, stolen ballots, extended voting, multiple voting, the attempt to count unpostmarked ballots, and so on. Indeed, every conceivable form of ballot tampering is par for the course, including the latest iteration of the grave robbing vote in Florida.

How this violation of voting legitimacy can be allowed to continue in the absence of strict electoral supervision in an arguably democratic nation boggles the mind. But as noted, a political constituency with controlling access to the levers of power, its legions of cronies and advocates, and a substantial segment of the franchise are perfectly fine with the flagrant perversion of professional honesty, electoral fairness, and personal morality.

Such practices are the stock-in-trade of the political Left at all levels of authority and sentiment, and explain why the Democrats may yet win an election they should reasonably lose by a crushing majority. This leads us to the speculation that there are really two opposing groups of political actors that are not wholly defined by political labels such as Democrat and Republican or liberal and conservative. Rather, there are those who believe that the end justifies the means and those who believe that the means cannot be polluted by a prior determination of engineered ends.