RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/end-impeachment-circus-bruce-thornton/

Not since Caligula enrolled his horse Incitatus in the Roman Senate has a deliberative chamber of a great power seen such a display of undignified triviality and dishonest sophistry as the case for impeachment that the House Democrats delivered last week. Over and over the same flimsy arguments we’ve already heard for months were repeated, with all the same question-begging accusations gleaned from second- and third-hand office gossip, and the same fake “high crimes and misdemeanors” fabricated by the desperate Dems. Time for the Senate to restore its dignity, put an end to this taxpayer-funded political circus, and get back to doing its job.

The House Dems’ argument boils down to criminalizing the President’s Article 2 powers into made-up crimes like “abuse of power for corrupt purposes” and “obstruction of Congress.” Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a mundane example of the President conducting foreign policy in straightforward style, is an “abuse of power,” because he brought up the hinky behavior of the Bidens supposedly in order to benefit himself politically.

This sophistry is transparently specious. Ukraine’s government is notoriously corrupt, and our president was right to ask for some help in getting at the truth of the evidence that Ukrainians had been involved in meddling with the 2016 election, and that a U.S. vice-president had used his power to benefit a son who, with no record of expertise and experience, nonetheless was being paid $50K a month by a sketchy Ukrainian company. For Trump not to mention it just because Biden was running for office would have been a ridiculous application of the Caesar’s Wife standard, and made running for office a convenient defense against scrutiny.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/rep_rashida_tlaib_retweets_an_unsourced_story_accusing_jews_of_child_murder.html

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who occupies a position at the heart of American politics, blithely retweeted an unsourced, unproven, and untrue claim that Jews living in Beit Hanina kidnapped and executed a seven-year-old boy. This is a  modern version of the medieval blood libel against the Jews.

The anti-Semitic blood libel has a long history, going back to at least the 1st century A.D., when the Jewish historian Josephus rebutted a claim that Antiochus Epiphanes found a Greek man in the temple in Jerusalem being fattened for sacrifice. A thousand years later, a Byzantine document again accused Jews of kidnapping a stranger every seven years to serve as a human sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem.

By the 12th century, the blood libel had firmly taken in England hold after Jews were accused of ritually sacrificing William of Norwich, a young boy found stabbed in the woods. After that, until the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, Jews were routinely accused of executing children and using their blood in rituals, especially when making matzo for Passover. The Jews were then slaughtered in pogroms. The libel migrated to Europe with the same deadly consequences for Jews.

The great irony of the blood libel, of course, is that one of the central stories in the Hebrew Bible is the Binding of Isaac, in which God ends human sacrifice. The Ten Commandments, the foundation of Western morality, forbid murder. The Jewish laws governing kosher cooking even forbid using blood when cooking.