RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-obstruction-article-frivolous/

We want our presidents to be elected democratically and to serve out their terms, with impeachment reserved for outrageous abuses of power.

Honor a congressional subpoena to appear at President Trump’s (presumably eventual) Senate impeachment trial? Joe Biden, still the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in the 2020 election, scoffed at the very idea — No way!

The former vice president’s knee-jerk obstinacy illuminates — we should say, provides even more illumination of — the patent farce that is the second article of impeachment passed by the House on a strict party-line vote: the accusation that the president has obstructed Congress. As we saw in a committee hearing, featuring the spectacle of staffers questioning staffers with no actual fact witnesses in sight, Democrats have no problem when Democrats blow off congressional demands for information. “Obstruction” is a one-way street.

Trump regards the impeachment inquiry as a partisan witch hunt, just the latest phase of the Democrats’ project to remove him, which began even before his term started. He certainly has a point . . . although that is not a good reason to give his opponents fuel for the project, as he did by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden. That is the allegation in the first article of impeachment. Under the circumstances, I believe it falls well short of the egregious misconduct for which impeachment should be reserved; it was, nevertheless, a foolish thing for the president to do.

Let’s focus, though, on the second impeachment article, obstruction of Congress.

The president directed his underlings and executive branch components not to comply with congressional demands for information. To be clear, Congress has undeniable constitutional authority, broad in scope, to conduct oversight of the executive branch. The president, with all the authority of a peer branch of government, has extensive privileges of confidentiality, rooted in Article II, particularly when it comes to communications with his staff and high executive officials. Congress, however, is empowered to probe, especially when its concern is presidential malfeasance, or the activities of executive branch agencies Congress has created — such agencies, after all, are led by officers subject to Senate confirmation, and Congress both underwrites them with taxpayer funds and limits their operations by statute.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/alarming-escalation-african-american-attacks-joseph-klein/

Anti-Semitic attacks have reached epidemic proportions in the New York metropolitan area. A shooting early last December at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City left several people dead, including two Hasidic Jews. A policeman was also killed by the same shooters nearby. The killers aimed to kill as many Jews as possible before they were struck down. Last Saturday night, five Jewish people were stabbed by a Jew-hater wielding a machete at a Hasidic rabbi’s house in the suburb of Monsey, New York. One of the victims suffered serious head injuries, which has left him in a coma and may result in permanent damage to his brain. Orthodox Jews residing in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg are living in constant fear, triggered by a slew of anti-Semitic incidents that were a near daily occurrence during December and have continued into 2020.

These were not violent crimes committed by white nationalists. While white supremacists continue to pose a major threat to the lives and well-being of Jews and other minority groups nationwide, the alarming series of recent anti-Semitic attacks in the New York metropolitan area were conducted primarily by African Americans.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/stop-blaming-jews-for-anti-semitism/

There have been a number of repulsive articles over the past few weeks blaming New York’s Jews for precipitating violence that is, um, “seen by some” as anti-Semitic. Yet, this piece by NBC News, which insinuates that icky ultra-Orthodox Jews bring some of this misery on themselves by having the temerity to move to the suburbs, might be the most tone-deaf of them all:

For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families pushed out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust. (The irritated italics are mine.)

I grew up in suburban Long Island, a place where nearly every Italian, Irish, and Jewish family I knew had, at some point, moved out of one of New York City’s boroughs to take advantage of “open spaces.” In those days New Yorkers were fleeing rampant criminality, litter, and mismanagement, rather than gentrification and high prices, but it was always about easier living.

Oftentimes, the refugees from the city would import the ethnic character of their neighborhoods to their new towns. Many suburban enclaves were mostly inhabited by one tribe or another, including the predominately Jewish “Five Towns.” Jews — and especially orthodox Jews who won’t drive on Sabbath — live near synagogues and form close-knit communities around them. This is nothing new. Yet no one, as far as I can recall, ever made the argument that Cedarhurst was a modern-day European shtetl.