RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/it-hasnt-stopped-him-trump-rolls-up-wins-even-as-impeachment-grips-washington

President Trump enjoyed an extraordinary period of policy successes over the past two weeks, even as Democrats seeking to remove him from office moved articles of impeachment through the House.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats damaged Trump politically, the two negotiated an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement, allowing the president to tout a previously elusive trade deal after three years of promising he would complete it. And he and House Democrats compromised on $1.4 trillion in spending that funds critical aspects of Trump’s immigration agenda and delivers on his vision for the Space Force, the first new U.S. military service branch in more than 70 years.

The House voted along party lines to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, an action the president had lamented would amount to a black mark on his legacy. A trial in the Senate, presumably in January, awaits. “But it hasn’t stopped him from having two of the best weeks of his presidency,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters.

Former congressman Jason Altmire, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania who now lives near Jacksonville, Florida, said the spate of deal-making that coincided with impeachment was advantageous to both Trump and congressional Democrats. In part to convince voters that impeachment was unwarranted, Trump needed legislative accomplishments. Democrats, especially in swing districts, needed to show constituents that impeaching Trump was not their only priority.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/chanukah_christmas_and_western_civilization.html

excerpt:

That Chanukah and Christmas are closely linked in the calendar is fitting for the message they each bring. The two faiths, Judaism and Christianity, taken together as the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the foundation of Western and American civilization.  Western nations are the greatest in the world because they are informed by Judeo-Christian principles.  It is in the West where human rights, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, music and the arts, science and technology have flourished and where slavery was ended. These are the nations that inhabitants from the rest of the world seek to live.  It is in Western nations where citizens are most free and enjoy the greatest prosperity.  It is not an accident. 

We must dedicate ourselves to preserving America, the West, and Western civilization, by preserving its Judeo-Christian tradition.  The light of Chanukah and Christmas must continue to burn, and illumine the night, pushing away the darkness that is always present, the norm for most of history. They should guide us and our nation and the West for all time.  It is what distinguishes us from the rest, our values, our devotion to truth, knowledge, goodness, beauty, and reason, the belief in the sanctity of the individual made in the image of God, rejecting the moral and cultural relativism of the post-modern left and the totalitarian threat of unreformed Islam.  We must rededicate ourselves in our current battle as the Maccabees did against the Greeks and as Israel did against the Arab armies that sought its destruction in 1948 and has done ever since against its many enemies.

The spirit of Chanukah and Christmas should inspire us.  Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas to all.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/transitioning-american-foreign-policy/

For better or worse, we are returning to the mentality that followed Vietnam until the first Gulf War.

Both officially and unofficially, Trump’s foreign policy has been described as “principled realism.” What does that mean?

Neither nation building nor apologetic isolationism? Hurting Iran by not sending ground troops into the Middle East, but by ratcheting up sanctions and deterrent U.S. naval and air power in the region?

More often, proponents define that term as punishing enemies and helping friends, and thereby persuading observant neutrals to make the right choices. Principled realism is charitably described as an effort to enhance U.S. power, commercially and economically, but to use it sparingly abroad for U.S. interests — and with maximum effect when force is called upon.

Critics, on the other hand, lament that America has now become isolationist, and overly “nationalistic” in diminishing the role of idealism in its foreign policy. The United States is supposedly cynically resigned to the idea that the world is forever a dark and gloomy place and the U.S. can hardly lead a crusade to bring consumer capitalism, democracy, and human rights to 7 billion people.

Yet most would agree that the U.S. is not so much withdrawing from its 75-year postwar role of leadership of the free world as much as radically redefining it.