RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/day-one-impeachment-hearings/

The first day of public impeachment hearings was good for Republicans and mediocre, at best, for Democrats. That’s far short of what Democrats need — and they know it. To remove a president, they need clear evidence of serious malfeasance, enough to convince average voters and put pressure on Republicans on Capitol Hill. They did not make a strong start.

Hearsay testimony about diplomatic process is not enough, and that’s all they heard on Day One. Trump’s use of irregular back channels may be irritating to career diplomats; it may be a confusing, incoherent way to run foreign policy; but it is perfectly legal. It’s also too deep in the minutiae of public policy to engage the general public. Persuading them is essential if Democrats are to overturn a popular election and remove a president the voters freely chose.

That does not mean President Trump’s call to Ukraine’s President Zelensky was ‘perfect’ as Trump calls it. It was wrong to mention Joe Biden or Hunter Biden and wrong to have delayed the lethal aid Congress voted to give Ukraine.

But ‘wrong’ does not mean impeachable. The Trump phone call falls short of impeachment for three reasons:

The aid was never explicitly tied to a clear-cut demand in the Trump-Zelensky call;
Zelensky never did what Trump hoped for; indeed President Zelensky probably did not know about the delay in aid disbursements until several weeks after the phone call; and
Ukraine actually received all the aid after a brief delay, even though they did not act on Trump’s request.

These limitations are crucial problems for the Democrats’ case. Unless Chairman Adam Schiff and his allies of the House Intelligence Committee can shake that story, they will find it impossible to sell the episode as a ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ bribery or treason. They need a lot more hard evidence that implicates the president directly in serious crimes. Without it, they cannot convince the public or wavering Republican office holders. It doesn’t help that the public already worries that the House process is fundamentally unfair and determined to reach a preordained outcome. Impeachment may be a political process, not a legal one, but the public demands fairness.

Trump supporters say he simply wanted an investigation of corruption in a country where it is pandemic. If that were all he sought, there would be no problem. The US has a long-standing goal of stopping corruption, and it has a specific interest in good governance where it provides aid money. The problem is that Trump wanted more. He mentioned the Biden family ties to an (allegedly) corrupt company, Burisma, in a pervasively corrupt sector, energy. He wanted those ties investigated. Since Joe Biden is a 2020 candidate, the President’s request asks a foreign government to involve itself, at least indirectly, in US politics.

That request is inappropriate, even if Hunter Biden was involved with a corrupt company and gave them political cover. It’s inappropriate, even if Vice President Biden demanded the Ukrainians fire a prosecutor who was closing in on Burisma and possibly on Hunter Biden himself. The Ukrainians should investigate that alleged corruption, but not because the US president requests it in connection with a political opponent.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/13/whose-witness-is-bolton/

he would-be impeachers had been salivating at the prospect that John Bolton, who President Trump had fired after 17 months as his national security advisor, would lend his undoubted “conservative bona fides” to their campaign to convince Americans that Trump is bad, awful, illegitimate, dangerous, even criminal.

Lately however, they have settled on doing with this potential witness what they have done with the ones who have appeared before them behind closed doors—namely, publicize such anti-Trump messages as they can ascribe to him, scrubbed of any other elements, sharpen it to fit their “narrative,” and leave him and others unable to alter it.

Were Bolton to be a witness in the impeachment hearings, what would he say? More importantly, what would he not say? Odds are, he would be a witness against impeachment, and for all the things for which he had worked over a lifetime—for the things which had gained him those bona fides.

Trump parted ways with Bolton because they had come to disagree. Bolton, never one to mince words, never dissembled his disagreements; nor would it occur to him to gainsay the president’s right to be advised by someone more congenial than himself.

On constitutional grounds, he would frustrate any attempt to have him recount anything that he told the president or that the president had told him, or that anyone else had said about the president. John Bolton the lawyer would refuse to divulge his own thoughts about any person or anything that he chose. He would, however, stress that thoughts and judgments attributed to him in the media are merely the opinions of those making the attributions.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/13/democrats-are-failing-the-reality-test/

It’s hard to think of a major Democrat issue and proposed solution that is not a fake. It’s an emergency. What’s the emergency? Everything. The planet, white privilege, transgender rights, Nazi policies on the border, killer cops. A health care crisis so dire the government must ban private insurance, private doctors, and private hospitals.

Most of all President Trump is a walking emergency. His voters are hate-filled bigots who love his authoritarian tendencies.  They are a danger to our democracy.

Democrat fixes are a list of economic and physical impossibilities. Ban oil, gas, and coal; make health care and college “free”; hand out reparations for slavery. They promise they will raise all the money from billionaires’ spare change.

The Democrats running for president in 2020 don’t talk about normal issues—jobs and national security. They have nothing to say about opportunities for minorities. Instead, it is all fake investigations of fake scandals.

Democrats are running fake impeachment proceedings on a fake accusation of quid pro quo from a fake whistleblower, who is one more deep state operative leaking hearsay that libels the president.

Who are they kidding? Oddly enough, themselves—very successfully.

Fake is fine with their voters. “Fauxcahontas” is a leading candidate. Fake news is all the news they’ll read.

Something has gone terribly wrong with previously normal Democratic Party voters.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/14/trump-just-made-his-case-for-r

The day before the Schiff & Pelosi Impeachment Circus opened for its fall run in the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump gave a speech at the Economic Club of New York in which he laid out his argument for a second term. And he made it clear why Democrats are desperate to avoid talking about the economy.

Trump began by resetting the clock back to 2016 when, as we’ve pointed out in this space many times, the economic forecast was grim. 

“The so-called experts said Americans had no choice but to accept stagnation, decay, and a shrinking middle class as the new normal,” Trump said. “In short, the American people were told to sit back and accept a slow, inevitable decline.” 

The Congressional Budget Office, he said, projected that the number of jobs would increase by just 2 million from January 2017 through the end of this year. The unemployment rate wasn’t supposed to get below 4.4% and was slated to start rising again in 2019.

The CBO said quarterly GDP growth over Trump’s first three years would never top 2.6% and would average 2%. 

As Trump rightly explains, this wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of an economy being suffocated by taxes and regulations. “If we lifted these burdens from our economy, and unleashed our people to pursue their ambitions and realize their limitless potential, then economic prosperity would come thundering back.”

Sorry Trump haters everywhere, but he was right.