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Ruth King

The Mueller Report Exposes the Absurdity of the Governing Class By Jay Cost

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-trump-opponents-governing-class/

Despite decades of egregious errors, a group of “leaders” remains steadfastly in place, waiting to take charge again.

The release of the Mueller report this week was a revelatory moment for me. I realized that, some time ago apparently, I crossed a political Mendoza line, where I am now more disgusted by Donald Trump’s opponents than I am by Trump himself.

This is no insignificant development for me. Regular readers of mine will recall that, just three years ago, I was calling on the delegates to the Republican National Convention to deny Trump the GOP nomination, arguing not only that it was prudent but also well within their rights. That feels like an eternity ago to me.

It was not the Mueller report per se that moved me, but rather its organization into two parts­ — the investigation into possible collusion with the Russians and the investigation into obstruction of justice — that was like a light bulb going off in my head.

Let’s start with the obstruction of justice. I do not think what Trump did was criminal or meriting impeachment. I do think it demonstrates that he is a nincompoop whose tendency to shoot from the hip has done more damage to his public standing than his political opponents ever could.

Put yourself in Trump’s shoes in January 2017. You know that you did not collude with Russia. You also know that high-level officials in the government think you did, pushing some bogus document in close conjunction with the mainstream press. The obvious inference about these people is either that they are credulous morons who will believe any silly claim or that they’re vicious partisans who want to end your administration before it begins.

George Faludy: Hungarian Poet and Hero for Our Times written by Robin Ashenden

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/george-faludy-hungarian-poet-and-hero-for-our-times/

Had the poet George Faludy not written in his native Hungarian—arguably the most impenetrable of European languages—he would, as many have argued, be world famous. He died aged 95 in 2006, his life spanning the First and Second World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Nazi and communist takeovers of his country.

Having achieved literary fame at 20, he would be imprisoned by both regimes and spend much of his life as an exile in France, Morocco, America (where he was a tail-gunner for the U.S. Airforce), and Canada, where he fled communism, only to find his lectures picketed and disrupted by campus leftists to whom his experience was an inconvenient truth. A ladies’ man all his life, he surprised the world by suddenly entering a gay relationship with Eric, a Russian ballet dancer, who’d fallen in love with Faludy in print and then rushed across the globe to find him.

In his 90s, after communism fell and Faludy, returning to Budapest, achieved living legend status, he married a poetess 70 years his junior with whom he produced his verses right up to his death. Faludy ignored the rulebook, spurred on by the knowledge that a man like himself would never exist again. He was right.

Cowardice at Columbia written by Coleman Hughes

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/cowardice-at-columbia/

On Thursday 11 April, shortly after 11pm, a black Columbia student named Alexander McNab walked through the gates of Barnard college—the undergraduate all-women’s school at Columbia University—after ignoring a security guard’s request to show his student ID. In search of a midnight snack, McNab got all the way to the library canteen before a public safety officer confronted him and asked for his ID a second time, a request McNab once again refused.

Several more officers had arrived on the scene and were continuing to request ID when McNab began yelling. What happened next, depicted in the video below, has become the subject of a national scandal: two officers pushed McNab’s upper body onto the countertop, at which point McNab finally handed over his ID. Public safety proceeded to verify that he was indeed an active Columbia student, at which point they left him alone.

Administrators reacted to the incident by placing the six public safety officers involved on paid leave until outside investigators reach a conclusion about their conduct. In the meantime, administrators have already reached theirs: racism. College deans sent an email to the student body—with the subject line “Addressing Racism on Our Campus”—in which they noted the “continued legacy of anti-black racism” and lamented that “such incidents continue to occur so close to home.”

On the contrary, the McNab affair involved neither police nor brutality. Public safety officers (who don’t carry guns) used the minimum amount of force necessary to get McNab to comply with their request that he identify himself. They pushed him against a countertop for 20 seconds before letting him go. I challenge those who believe this was excessive to name an alternate course of action which would have compelled an unknown man to produce identification.

Anti-Semitism at NYU Why did the university award a hateful group? By Susan Shapiro

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-at-nyu-11555873457

‘I went to NYU so long ago, it was in the Bronx,” my conservative Midwestern father once joked. He wasn’t thrilled to send his left-wing daughter to New York University to study creative writing. My husband, a Tisch professor, and my prelaw niece Dara also love our school. Unfortunately, the recent anti-Semitism sweeping the campus is testing our affection.

Jewish students were assaulted at an Israeli Independence Day celebration last year in Washington Square Park, where two anti-Israel student agitators were arrested after desecrating Israeli flags. The NYU Jewish Center received threats; swastikas were found in a residence hall. The student government passed an anti-Israel BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—resolution. NYU activists confronted a pregnant Chelsea Clinton and insanely blamed her for the massacre at a New Zealand mosque because she criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic slurs.

Most shocking, last week the university gave a President’s Service Award to Students for Justice in Palestine for its “positive impact on the community.” SJP is known for pushing BDS, demonizing Israel and leading a boycott of Zionist student clubs.

There’s a Brownout in the Bay Area.

https://www.openthebooks.com/

San Francisco is a city in trouble.

Today, San Francisco hosts an estimated homeless population of 7,500 people. Affluent sections of the city have become dangerous with open-air drug use, tens of thousands of discarded needles, and, sadly, human feces.

Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.

This week, we published our OpenTheBooks.com investigation at Forbes exposing the human waste challenge in San Francisco.
It’s so unbelievable, you have to see it to believe it. Check out our interactive map to view every case report since 2011.

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World’s Greatest Threat To Peace The Sri Lankan massacre is just another harrowing reminder.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/22/islamic-terrorism-remains-the-worlds-greatest-threat-to-peace/

After the horrific mass murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was widespread coverage and a torrent of mainstream news networks contemplating the threat of white supremacy. These conversations, completely reasonable and necessary in the face of violent attacks from a racist gunman, soon began deteriorating into politically motivated and specious claims contending that “white supremacy” had become the predominate terror threat in the world.

Well, the coordinated bomb blasts aimed at Christian worshippers on Easter Sunday, which killed at least 290 people and injured hundreds more, demonstrates the kind of meticulous planning, funding, resources, and support that is still exclusively the domain of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s not merely that the act was planned to maximize the death toll, but that it is a continuation of long-standing efforts by Islamists to destroy the Christian communities left in Asia.

Prison, anyone? By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/prison-anyone

Just a few months ago, in an article entitled “Still the Smartest Guy in the Room,” I wrote the following about President Trump:

Well, whaddaya know? In the midterm elections of November 6, 2018, the American people rewarded the president—for only the third time in almost a hundred years—with a net gain of three and possibly four Senate seats, lost half the House seats that his predecessor lost, and left the radical leftwing Democrats not rejoicing at their meager gains, but still chomping at the bit to bring down the president who has effectively destroyed everything they believed in, worked for, and thought they achieved over the past 75 years..Yes, President Trump posed a mortal threat to the Left’s very raison d’etre—a globalist one-world order controlled by them!

And so way back in 2015, when he announced his intention to run for the presidency, the “connected” guys of the D.C. swamp—to use the vocabulary of the mob—decided to pool their formidable resources to “clip” the billionaire business mogul, if not physically (although I wouldn’t put that past them), then by proving that their manufactured fiction of candidate Trump’s collusion with Russia to win the presidency was, in fact, true and therefore impeachable.

In that article, I listed all the fanatical Detectives Javert—the top dogs at our top-secret intelligence agencies (and many of their wives who also played central roles)—and elaborated on their impressive credentials, privileged educations, vast experience, and, oh, their appointments to high office by the former occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama.

Taqiyya for Easter by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9317/taqiyya-for-easter

Let’s say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city’s other most prominent houses of worship – St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis – have been attacked and vandalized.

Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it’s undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don’t need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it.

On the other hand, when there are coordinated attacks on Easter services at several churches in Sri Lanka, it becomes a little more challenging to pass off multiple suicide-bombings killing nearly three hundred people as an electrical malfunction.
So, in contrast to the confident declarations of a week ago, on Sunday morning the media opted for a subtler narrative. Lead sentence from The Economist:IT HAS BEEN nearly ten years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka’s civil war. But bloodshed returned with a vengeance…So it’s something to do with the Tamil Tigers? Their guns fell silent, but now they’ve returned with a vengeance, eh?Well, er, no, er, not, ah, precisely… But it’s useful for “context”, lots and lots of context. And, if you pile up enough context, you can bury the actual story. My old chums at The Age in Melbourne produced an especially fine example:Colombo: More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in eight bomb blasts that rocked churches, luxury hotels and other sites in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday – the deadliest violence the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.Ah, there’s that bloody civil war flaring up all over again, right?

MY SAY: REFLECTIONS ON THE MOVIE “CAPERNAUM”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/4_21_2019_16_40.html

Capernaum: a film review By Ruth S. KingWhen I heard that the movie Capernaum was short-listed for a foreign film Oscar, I braced myself. Capernaum was a fishing village established during the time of the Hasmoneans, located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.  The trailer for the film showed squalid scenes of Arabs squeezed into makeshift homes on streets with running sewers and diapered children hungry and weeping.

Another tale I told myself, of the “Palestinian Arab refugee” camps maintained by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) to be used and recycled as Potemkin proof of Arab dislocation and Israel’s tyranny.

In Arabic, “capernaum” means chaotic and disorderly. The locus of the movie is actually Beirut, where unregistered Syrian refugees live in unspeakable conditions. Amenities such as potable water, electricity, proper housing, and medical care are virtually nonexistent. Children have no birth records or schooling. Their lives consist of begging or stealing for crumbs. Girls as young as eleven are sold to degenerate grooms. Menial jobs amount to slavery. The conditions in jail are inhuman. Infants in diapers wander the mean streets often abandoned by their parents and multiple siblings.Zain, the lead character, about twelve and desperate and illiterate, runs away from home after his sister is sold to a sexual predator for a few chickens. An Eritrean refugee takes him in and feeds him, but he is obliged to care for her baby.  When she is jailed and fails to return, Zain’s efforts to find her and take care of the baby become impossible and he relinquishes the child’s care to a vendor who traffics in humans.

Russian ‘Collusion’s’ Greatest Hits By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/21/russian-collusions-greatest-hits/

From late 2015 until April 2019, the media, the Left, and the Obama administrative state hierarchy warned us nonstop that candidate, president-elect, and inaugurated President Trump “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, to assemble a suspect cabinet, and to rule in treasonous fashion in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The former head of the CIA and the director of national intelligence were birthed as permanent analysts at MSNBC and CNN to sermonize—with wink-and-nod assurances that their past billets and security clearances substantiated their authority—that the treasonous Trump would likely be impeached, indicted, or quit.

A mostly progressive team of lawyers, with an unlimited budget, no restrictions on time, and with enormous legal powers found all of that to be a lie.

Unable to find Trump likely guilty of either collusion or obstruction of investigating the non-crime of collusion, they instead salted their report with innuendo and rumor of what the enraged Trump was supposedly thinking about, raging about, and talking about among his closest confidants, including the insurrectionary statement of his press secretary who allegedly sinned by exaggerating the extent of FBI rank and file unhappiness over the firing of James Comey.

All that was a long, slow distraction over real culpability on the part of a number of our supposed best and brightest. And here are some of their most absurd moments from the Orwellian hunt for collusion.