RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273095/nevertrump-bitter-enders-bruce-thornton

As Trump enters his third year of office, some Republican NeverTrumpers have gotten control of the symptoms of Trumpophobia, and have settled for the occasional snarky asides to maintain their anti-Trump bona fides while they write about serious issues rather than Trump’s alleged crypto-fascist assault on “democratic norms.” Others, however, have become bitter-enders, still clinging to the hope that Trump will be impeached or weakened enough to lose in 2020, thus sanctifying their irrational hatred of the best and most effective champion that conservatism is likely to find these days.

But make no mistake, no matter how seemingly marginalized or absurd, the bitter-enders are still functioning as a fifth column for the progressive “resistance,” providing a “conservative” and “bipartisan” cover for the Democrats’ rush to move America farther to the left in order to change our Constitutional Republic into a socialist technocracy.

Some of these bitter-enders have retreated into a left-wing financed, online redoubt they call The Bulwark, the motto of which is “conserving conservatism.” But that sentiment is hard to square with the editors’ decision to send evangelical pro-choice blogger Molly Jong-Fast to CPAC shortly after the Democrats in New York gleefully legalized infanticide. As Jim Treacher reported, Jong-Fast in her CPAC twitter commentary mocked millennial conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, who put her in a “rage” for speaking obvious truths like Trump had “revealed” the left’s true nature. She also targeted Glen Beck, “who thinks socialism is very bad.” But she really got miffed at the “scary” pro-life panel and a host who is “very very very very anti-choice,” and she bragged, “People are mad at me for wanting to control my own uterus.” Treacher economically sums up the problem with The Bulwark: “They’re conserving conservatism by behaving just like the people they think have ruined conservatism.”

The Bulwark also is going after writers like Victor Davis Hanson, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Thiessen, and Henry Olsen who support Trump with what editor Charles Sykes calls “sophism and trollery.” Just recently contributor Gabriele Schoenfeld reviewed for The Bulwark Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Case for Trump. The piece is titled “Sophistry in the Service of Evil,” and like the title, it is a tissue of the question-begging assaults on Trump favored by progressives, such as “blatant racial prejudice” and “racism”; and hysterical adjectives like “demented” and “morally unfit for office.” Indeed, Hanson’s dismemberment of the progressives’ Orwellian “racist” meme is, according to Schoenfeld an example of the “gaping hole that is [Hanson’s] treatment of Trump’s odious life-long record in matters of race,” which is “worse than sophistry”–– it is “sophistry in the service of a genuine evil.”

Schoenfeld finishes with a bit of true sophistry by using an ancient rhetorical device called apophasis: bringing up something unsavory then disavowing it:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/paul-manafort-sentencing-washington-dc-federal-court/

The 47 months from a Virginia court was a side show. Today’s sentencing is the main event.C ritics who last week blasted the light 47-month sentence imposed on Paul Manafort by Judge T. S. Ellis of the federal district court in Alexandria, Va., may lack familiarity with both the federal sentencing guidelines and the peculiarities of Manafort’s case. As I observed in my weekend column, he is going to get slammed when he gets sentenced today by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.

I am not telling you this based on some crystal ball I’ve been hiding. You just need to read Manafort’s plea agreement in the Washington case.

Manafort should have had only one case, not two. Even though the charges are different, the two cases were based on the same fact pattern, and they have always been two parts of the same whole. Manafort was tried twice instead of once, strictly because of his own choice.

Prosecutors would have preferred to file the whole case in Washington. But the case involved some counts (the tax counts, in particular) as to which Manafort was entitled to be tried in the venue of the offense — in Virginia, where he resided. Defending oneself in a trial is prohibitively expensive for those who have means to hire their own counsel; and trials are emotionally wrenching for an accused and his family. So most defendants waive venue objections; that allows all the counts to be tried once, in one district. But Manafort calculated that Virginia would be a friendlier place for him than Washington: He hoped to beat the case there, and maybe gain some momentum that might miraculously help him in Washington — or at least improve his argument for a pardon. He was largely wrong — convicted on all the counts the Virginia jury decided, and the hung jury on the other charges meant he could be tried again if the special counsel chose to do so. Consequently, Manafort pled guilty in the Washington case because it made no sense to fight on.

Judge Ellis may be sympathetic to Manafort, and he may have been trying to convey a signal, by the light sentence, that he thought the prosecution was overkill (i.e., that no matter how serious Manafort’s offenses are, he would never have been prosecuted if he had not gotten involved in Donald Trump’s campaign). But the Virginia sentencing exercise was theater. No matter what Ellis did, Manafort was going to be sentenced to heavy time in Washington.

In his Washington plea agreement, Manafort and his counsel agreed that his sentencing-guidelines range, at a minimum, calls for 210 to 262 months’ imprisonment (roughly 18 to 22 years). I say “at a minimum” because the agreement’s guidelines calculation includes a caveat that Manafort’s downward adjustment (2 “offense level” points) for accepting responsibility by pleading guilty could be withdrawn if Mueller’s office presses the contention that Manafort proceeded, post-plea, to lie in his failed cooperation attempt. If he is at offense level 39 instead of the currently projected 37, Manafort’s sentencing range spikes up to 262 to 327 months (roughly 22 to 27 years).

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/13/schiff-trump-impeachment-russia-probe-1219471

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Wednesday that even if a report from special counsel Robert Mueller exonerates President Donald Trump, impeachment talk might remain on the table.

Schiff (D-Calif.), whose committee is still investigating the president’s ties to Russia during to the 2016 presidential election, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that if neither Mueller nor his panel find definitive evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice by Trump, he would consider that to be the end of the collusion inquiry, the most likely grounds for impeachment.

Still, he said, “there may be grounds for removal of office or there may be grounds for indictment after he leaves office that the Congress discovers.”

He pointed out that Mueller’s narrow mandate may have precluded the special counsel from investigating “whether the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization,” something Schiff said his committee is looking into.

“Our predominant concern on my committee is: Was this president, is this president compromised by a foreign power?” the California Democrat said.