RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/24/nevertrump-turns-to-porn

As Julie Kelly established in these pages last week, when stripped of its Oz-like bluster, Conservative, Inc. is just Bill Kristol behind a curtain pulling levers. The cynical purpose is to create a mirage that scares people into providing tribute to the great and powerful punditocracy.

The “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” protests that followed Kelly’s report that Kristol cribbed off the Steele dossier in July 2016 to conjure Putin’s disembodied head surrounded by fire and smoke were certainly telling, eh?

This week, for the 71st time in Trump’s presidency, the sneering smart people in Washington who are threatened by a popular movement that overruled their veto and put him in office, declared once again that it is “finally over.”

As in the campy serial cliffhanger of yore, they have the hero strapped to a conveyor belt moving slowly toward a buzzsaw. He will not be able to escape his own lawyer’s guilty plea for paying the porn star, they think.

One wonders what comes next in their fantasy. Maybe 62 million Trump voters subscribing to The Weekly Standard to read 4,000-word essays about Montenegro’s crucial but underappreciated role in NATO?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/james-buckley-pioneer-conservative-thought-and-politics/

James L. Buckley, a pioneer in conservative thought and politics, looks back over an eventful life.

In the beautiful landscape of northwestern Connecticut, far from the madding crowd, lives James Lane Buckley, the 95-year-old elder brother of William F. Buckley Jr. and founder of the conservative movement.

That is not a title that political historians often bestow on James. The honor is often reserved for Bill, the tireless apostle behind National Review and Firing Line, whose influence in forming the American Right is incalculable. Yet the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964 won its first electoral victory in 1970, when Jim Buckley was elected U.S. senator from New York on the Conservative ticket in a three-way race. Though the last third-party candidate elected to Congress, he played a vital role in turning the GOP into a party that could elect Ronald Reagan.

His current residence stands in the shadow of Great Elm, the elegant house bought by his father, William F. Buckley Sr., in 1923. It took its name from the largest such tree in Connecticut, which governed the 46-acre estate until it fell victim to Dutch elm disease. When the family moved in, Jim was a few months old, preceded in birth by Aloïse, John, and Priscilla, while Jane, William, Patricia, Reid, Maureen, and Carol were yet to come.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-justice-is-partial-1535063261

U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami took a few moments in his Tuesday statement about Michael Cohen’s plea deal to sing neutrality’s praise: “His day of reckoning serves as a reminder that we are a nation of laws, with one set of rules that applies equally to everyone.”

Noble words, and they used to mean something. But a disparity of justice is at the heart of our current crisis of faith in institutions. Americans aren’t outraged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation felt obliged to investigate allegations leveled at campaigns, or that a special counsel is looking at Russian electoral interference. They are instead furious that Lady Justice seems to have it in for only one side.

The country has watched the FBI treat one presidential campaign with kid gloves, the other with informants, warrants and eavesdropping. They’ve seen the Justice Department resist all efforts at accountability, even as it fails to hold its own accountable. And don’t get them started on the one-sided media.

And they are now witnessing unequal treatment in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Yes, the former FBI director deserves credit for smoking out the Russian trolls who interfered in 2016. And one can argue he is obliged to pursue any evidence of criminal acts, even those unrelated to Russia. But what cannot be justified is the one-sided nature of his probe.

Consider Mr. Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who this week pleaded guilty to eight felony charges. Six related to his personal business dealings; the other two involved campaign-finance violations arising from payments to women claiming affairs with Donald Trump. The criminal prosecution of campaign-finance offenses is exceptionally rare (most charges are civil), but let’s take Mr. Khuzami’s word for it when he says Mr. Cohen’s crimes are “particularly significant” because he’s a lawyer who should know better, and also because the payments were for the purpose of “influencing an election” and undermining its “integrity.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/campaign-finance-law-clinton-campaign-committed-worse-violations/

Mueller should investigate more than just the 2016 Trump campaign

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s proxy prosecutor in New York City has obtained a plea agreement with Michael Cohen on some pretty slimy personal-business issues, and in the process, obtained pleas to two federal campaign-finance-law violations . . . that, from my experience as an attorney in the field, do not appear to violate federal campaign-finance law. That aside, maybe this means that Mueller might step out of his snipe hunt of an investigation of Russian “collusion” in 2016 to take an actual interest in whether there was compliance with federal campaign-finance law by both 2016 presidential campaigns, not just President Trump’s. If Mueller is actually concerned, as his designated prosecutor in the Cohen case apparently is, about compliance with the federal statutes setting limits on contributions and reporting of expenditures by campaigns, parties, and candidates, his interest is long overdue. There are several serious enforcement and prosecutorial undertakings awaiting his attention — none involving President Trump or his campaign.

Let’s start with the payments from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to Fusion GPS for the infamous dossier that triggered the entire Mueller investigation of “Russian collusion.” It is still not known how much the Democrats paid to Fusion GPS because that information has not been released, even though it was revealed almost a year ago that the source of payment was the Democrats. We should know the exact amount paid to Fusion GPS by the DNC and the Clinton campaign because all expenditures over $200 by parties and campaigns are required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). However, the Democrats’ payments for the discredited dossier were falsely reported as “legal fees” paid to Perkins Coie, and not disclosed as to the actual vendor, amount, or purpose — as required by federal law. It is a federal offense to falsify an FEC report, which was obviously done in this case. Perhaps there is a conflict of interest for Mueller to investigate this matter, since it involves several of his own agents as potential witnesses, thus suggesting that the investigation of the Fusion GPS payments from Perkins Coie should be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in the same manner that Mueller transferred the Cohen case to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/china-persecution-of-uyghur-minority-demands-international-response/

It is the secrecy that makes whatever is happening in Xinjiang so sinister. The silence of the Xi Jinping regime is broken only by euphemism, which raises suspicions that something epochal, horrible is going on. The population of 12 million Uyghurs seems cowed. The province is under martial rule. Anyone attracting attention is liable to wind up in — where, exactly? A concentration camp? A penal colony? Or, as the People’s Republic of China would have it, a “vocational training center”?

American officials estimate that 1 million Uyghurs have been incarcerated in these facilities, located in a province in northwest China named the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The XUAR, or alternatively, East Turkestan, is the historic home of a group of non-Chinese, ethnically Turkic Muslims called Uyghurs. Since the Qing dynasty reasserted control of the region in the 19th century, relations between the Uyghurs and the Chinese have been tumultuous. But the mass detention and “reeducation” of them, part of China’s ongoing effort to Sinicize the province, is a step down a dark and dangerous path.

The history of the Uyghurs in China is that of a restive minority generating fears among the Chinese majority that the fringe of their empire is pulling away, and the Chinese responding with brutal consolidation. Uyghurs tried to declare independence from the Republic of China multiple times before the Communists came to power; under Mao, there was no shortage of Red Guard violence bent on stamping out their religious practice. More recently the PRC encouraged Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang, hoping to dilute the Uyghur presence in the region. And it has exploited international fears of Islamic terrorism as a pretext to build an immense surveillance state that involves DNA collection, cell-phone monitoring, and the installment of facial-recognition software.