RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/donald-trump-best-west/

Opposed by Democrats, the media and a nefarious cabal of high government officials, this most unlikely president has implemented precisely what he had promised on the stump. Despite the Deep State’s worst efforts to bring him down, his record far exceeds even that of the great Ronald Reagan.

Australia is fortunate indeed that Donald Trump is US President, just as we have been fortunate that we have always been so close to the world’s most powerful nation — first Great Britain, then the United States of America. It is crucial to Australia that the US continue in her powerful role of preserving, protecting and defending Western civilisation based, as it is, on Judeo-Christian values.

Sadly, under the Obama administration, American influence had been allowed to wane, her armed forces under-resourced, action against ISIS circumvented by bureaucratic intervention and those powers most hostile to the West, Iran and North Korea, appeased. Meanwhile, the administration condoned the undermining of the family and traditional values by encouraging undemocratic judicial activism, the high point of which remains the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v Wade inventing a constitutional ‘right’ to abortion.

This was done by interpreting the Constitution as a ‘living document’—in other words, the Constitution means whatever the judges say it means. As the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia maintained, the only proper interpretation must be that the Constitution means what it meant to a reasonable person at the time it was adopted. This is the originalist interpretation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/media-bias-annapolis-shooting/

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for the attack.

If you’re at all normal, which is to say not hysterically progressive, your reaction to initial reports of a horrific newsroom shooting in Annapolis, Md., was probably to assume it was the act of a disgruntled ex-employee. That is, after all, the usual back story to workplace massacres. Or your mind might have turned to other common motivators for such acts — psychosis, unrequited male affection. If you’re conversant with local newspapering specifically, you might have considered the special worry that accompanies this job: the danger of one of your readers being enraged by your coverage of a micro-feud involving zoning permits or construction detours or school-board composition or some other niche matter in which passions run inversely proportional to historical importance.

On the #Resist left, though, a faction increasingly prone to put emotions before reason, indeed to mistake the former for the latter, the immediate response was: This is on President Trump. Trump is up to his wrists in blood. Hasn’t Trump been railing at the press this week and for three solid years since he first announced his presidential candidacy? Did he not dub the media the “enemy of the people” on Monday night in South Carolina?

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for either directly or indirectly inspiring the attack. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten tweeted, “The demonization of the press leading to a shooting of the Press . . . Just horrible!!!!” Feminist writer Lauren Duca said on the same medium, “The shooting . . . cannot reasonably be separated from the President’s mission to villainize [sic] the press.” Reuters editor Rob Cox wrote, “This is what happens when @RealDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands, Mr. President.” The Wire mastermind David Simon, a longtime Maryland newspaperman, tweeted at the president, “Blood today in an American newsroom. Aren’t you proud, you vile, fascist son of a bitch,” adding later that “Trump’s direct language was to blame.” Leftist commentators Jessica Valenti and Shaun King expressed similar sentiments. (Trump’s “enemy of the people” crack Monday was such a glancing aside that Chris Cillizza of CNN didn’t even include it in his exhaustive retrospective piece, “The 55 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump’s South Carolina Speech.” Nor did the New York Times writeup of the rally mention it.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-nomination-fight-would-provide-political-lessons/

The fight to confirm Barrett would contain edifying political lessons.

The mental relief that one will never again have to read an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy is enough to satisfy for weeks. Just be glad for this, I’m telling myself. We never have to hear this man explain that his job is to “impose order on a disordered reality.” In an America of 300 million people, the likelihood of finding a new justice with Kennedy’s self-regard is near zero. After all, Donald Trump is unlikely to appoint himself.

But we must refuse the natural complacency that should settle on a normal and well-adjusted people who have survived the rule of Anthony Kennedy. We must press ahead. To do so, Donald Trump should appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the highest court in the land.

There are many good and fine people rumored to be on President Trump’s short list of candidates for the Supreme Court, including Amul Thapar and Senator Mike Lee. But Barrett’s qualifications match them all.

And her appointment, in particular, has several political advantages. Millions of Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump because they felt it was necessary to protect the liberty to practice their faith. The fight over Barrett’s confirmation would almost certainly build trust between President Trump and social conservatives. It would energize Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

The facts of Barrett’s life — that she is a mother of seven children, and that when she speaks about her Catholic faith, she speaks about God as if she really believes in His existence — will provoke nasty and bigoted statements from Democratic senators and liberal media personalities. Again.

https://spectator.org/the-collapse-of-the-never-trump-conservatives/?utm
They’ll always have Twitter and MSNBC.

With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?

For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trumpeditorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.

One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.