RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/bad_day_for_president_trump_but_worse_day_for_his_critics.html

Let’s be honest, it was not a good press conference for President Trump. As my friend Barry Casselman said, it “was simply and inexcusably a blunder.”

I was not expecting President Trump to yell at Putin on the world stage. However, he could have expressed himself differently.

It was not the end of the world as we know it. The sky and the stars are not falling. Finally, let’s give this meeting a few months and see what comes out of it.

At the same time, his critics always end up throwing President Trump a lifesaver, as Liz Peek wrote:

Trump’s critics responded with customary vitriol and excess, attacking the president in such extreme terms that his supporters only dig in even deeper.

Democrats and never-Trumpers cannot help themselves; over the past two years, the public has grown weary of the non-stop, five-alarm fires, and they have tuned out.

Trump’s critics fail the most basic of tests. You can’t cry wolf over and over again without making a fool out of yourself.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/17/the-collusion-of-lawyers-is-finally-collapsing/

Colluding, like canoodling, is all the rage. Robert Mueller, like a dog chasing his tail, has been trying for more than a year to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to cook the 2016 election, which fate, providence, fortune and destiny decreed properly belonged to Hillary Clinton.

So far as anyone beyond his circle of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers know, Mr. Mueller has not come up with anything more than a few indictments of second- and third-tier aides, helpers, hangers-on, and lawyers that a nice girl would not take home to meet the folks.

Now The New York Times reports that the FBI colluded with the Australian ambassador to the United States, of all unlikely people, to find something to lend credence to the Russian collusion. Maybe, the FBI calculated, collusion could be catching. Mr. Mueller has demonstrated that he is not afraid to venture into the tall weeds in pursuit of Trump villainy (if any).

“Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016,” The New York Times reported this week in a dispatch both exhaustive and exhausting, “the FBI dispatched a

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/17/tell-us-again-why-we-need-a

We needed a special counsel for this?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday announced federal charges against another gang of Russian operatives who allegedly stole some emails from some Democrats in 2016 and posted them on the internet. The Rooskie conspirators will never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom; no American was involved in the criminal conduct; there is no evidence that the online chicanery influenced a single vote in the 2016 presidential election.

As the media and politicians predictably flipped out—“ZOMG, America was attacked!”—most journalists overlooked a key point: Rosenstein transferred the case from the special counsel’s office back to the Justice Department’s National Security Division. So even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller signed the 11-count indictment, the Justice Department will take it from here.

Let’s break this down, shall we? Rosenstein appoints Mueller. Mueller conducts an investigation (that has already been completed by Congress) into a dozen Russian intelligence officers who allegedly breached the computer systems of a few political organizations. Mueller signs the indictments. Rosenstein—not Mueller—announces the charges and fields questions from the media (Mueller is again nowhere in sight.) Rosenstein transfers responsibility for the prosecution from the special counsel back to the DOJ.

Oh, and by the way, none of it has to do with Mueller’s original marching orders, which are to find “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/anti-defamation-league-anti-trump-anti-semitism/How a Democratic operative led the venerable hate-monitoring group off a partisan cliff.

The moment President Trump concluded his announcement of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Anti-Defamation League fired off a tweet. In it, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tore into Kavanaugh as lacking the “independence and fair treatment for all that is necessary to merit a seat on the nation’s highest court.”

The tweet teased a press release that obliquely demanded that the Senate reject the nomination. The timing made it clear that there would be no questions or deliberative process before the venerable group, which for more than century has played the role of both defender of the Jewish community against anti-Semitism and monitor of hate crimes, made up its mind about Kavanaugh. Considering that the ADL was quicker to publicly oppose the nomination than were some members of the Democratic caucus who were certain “no” votes on the appointment, the group’s haste showed that it had planned to oppose anyone nominated by Trump.

It is no surprise that many liberal groups — including some that are all-in on what some on the left are treating as an apocalyptic fight for the future of the High Court — are reflexively opposed to anyone Trump may nominate. But the ADL’s presence in the ranks of those who are supplying the organizational muscle for the resistance to Trump might come as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying much attention to the group in recent years. Though it spent its first century of existence being careful to avoid getting labeled as a partisan outfit, in the three years since the ADL’s longtime national director Abe Foxman retired, Greenblatt has steadily pushed the group farther to the left and, in so doing, more or less destroyed its reputation as being above politics. After the ADL has repeatedly involved itself in partisan controversies, it is impossible to pretend that Greenblatt’s vision of the group isn’t fundamentally that of a Democratic-party auxiliary that is increasingly overshadowing and marginalizing its still-vital role as the nation’s guardian against anti-Semitism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-whatever-advances-progressive-causes-is-sacrosanct/What is sacrosanct? Whatever advances progressive causes.

1) Right to Left. The majority of post-war Republican Supreme Court nominees, who were initially perceived as conservative, turned liberal on the bench (Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Earl Warren), or went from right-wing to center-right or centrist (Warren Burger, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts). Perhaps the pressures of approval from the liberal social and political culture of Washington, D.C., becomes finally overwhelming. Or justices sense that the liberal media and historians will praise and memorialize a “maverick” who “grows,” “matures,” or “evolves,” while dismissing a “recalcitrant,” “hard-core,” or “reactionary” justice who remains a strict constructionist. A conservative president perhaps realizes that he will get more praise from the Left than blame from the Right when his malleable nominee bolts and become progressive. The ongoing liberal political reassessments of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in part came from their nominations of Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter. Or perhaps as we age we all tire a bit and cave to popular pressures and prefer “to just get along” in our sunset years. Controlling the culture — and the threat of ostracism from it — is a powerful tool in massaging political ideology.

2) Never Left to Right. In contrast, few Democratic nominees become centrist or conservative. To do so would be to suffer something like the “Dershowitz effect” that brands independent-thinking liberal legal scholars, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who remain progressive but honor the law, as veritable traitors and pariahs. Most Democratic justices arrived at the Court either from the academic world, the bureaucratic state, or private legal practice — all overwhelmingly liberal environments. They certainly realize that university appearances, favorable media coverage, and legacy and historical memorialization all hinge on remaining liberal or intensifying their liberal fides. Moreover, vote against Second Amendment rights, and no right-wing zealot is going to corner you at a D.C. bistro. But vote against Roe v. Wade and be prepared to have enraged leftists camped on your Chevy Chase lawn yelling “traitor!” and “fascist!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/trump-putin-meetings-unnecessary/The United States should have contacts with Russia, but the president should not be holding summit meetings with a despot.

Prior to President Trump’s dismal performance at Monday’s meeting with Russian despot Vladimir Putin, I expressed bafflement over his longstanding insistence that we need to have good relations with Moscow. This has never made sense to me. We have often done quite well, thank you very much, while having a strained modus vivendi with Moscow, even when it was the seat of a much more important power than today’s Russia.

It is not possible to have good relations with a thug regime unless one is willing to overlook and effectively ratify its thug behavior. Yet the widely perceived “need” to have good relations with Russia leads seamlessly to a second wrongheaded notion: It was appropriate, indeed essential, for the two leaders to meet at a ceremonial summit.

There is no need, nor is it desirable, for the president of the United States to give the dictator of the Kremlin the kind of prestigious spectacle Putin got in Helsinki. When I’ve made this point, as recently as Monday night in a panel on The Story, Martha MacCallum’s Fox News program, I’ve gotten pushback that, I respectfully suggest, misses the point.

The counterargument, premised on the fact that it is important for the United States and Russia to have dialogue, maintains that this dialogue must be conducted at the chief-executive-to-chief-executive level. There is, after all, a long history of such meetings, tracing back to FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 (only after, I would note, years of antagonistic relations following the October Revolution).

To be clear, I did not and do not take the position that the United States should not have contacts with Russia in areas of mutual concern, or that it should not defuse tensions lest they escalate into unnecessary confrontations between the world’s two dominant nuclear powers. But these communications channels have long existed. They range from diplomatic, military, intelligence, and even law-enforcement contacts all the way up to occasional phone calls between the heads of state, and even the odd sidelines conferral between leaders at this or that multilateral conference.