RUTHFULLY YOURS

The three-day government shutdown last Saturday has sharpened the debate about which party has the advantage going into the midterm elections in November, and which will profit from another possible shut-down if the February 8 deadline for coming up with a solution for the expiring DACA program isn’t met. More interesting than these analyses and prognostications is what they say about the pundits’ estimation of the American people’s ability to sort out the style “sizzle” from the policy-success “steak” come November.

The Democrat instigators of the current shutdown are for now paying a political price for bluffing and then caving to the Republicans, even though Republicans usually are blamed by the media and voters who have tarred them as the mean and greedy party of small government that always wants to starve the big-government Leviathan. Before the shutdown this received wisdom got support from A Washington Post poll that reported 48% of those polled would blame Republicans, 20 points more than those who’d blame the Dems. In fact, a later poll put 58% of voters blaming the Democrats.

Despite this seeming victory for Republicans, however, many still see the outlook for November as dim. Trump’s approval ratings, which are around 40%, 15 points behind his disapproval numbers, are at a historical low. The generic ballot poll asking people which party they prefer in November has the Dems ahead by 8 points. Democrats have been winning special elections lately, including a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama that had been Republican for 30 years, and most recently a the 10th State Senate district in Wisconsin, one held by Republicans for 17 years. The general consensus of Trumpophobes (e.g. here) from both parties is that the president’s abrasive and vulgar Tweets and comments, and his callous, if not racist, dismissal of immigrants during negotiations with Democrats in Congress, are undermining the party and threatening its success in November.

September 2009.

Obama hadn’t even been in office for a whole year when he gave in to Moscow’s biggest demand by dropping the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic. During his campaign, he had enthusiastically backed the defensive program, declaring, “We have to send a clear signal that Poland and other countries in that region are not going to be subject to intimidation and aggression.”

Like all of his campaign promises that were based on political triangulation, law enforcement, counterterrorism, Jerusalem and gay marriage, it was a campaign lie to be thrown out after the election.

Putin praised Obama’s sellout of our allies as a “brave decision.” In his first year, President Trump touted the sale of Patriot missiles to Poland. That was a truly brave decision.

After the Russian invasion, Obama refused to provide Ukraine with military assistance. While he had handed out weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria and Libya, the Ukrainians were only offered MREs. The same administration that covertly shipped a fortune in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to Russia’s Iranian allies took months to meet Ukrainian requests for boots and spare tires.

The Trump administrated unapologetically approved the sale of sniper rifles to the Ukrainians.

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people,” Obama had gushed during his meeting with Putin. There were no protests from the same media that has since then repeatedly suggested that Trump’s praise for Putin indicated a soft spot for dictators.

Looking back at Obama’s first year and Trump’s first year, it’s easy to assess who was giving Moscow more. It wasn’t just missile defense. In the spring of ’09, Hillary was in Moscow toting a misspelled Reset Button swiped from a swimming pool. But it was Obama who had first urged a “reset or reboot”. That was the month he sent a secret hand-delivered letter to Russia offering to kill the missile shield. The Russians turned down his proposed deal, but he went through with the appeasement anyway.

Trashing missile defense was just one step in a larger effort to revive Jimmy Carter’s defense policies. In his first year, Obama began the push to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. CTBT would have allowed the Russians (and everyone else) to build up their nuclear arsenals while crippling our own. The new START treaty was drafted in ’09 and signed next year. And Russian violations of it were ignored.

Here’s the solution.https://spectator.org/what-trump-can-and-must-do-about-mueller/

No, don’t fire him. That way is boobytrapped. Instead, use your power as President to exercise control over him, in accordance with the rule of law.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Somewhere, right now in Washington, there is a fire raging, just out of sight, but entirely out of control.

The fire is the unimaginable. Everything that is publicly known in and about Washington, and trumpeted by the so-called “mainstream” media, is actually the opposite of the truth.

Instead of Trump being guilty of obstruction of justice, and about to be bounced out of office through impeachment, it is actually the FBI, and President Obama’s Justice Department, that are guilty of obstruction of justice, with top figures about to be bounced into prison, or worse.

Instead of Trump being guilty of collusion “with the Russians” for help in defeating Hillary, it is Hillary Clinton who colluded with the Russians to try to defeat Trump. Hillary actually financed the Fusion GPS “dossier,” which served as the foundation for the FISA warrant authorizing espionage by the Obama Administration against the opposition party’s candidate for President.

Instead of Trump committing crimes that warrant impeachment and sending him to prison, it is Hillary Clinton who committed crimes that warrant sending her to prison. She is the one who sold out control over 20% of America’s uranium supply to Putin’s cronies, for $150 million in payoffs to the Clinton Foundation, in broad daylight as Obama’s sitting Secretary of State, in the biggest and most brazen corruption scandal in American history, by far.

That was in addition to revealing America’s top intelligence secrets by conducting her official business as Secretary of State on an unprotected email server that she should have known was subject to open access by foreign spies, which is a criminal violation of America’s intelligence laws.

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him. CONTINUE AT SITE