RUTHFULLY YOURS

When you look at it hard, two conclusions are impossible to escape: First, at the height of the 2016 campaign, Obama intelligence officials anxiously adopted Christopher Steele’s allegations of traitorous conduct by then-candidate Donald Trump rather than first subject his “dossier” to rigorous investigation — even though Steele himself admits that his “raw,” “unverified” reports might not be true.

Second, at the same time the FBI was receiving Steele’s reports — which were based on multiple-hearsay from anonymous Russian sources, and paid for by the Clinton campaign — Obama intelligence officials were briefing congressional leaders about them, thereby ensuring that they’d be publicized just six weeks before Election Day.

This is the second of two columns addressing the relationship between Steele and American government officials. To recap, Steele is a former British intelligence agent who compiled a “dossier” of uncorroborated reports alleging a Trump–Kremlin conspiracy. Steele was retained for this project by his contractor, the research firm Fusion GPS. The work was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their lawyers.

The first column, on Monday, dealt with the recent referral of Steele to federal law-enforcement agencies by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members. Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham seek an investigation and potential prosecution of Steele for making false statements to the FBI. Though most of the referral is classified and non-public, we can glean that it focuses on Steele’s representations about his communications with journalists regarding dossier information.

As President Trump’s first year in office comes to a close, media hysteria about the grave harm he will cause to the nation and the world continues unabated – even though predictions of disaster he would supposedly cause in the past year never came to pass.

Since Donald Trump’s upset election victory in November 2016, commentators, anchors, reporters, columnists, editorial writers, op-ed writers all manner of experts have been opining on the horrors his presidency would bring about.

Gazing into their crystal balls, these sages told us: a monumental stock market crash was just around the corner; there was a good chance we were headed toward a nuclear war with North Korea; U.S. relations with nations around the world would hit a new low; investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election would create a path eventually leading to President Trump’s impeachment; and a Republican revolt in Congress would stop President Trump from winning approval for any significant legislation.

While the prophets of doom have not recanted their claims – and in fact have continued making them – the reality of President Trump’s time in office so far speaks volumes about what never happened.

Looking back at President Trump’s first year in office as it winds to a close we see the following positive developments under his leadership:

The stock market is booming. In 2017, the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its biggest gains ever, with the most closing highs for the index in a single calendar year. Volatility diminished to historic lows and many global stock markets finished the year at or near record highs.

There’s no evidence of collusion available to the public that shows Russia worked with the Trump campaign to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Unemployment is low. The unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the lowest in 17 years. The labor participation rate has increased steadily throughout the year, meaning more people are getting and keeping jobs.

Cis-gendered: those who have unquestionably accepted their assigned gender.
Cis-racial: those who have unquestionably accepted their assigned race.
Cis-planetary: those who have unquestionably accepted their assigned planet.
Cis-species: those who have unquestionably accepted their assigned species.
Cis-temporal: those who have unquestionably accepted their assigned historical period.

Technological innovations have brought us many new words. We need new words not only to identify new things, but also to rename some of the old things in order to avoid confusion. For example, people have been playing the guitar for centuries without calling it “acoustic” until the electric guitar entered the stage; that’s when the old guitar was retroactively renamed into acoustic. Traditional clocks with a face and rotating hands were retroactively renamed “analog” to distinguish them from “digital,” along with displays, signals, recordings, and so on. The new words for such retro-naming are called retronyms.

Innovations in social engineering affect our language in much the same way.

When Karl Marx laid out his blueprint for communism and socialist ideas began to engulf Europe, the normal way of doing business was retroactively renamed “capitalism.” Rational behavior became “oppressive” and people who preferred normalcy to “isms” became apologists for a reactionary socio-economic ideology. The advent of communist propaganda caused any non-communist discourse (e.g., Adam Smith) to be retroactively known as “capitalist propaganda.”

In the U.S., the advent of progressivism in the 1930s caused a retroactive renaming of mainstream believers in the American Revolution into “conservatives.” When the progressives decided to call themselves “liberals,” the real liberals renamed themselves “classical liberals.”

President Trump’s economic boom is undeniably underway which means that the Left will grow increasingly strident and desperate in the lead-up to this year’s midterm congressional elections and beyond.

The better things go under Trump, the more looney the Left becomes. Left-wingers need something new to excite their base but they’re not likely to find it anytime soon. They’re going to recycle the same old garbage.

Despite potentially the ensnaring of a handful of people in FBI perjury traps, the crazy Trump-Russia electoral collusion conspiracy theory is going nowhere.

Because the lies in the Fusion GPS dossier aren’t helping the Left move the needle toward impeaching Trump, these people are back to the bogus sexual harassment allegations and the claims that Trump is mentally incompetent that conveniently emerged during the 2016 campaign. Richard Wolff’s wacky tell-all book is being attacked even on the Left and Wolff comes across as emotionally disturbed and malicious in TV interviews. His 15 minutes of fame are almost up.

But President Trump’s “economic sanity” should be beyond question, Charles Gasparino writes in the New York Post.

In fact, it’s safe to say that the current president, for all his temperamental flaws and petty insecurities, makes his tightly wound predecessor, Barack Obama, look like a raving madman when it comes to showing sense on economic growth. Armchair psychiatrists are having a field day diagnosing the president’s mental state from afar, especially after his increasingly bizarre tweeting, but the market says otherwise.