RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/whos_destroying_civic_norms_again_trump.html

It’s hard to believe how many high-ranking government officials have been serving time behind bars these last couple decades.  Bill Clinton got caught selling military secrets and influence to communist China in return for campaign contributions.  Hillary Clinton got caught storing top-secret materials on an unsecured email server in a bathroom closet.  Lois Lerner got caught using the IRS as a weapon for targeting conservatives and influencing the 2012 election.  Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents concerning the Obama administration’s transnational gunrunning racket.  Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper were all thrown in the clink for spying on a political opponent’s campaign and then covering up their illegal activities by framing the victim as a covert Russian agent.

The saddest thing was watching Dementia Joe Biden stumble out of the White House in cuffs, as remaining federal agents finally arrested him for decades of corruption involving quid-pro-quo schemes that enriched his family by selling the powers of his various offices to the highest foreign bidders.  

Oh, right — none of that happened, because the Deep State and those in bed with the Deep State protect their own.  At this point, anybody not being attacked or politically persecuted should be presumed as secretly working for some shady enterprise hostile to the best interest of the United States.

Yet somehow special counsel Jack Smith has the temerity to stand before the American people, announce the federal government’s continuing crusade to keep President Trump from office, and shamelessly declare, “We have one set of laws in this country.”  Right.  What he really means is, “The Deep State controls America, and if you mess with those gangsters, we’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”  Jack Smith — like Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, so many inspectors general who ignore crimes under their purview, and too many partisan political operatives posing as judges — is just another thug enforcer sent out to protect the ruling regime.  Well done, Jack!  Collect your thirty pieces of silver and career advancement as your reward!

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/11/the-pandemic-of-nuclear-trash-talk/

After the world escaped a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, it has been generally understood that nuclear-armed nations did not publicly threaten their rivals and enemies with thermonuclear weapons.

Of course, there were occasional lunatic exceptions to the rule. Since 2006, when the unhinged North Korean regime acquired nuclear weapons, the world has periodically dismissed the zany threats from the Kim dynasty. Kim Jong Un has sporadically warned he might strike Japan, South Korea, and the United States—usually in an outrageous and outlandish fashion.

Kim finally was warned of the consequences of his brinkmanship rhetoric, most famously by Donald Trump in 2018. He reminded Kim that the American nuclear button was bigger than North Korea’s—an eerie counter-warning that for a time led to the cooling of North Korean rhetoric.

Pakistan went nuclear in 1998. From time to time, its prime ministers have warned India that in any confrontation, what Pakistan lacked in numbers and arms would be made up by the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. But again, Pakistan’s threats, like those of Kim Jong Un’s, were dismissed as the rantings of the insecure and blustering, who were otherwise deterred by much larger nuclear arsenals.

But the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine opened a new chapter in nuclear trash-talking. The Ukrainian war has proved dangerously unique in a variety of ways. True, there have been prior large land wars involving nuclear powers. The first Gulf War of 1991 saw Britain, France, and the United States combine to help crush Iraq without mention of nuclear arms. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 without such threats. Neither did China mention a nuclear option in 1979, despite a less-than-successful short invasion of Vietnam. Nor did Great Britain, in its 1982 retaking of the Falkland Islands, talk of the bomb, although recently declassified documents revealed that the Royal Navy carried 31 nuclear weapons on its expeditionary fleet—presumably depth charges, bombs, and missiles—to the chagrin of the current Argentine government.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/06/seeing-our-adversaries-with-clear-eyes
Middle-aged men finish their work for the day, overseeing exterminations at Auschwitz, and retire to the comfort of their homes, wives, and children. Young female telephone, telegraph, and radio operators who send and receive messages about who shall live and who shall die take a break to relax in the sun.

It was all part of life in and around history’s largest killing factory, as showcased in a set of jarring photos that are housed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and that come to life in a moving new play, “Here There Are Blueberries” – which premiered in La Jolla and just passed through the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington.

The photos and play call to mind “the banality of evil,” the phrase that philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She concluded that Eichmann, who helped spearhead Hitler’s “final solution,” was less a monster than a normal person, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” He was a former day laborer who could perform the evilest of deeds with nary a moral concern, a cog in a machine of ordinary people, living otherwise ordinary lives, in a country renowned for its advanced culture.

We see Auschwitz’s worker bees, but we also see top Nazi leaders – including Rudolf Hoss, who was most responsible for building Auschwitz and was its longest-serving commandant, and Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed the vilest of medical experiments on its prisoners.

Thus, the play offers lessons not just about the multifaceted drives of average people, but about those of individual leaders.

The play centers around 116 pictures and captions in an album that was assembled in meticulous fashion by Karl Hocker, a top aide to Auschwitz’s last commandant, Richard Baer.

https://victorhanson.com

We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. 

I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and in most of the major capitals and large cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, etc., as well as the first-, second-, and third-world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.

Over the last 40 years, I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in “bad areas,” lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to their hinterlands. I have been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006–07, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and 1974 war in Cyprus, and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur War. I have seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Khadafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe.

And yet, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo or in the worst environs of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square were routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse. Were these scenes being filmed for The Last of Us?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-nation-two-sets-of-laws/

When Barack Obama announced that he was unilaterally legalizing millions of illegal aliens while further opening the border, he described it as using “discretion about whom to prosecute”.

In the years since, pro-crime prosecutors have virtually dismantled the justice system in some jurisdictions by using their “discretion” not to prosecute thieves, drug dealers and violent criminals. Some prosecutors announced that they wouldn’t prosecute rioters and looters, others that they would stop prosecuting prostitution, public urination or thefts of under $1,000.

In the decade since Obama announced his exercise in prosecutorial discretion, the country has been overrun with criminals and illegal aliens who benefited from that “discretion”.

But prosecutorial discretion, like most leftist policies, works both ways.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg issued a ‘zero day’ memo on taking office that told prosecutors not to seek prison sentences for armed robbers. Bragg then labored to indict former President Trump while bypassing such niceties as the statute of limitations and the actual nature of the crime.

Such prosecutorial discretion has become routine in New York where Attorney General Letita James has championed criminal justice reform while targeting not only Trump, but the NRA. Bragg’s predecessor, DA Cyrus Vance, gave Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein a pass. He announced that he wouldn’t charge former Mayor Bill de Blasio, but pursued Trump. After refusing to charge BLM rioters or prostitutes, he made a point of dragging a woman featured in a viral video into court because she had called the police during a dispute with a black man.

But it’s also become normal at the federal level.

Hillary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information on a massive scale. The indictment of President Trump contrasts sharply with the treatment of Hillary, not to mention Biden who left classified documents lying around his garbage. The Trump team will argue selective prosecution, but the prosecution will argue that it can charge whom it pleases.