RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/no-senate-republicans-the-fbi-does-not-deserve

The day before FBI Director Christopher Wray explained to a Senate appropriations subcommittee why his department deserves a $527.8 million raise in 2023, his agents were credited with foiling an ISIS-linked plot to assassinate George W. Bush. An Iraqi national was arrested on May 25 and charged with attempting to smuggle four other Iraqis into the United States then “murder” the former president in retaliation for the war in Iraq. (I will address the sketchiness of this story in a separate column.)

The timing for Wray was suspiciously fortuitous; appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 to lead the scandal-ridden agency, Wray continues to promote the unsubstantiated notion that domestic terrorists, i.e., Trump voters, pose a lethal threat to national security. For nearly a year and a half, armed FBI agents across the country have raided, interrogated, and arrested more than 800 Americans on mostly nonviolent offenses related to January 6, 2021, a four-hour protest that Wray considers an “act of domestic terror.”

Then right before Wray went hat-in-hand to Congress to ask for a budget boost, headlines blared the news that his department thwarted a plan tied to a legitimate terrorist organization overseas?

Color me skeptical.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/shouldnt-hillary-clinton-be-banned?s=r

“Hillary Clinton was falsely accused many times earlier in her career. This time she’s guilty. It’s not society’s fault there’s no legal name for the offense she and her campaign committed. It was serious, and there should be serious consequences.”

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/blue-dog-democrat-endangered-species/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

It is easy to find Democrats who believe that their party’s problem is not runaway inflation, poor communication, or flawed candidates. The real problem, they contend, is that the structure of the U.S. government is biased against the Democratic Party and that the only solution is a sweeping, Constitution-busting rebuild from the ground up.

A certain kind of wonky Democrat will whine that it is just so unfair that Alaska gets as many Senate seats as California, or that Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes when it has only 576,000 people. (You rarely hear them making similar complaints about the District of Columbia, Vermont, or Delaware.)

The subtext is often that it is unfair that so many Senate seats and electoral votes are in the South and the Midwest — broad swaths of the country with majorities of white, culturally conservative voters. Never mind that recent history shows that a Democrat who deviates from party orthodoxy on abortion and guns gets a lot of leeway from culturally conservative voters on other issues. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/flag-under-foot-memorial-day-crime-anger/

On my way to work in Midtown Manhattan each day, I pass down 50th Street. Near the corner of Broadway, not long ago someone glued an American flag to the sidewalk and set fire to it. The scorched remnants cry out in resistance to the attempted insult and erasure.

I have no idea what protest prompted this indignity, or whether the person who sealed the flag to where pedestrians would trample it was the same who decided to set it on fire. I haven’t noticed any passersby taking special note of Old Glory reduced to such an inglorious state, surrounded by cigarette butts and other debris.

This isn’t New York City’s fault. We are amid more pressing crises. The subway entrance nearby — one of the main points of access to Midtown — reeks of urine and sometimes worse. We ride it knowing that at any moment some homeless turnstile jumper may try to push someone in front of a train, knife a stranger or, as happened last weekend, shoot a man dead for looking at his cell phone.

Most, but not all the perpetrators are young black men, but older black men and black women have gotten into the game as well. But we can’t talk about this except as a “mental health” crisis. Truth be told, it is an anger crisis.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/joe-biden-whispers-to-naval-academy-graduates/

President Biden revived his frequently ridiculed stage whisper Friday while addressing the US Naval Academy’s Class of 2022, stooping over his microphone to remind them that “I’m your commander-in-chief.”

Biden addressed the graduates for approximately 25 minutes during the outdoor ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, during which he slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his three-month-old invasion of Ukraine.

“The actions taken by Putin were an attempt to — to use my phrase — to Finlandize all of Europe, make it all neutral,” Biden said. “Instead, he NATO-ized all of Europe.”

The phrase “Finlandize,” which the president mispronounced as “Fingalize,” refers to Finland’s Cold War-era practice of treading lightly in international politics so as not to upset its near neighbors in Moscow.

The president was speaking about Finland and Sweden applying to join NATO in response to the Russian invasion, which began Feb. 24 and has been met with stiff resistance from Ukraine’s military.