RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/600332-back-in-the-safe-space-of-hollywood-scandal

There’s nothing like a good Hollywood slap in the face to distract us from our looming dystopia. As bombs continue to fall on Ukraine and mothers shepherd their children through mine fields, it took Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to return us to our safe space: the latest Hollywood scandal. Nothing says escapism like two celebrities in a made-for-television brouhaha.

“The slap heard ‘round the world,” as it’s been heralded in the media, smacks of the self-absorption of our popular culture. Heard ‘round the world, really? Heard in Lviv, against the groaning of bulldozers plying through wreckage? Heard in the clatter of refugee camps in Europe? In El Salvador, where 62 people were murdered in gang violence over the weekend?

After the incident, social media erupted, memes formed, newspaper headlines blared and actual crises were, well, upstaged. “BEST SMACKTOR,” snarked the front page of the New York Post. Facebook, the most self-centered communications platform since the mirror, exploded with our completely uninformed but no less authoritative positions and diagnoses: Smith needs anger management therapy…Rock provoked Smith…the whole thing was a conspiracy to hoist the Oscar’s anemic ratings.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/a-sleepwalker-stumbles-on-the-right-answer/

As I write there are signs that Putin may be prepared to limit his ambitions and settle for some portion of east Ukraine.  President Zelensky may be prepared to accept a compromise of this nature simply in order to ease the suffering of his people.  That will ease the immediate human problem but the issue will not be resolved.  Putin’s long-term ambitions will not be assuaged.  Ukrainian resentment will not abate. 

But, more critically, Putin has undoubtedly committed war crimes.  Arguably he has committed them before, but this time the West in its customary impotence cannot credibly turn a blind eye.  Could it allow a Putin dominated Russia to remain on the UN Security Council or any other UN organisation?  Could it refrain from prosecuting Putin in the International Court of Justice?  Could it allow Russia to compete in sporting events?  Can we continue to indulge Putin continuing to thumb his nose at the world?

Putin cannot be allowed even the semblance of a victory – we cannot think that if we allow him a face-saving compromise that will be an end of the matter.

Of course, yes, we tolerate murderous dictators all the time as long as they confine their atrocities to their own people.  But pragmatic indifference can only be stretched so far.  This time Putin has gone beyond his own borders.  Surely this is a red line we cannot compromise. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/28/gop-must-promise-inquisitions-not-meaningless-task-forces/

Using the pretext of the so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021, the long knives are out for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Post-election text exchanges between Mrs. Thomas and Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief-of-staff, recently were leaked by the January 6 select committee to none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who darkly described the communications as proof that “Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election result.”

The small cache of texts—29 total—shows Thomas expressing frustration at the election’s outcome. There is nothing sinister, and certainly nothing criminal, about the messages.

But like everything related to the events of January 6, the truth doesn’t matter. Doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is considered a thoughtcrime and handled as such by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Congress; CNN reported Monday afternoon that the January 6 select committee led by U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) now wants to interview Thomas. If she refuses—as she should—it’s highly likely the committee will issue a subpoena to compel her testimony, which it has done in numerous cases.

The poisonous tree of Thompson’s committee is yielding a bumper crop of political fruit for House Democrats and their useful idiots in the Republican Party such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). With little else to run on and a White House in freefall, Democrats think they can sustain enough outrage over January 6 to stem major electoral losses in November.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18374/ukraine-us-energy-independence

In late 1944, desperate Poles radioed the Allies pleading for weapons to help them stop the Nazis from massacring the citizens of Warsaw.

The Soviet Army was within easy distance of the Polish capital but, for some reason, decided to pause in their deadly offensive against the Third Reich at the exact same time the Poles had risen up against the Nazis. Some historians suggest that the pause was Stalin’s cold-blooded decision to let the Germans destroy the under-armed Polish resistance, whose leaders would have demanded independence when the war was over.

Now, some eighty years later, beleaguered freedom fighters throughout Ukraine are begging for the West to send them more arms so that they may confront and defeat Hitler’s protégé, Russian President Vladimir Putin. If America and NATO fail this test, history will record a craven retreat of democracy that makes our shameful departure from Afghanistan a mere footnote.

There is no room for any equivocation on the part of the Biden White House or members of Congress. We need to face this Russian threat as a united country with a single focus: providing Ukraine with every weapon and every resource this democracy can offer.

US President Joe Biden also needs to hear from those who engineered his political campaign and who still play closeted roles as kitchen cabinet advisors; they have much to say about both domestic and international policy. They too must insist on all available aid to the people of Ukraine.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/will-smith-chris-rock-donald-trump/

Will Smith, a prominent Scientologist and Democratic donor best known for co-writing the hit song “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It,” shocked the civilized world on Sunday by slapping the s—t out of comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Libs were flummoxed. Should they be outraged? Was it racist? A number of Democratic politicians, including “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), initially applauded Smith’s violent outburst, which came in response to Rock making a joke about the actor’s nominal wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) tweeted, then deleted, the following take: “Teachable Moment: Don’t joke about a Black Woman’s hair.”

Doing what comes naturally, a number of libs reacted by denouncing former president Donald Trump for his role in the slapping incident. “So did like anyone walk out after that happened???” wrote Asha Rangappa, the CNN analyst best known for doxxing a Washington Free Beacon intern. “Or are we getting an independent psychological case study on how Trump got normalized?”

Steve Schmidt, the schlubby Lincoln Project cofounder who once compared himself to the soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches on D-Day, offered a similar assessment. “Do you want to understand how Trump happened? Watch the Oscars and the crowd reaction,” he wrote. “Applause for assault in a tuxedo in California is the same as applause for assault while wearing a red hat in Alabama.”

Howard Stern, the former anti-establishment shock jock turned boring liberal scold, suggested (without evidence) that “Will Smith and Trump are the same guy.” The fact that Smith, who would go on to accept the best actor award for his role in King Richard, did not face any meaningful consequences for his actions was an example of “how Trump gets away with shit,” Stern said.

Left-wing radio host Dean Obeidallah used the violent outburst as an opportunity to complain that “Donald Trump [has] still NOT been criminally charged for his attempted coup and his role in the Jan 6 terrorist attack.” It is almost as if America’s libs have developed an unhealthy addiction to the constant outrage and anxiety they felt during Trump’s presidency, and miss him even more than his biggest fans.

Smith and his wife, who have said they are in an open marriage, were among the campaign bundlers who raised at least $500,000 for former president Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, along with disgraced Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/putin-finds-some-unlikely-allies-united-states-robert-spencer-0/

Everyone knows that The Squad in the House of Representatives is so far to the Left as to make Stalin look like a John Bircher, but would they go so far as to cheerlead for a former KGB man’s war of aggression? It looks as if the answer is yes.

“The Democrats,” Stephen Kruiser observed on Feb. 21, “were lurching leftward long before the arrival of AOC and her gang. What they’ve done though is help drag the party so far to the lunatic fringe left that whatever passes for center with them these days is probably somewhere in Cuba.” Or, say, Moscow. Putin, after all, has called the fall of the Soviet Union a “tragedy” for “most citizens,” and said it was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.”

In October 2020, Putin praised the Democrat Party for being “traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to Social Democratic ideas, if compared to Europe. And it was from the Social Democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved.” He went on to reveal: “I still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them? In fact, they are akin to Christian values. Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless.”

What’s for a good Squad member not to like in all that, except maybe the reference to detested “Christian values”? And so the New York Postreported Saturday that “comrades in ‘The Squad’ have bent over backwards in the House of Representatives to defend Vladimir Putin, voting against sanctions on Russian oil and parroting Kremlin talking points.”