RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18230/storm-clouds-approaching

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful that we are far from there
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer

God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above

The words of Irving Berlin who wrote “God Bless America” in 1918 and then revised it in 1938 as Europe stood once more on the abyss of war still speak to us today as Russia positions tens of thousands of troops on the Ukraine border.

The Russian trigger could be pulled “at any time” according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The crisis begs the question: Is Biden in the same mold as Lincoln. Or Wilson. Or Roosevelt?

In our nation’s history, three out of these four Presidents experienced the lengthening shadows of war. Through the strength of their leadership and force of personality provided our democracy with the power required to navigate an existential threat to our nation and the future of freedom. They were able to call upon the patriots of American democracy to preserve and defend our country. They had the means to galvanize the enormous power of an exceptional America and confront our enemies.

As the shadows of possible conflict dramatically darken, one has to ask whether President Biden is prepared and capable of confronting what may be the defining test of Western Democracy, his administration, and by extension, the man himself.

One is compelled to ask because his tenure to date reveals a muddled and amateurish response to crisis. Media reports regarding our retreat from Afghanistan reveals an embarrassing level of incompetence by the White House that left our “boots on the ground” not just frustrated but in danger.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/truckers-biden-trudeau-not-enemy-liz-peek

What if … Justin Trudeau had met with the truckers the day they first arrived in Ottawa?

Instead of bolting and hiding out in an “undisclosed location,” what if Canada’s prime minister had emerged from the Privy Council building and talked to the Freedom Convoy drivers about their demands?

Might Trudeau have defused the entire protest? Would the truckers have been satisfied that their cause was heard and gone home?

After all, these are truck drivers, not thugs. Even under the microscope of a censorious press, during those first heady few days, when massive crowds appeared from nowhere to cheer on the drivers, they committed no crimes, no injuries, no looting. There was not a single arrest, much to the disappointment of the liberal media.

More recently, as police moved in to dismantle the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor, almost all the demonstrators peacefully decamped. CNN sounded downright disappointed to report that none went to jail.

The truckers are speaking for millions of working people in Canada and around the world who are sick of COVID restrictions and increasingly skeptical of the “science” behind them. Canada’s drivers were set off by a new rule, imposed even as the pandemic crested, that required all truckers entering the country from the U.S. be vaccinated or self-quarantine. The rule seemed unnecessary considering that 85% of the truckers had taken the shot, and that most spend the majority of their time alone.

The new mandate also seemed whimsical in that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical authorities have now proclaimed immunities from surviving COVID just as effective against infection as the vaccines. Truckers were praised as selfless essential workers as they continued to work through the pandemic, putting themselves in harm’s way. Presumably, many got sick and now have antibodies; they may not need the vaccine.

What was Trudeau scared of? That the crowd of burly drivers might scoff at his perfectly coiffed hair? Not be properly reverent of his literature degree from McGill University? That the truckers might not respect a lifelong politician whose career rested on the fame of his father?

Instead of engaging with the truckers, Trudeau ran like a rabbit, only to emerge from hiding to demean the protesters as a “fringe minority.” The irony is, of course, that Trudeau himself represents a minority, with his Liberal Party setting a record last fall for the lowest vote share of any party to ever form a government, winning a mere 33% of the popular vote. As in 2019, the Conservatives won the popular vote.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/13/joe-biden-alchemist/

Medieval alchemists sought to turn base metals into precious metals like gold. The more the alchemists bumped into the reality that gold was an element, the more desperately they sought to find fantastic ways to fabricate the rare element out of nothing. 

Joe Biden operates on the same alchemist principles. He tries to turn his record of dross into golden success. And the more he fails, the more zealously he embraces his next new fantasy. Meanwhile,  the midterm reckoning approaches. 

Printing money, talking up low interest rates, disincentivizing work, subsidizing inactivity, and being unprepared that a pent-up, locked down, constipated economy of the past two years would eventually break out—all that resulted in January’s 7.5 percent annualized inflation rate. Unlike Joe Biden, even a child knows that too much demand and liquidity and too few available goods and services cause prices to rise. The rate of inflation is increasing at an annualized rate not seen in 40 years. And the jump already follows a prior 2021 annual rate of 6.8 percent. The prices of gas, food, and houses—the stuff of life—are collectively rising far higher than just 7.5 percent. 

At first, the Biden Administration attempted to turn this inflationary dross into gold. Price hikes, we were assured, were all just the worries of an elite. 

https://www.city-journal.org/metropolitan-museum-of-art-has-redefined-itself-as-an-antiracist-agent-of-change

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”

What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage.

The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry.

The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings; subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing; the collecting and donating of art does, too. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell. Colonialism, slavery, and war—major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history—are scarcely visible here.”