RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/why_will_no_democrat_pull_the_plug_on_schiff_.html

One would think that by now  that there would be one or two sentient Democrats who realize the terrible damage that Adam Schiff is doing to their party.  But, with the possible exception of the two Democrats who voted against Pelosi’s stupid “impeachment resolution,” Reps. Jeff Drew and Collin Peterson, they all seem to be captive to Nancy Pelosi’s and Adam Schiff’s pathological moonbattery.  Not one other of them has the courage to stand up for what is right and true; that Trump committed no impeachable crimes, not even close.  He’s the most transparent, most investigated president in U.S. history.  The Democrats all know this!  They know Trump is not guilty of any offense, let alone one that is impeachable.  They surely know that Schiff is certifiably insane and yet they stand by and let him make fools of their party.  They stand by and let him conduct his anti-democratic Star Chamber that is running roughshod over the Constitution.  And they all know that what he is doing is wrong, very, very wrong.  If this were being done to one of theirs, they would be screaming from the rooftops of their luxurious D.C. abodes. 

So what explains the cowardly reticence of the rest of the party?  Trump derangement?  Perhaps.  They all certainly suffer from that disorder.  Conservatives loathed what Obama did to the nation over his eight years in office. We did not engender the violence the left promotes such as that of Black Lives Matter or Antifa.  No one on the right hired thugs to foment chaos as the left did on the day of Trump’s inauguration and so many times since.  That brand of vicious intolerance is all on the left.  It is who they are, what they do.  They are proud of their contempt for those with whom they disagree.  They believe it proves their superiority, but it only proves that they are narrow-minded, discriminatory and contemptuous of millions of their fellow Americans.  To be a Democrat in Congress at this moment in time means that one is dismissive of our Constitution, despite their constant professed reverence for it, and willing to do everything in their power to overturn the results of the 2016 election.  They do so at their peril.  Americans are not nearly as ignorant and/or unengaged as they assume.  They are not fooled by the Democrats’ obsessive mission to remove Trump from office because a majority of Americans, the Americans they loathe, love him and are grateful for his America First agenda.  Unlike Obama, this president loves this country; Obama did everything in his power to diminish us and he succeeded wildly.  He wasted billions for a fake stimulus to his donors, more than a billion in cash to the terrorist nation of Iran, broken promises all around.  He was a foreign policy disaster.  Trump now has to try to clean up the mess. 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-2-annals-of-presidential-election

Here in the U.S., our tradition has long been that we accept the results of our elections, and in particular our presidential elections. The machinery of a presidential election is run by the state governments, not the federal government, which means that the incumbent President and his party have very limited ability to manipulate the result. There is little to no doubt about who actually won under the established rules. Losing candidates concede on election night, or maybe, in the case of an extremely close election, a few days later. The losing side becomes a loyal opposition, free to express its disagreement with everything the winner does in office, but never contesting the right of the winner to exercise the powers of the office.

At least that was the way it worked for the first 57 presidential elections. The search for an exception only proves the truth of the proposition. Yes, there were those who called Bush 43 “illegitimate” after the very close result in 2000; but I don’t recall any systematic defiance of his authority by the bureaucracy, let alone constant attempts to find some pretext to initiate impeachment. And yes, there were three prior attempts to impeach a President. But all of those involved much more the question of whether identifiable violations of law rose to the level of “impeachable,” rather than our current situation of a desperate search for something, anything to get rid of the guy whose real sin is that he really did win the election. (Of the previous impeachments, the closest to pretextual was that of Andrew Johnson for violation of the Tenure of Office Act; however, note that Johnson did violate a specific statute, and moreover had not himself been elected President, but had succeeded to the office by the death of Lincoln.)

Anyway, that was then. Now, places like the New York Times and the Washington Post declare to be heroes the bureaucrats who defy any and all directions of the duly-elected President and who search for any grounds they can take to the press or to Congress to undermine the President’s authority and get him removed. In simple terms, elections only count when our side wins.

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/j-streets-foul-formula/2019/11/03/

When it was founded some ten years ago, J Street claimed to be a “pro-Israel and pro-peace” organization. That was taken to mean partnering with the mainstream Israeli political left to build support in Washington for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Since then J Street has morphed into an anti-Israel mutant. The organization spends its time and money besmirching Israel, smearing AIPAC and other leading American Jewish organizations, boosting President Obama’s dangerous deal with Iran (and now trying to bring it back), and supporting political candidates for whom BDS is a badge of honor.

Its campus arm, J Street U, has become a primary vehicle for conveying the most poisonous messages about Israel to students, acting to block student participation in Birthright, and actively campaigning against support for Israel at American universities.

J Street also believes that it has the “moral responsibility” to get America to force Israel to change its policies on the Palestinian issue. Why? Because J Street knows what’s best for Israel. It knows better even than the Israeli political left – which generally doesn’t share J Street’s radical positions on unilateral withdrawals and mass settlement eradication.

J Street knows how to bring peace to the Mideast: Israel needs to be pressured. As if Israel is the party unwilling to compromise. As if Israel hasn’t already offered the Palestinians at Oslo, Camp David, Taba and Annapolis just about everything they want of post-67 Israel. As if the Palestinians have compromised on their demands one wit since the great handshake on the White House lawn. As if the Palestinians are currently willing to enter peace talks with Israel unconditionally.

Nevertheless, it is Israel that needs to be pressured and shamed, say the J Street moral oracles.

Of course, this is the same J Street that supported the anti-Israel UN Goldstone Report, supported the illegal Palestinian bid for unilateral statehood recognition at the UN, and supported talks with Hamas but not military action against it.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/europe-goes-right-as-democrats-try-their-failed/90894/

“Yes, Europe’s left is trying new things: The Dutch, for one, want to shorten the workweek to four days to raise productivity. These ideas are yet to be tested. But if America’s contenders want to beat President Trump next year, they better develop new ideas of their own — or at least reexamine their stalest, oldest European ones. Like, you know, the Europeans are doing.”

As America’s Democratic presidential candidates promote programs borrowed from Europe’s traditional left, Europeans are increasingly pushing back against them.

Following an election last Sunday in Germany’s Thuringia state, members of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party accused the chancellor (in power since 2005) of dragging the party too far leftward, blaming her for the loss to the far-right Alternative for Germany party. A top contender for the Christian Democratic leadership, Friedrich Merz, called on Frau Merkel to resign now, rather than wait for 2021, when she plans to retire.

In the European Parliament election in May, France’s National Rally party handsomely beat President Macron’s centrist faction. Formerly known as the National Front, the current right-most French party is dominated by Marine Le Pen, whose father and party founder, Jean-Marie, was a Holocaust denier. Now Madame Le Pen’s party concentrates on conservatism and retail politics, and its increasingly seen as a formidable challenger to Monsieur Macron, whose poll numbers, despite a recent uptick, remain low.

In Poland, Hungary and Italy, to name a few, politicians of various right-wing parties are now in power, while anti-leftists, including some ugly and racist ones, are on the rise. Meanwhile, in Canada, another perceived utopia among progressives, a former golden boy, Prime Minister Trudeau, is striving to stay in power after his Liberal party suffered parliamentary seat losses in the October 21 election.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ending-wars/

“”It’s a very complicated war over there,” says Paul. “They’re four or five different countries involved in it. The people who live there know better. We can’t know enough about these problems. And unless you want to put 100,000 troops in there and fight Assad, Russia, Turkey … we ought to rethink whether we should get involved in these wars to begin with.”

Four years ago, the media were talking about a “Libertarian Moment.”

I had high hopes!

Sen. Rand Paul ran for president, promising to “take our country back from special interests.” But his campaign never took off.

He “shouldn’t even be on the stage,” said Donald Trump at a Republican presidential debate.

Paul quit his presidential campaign after doing poorly in Iowa.

In my new video, Paul reflects on that, saying, “Either the people aren’t ready or perhaps the people in the Republican primary aren’t ready.”

But Paul says, “We may be winning the hearts and minds of people who aren’t in Washington.”

Really?

The current deficit is a record $984 billion, and since Trump was elected, federal spending rose half a trillion dollars.

But Paul says progress has been made, in that Trump has introduced some market competition in health care, cut taxes, cut regulations, appointed better judges and promises to get us out of foreign wars. Paul tweeted that Trump is “the first president to understand what is our national interest.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/

“Don’t get me wrong, as I am all in favour of taxing the well-heeled. But soaking the rich, as the Left forever advocates, will see investment stall, capital stock run down, progress go into reverse and poverty increase. Welcome to your socialist paradise: an equality of impoverishment for all.”

Line up any bunch of political lefties anywhere and their key to delivering free stuff is taxing the rich. This applies to all of the Democrat presidential candidates in the USA. In addition to confiscatory income taxes, Pocahontas (aka Elizabeth Warren) wants to impose a wealth tax, in the style of French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.

Apparently, those rich people are selfishly keeping goodies from us ninety-five percenters. This is the grievous money delusion (GMD) which seduces callow minds. It can only be compared to the grievous warming delusion (GWD) which has swept away reason among so many in recent years. It is perhaps no coincidence that those particularly susceptible to GMD succumb to GWD.

It is also disappointing that economists, worthy of the name, in other words, excluding sad lefties like Paul Krugman and his ilk, hardly ever explain the position clearly. They generally go to the point that high taxes undermine incentive. They do to an extent. But only to an extent.

There was an instructive survey of Ford Motor company workers in the late Sixties I think it was. They were asked whether they thought their fellow workers would likely work less overtime if taxes were increased. Something like ninety percent said yes. They were then asked whether they personally would work less overtime. Something like ninety percent said no.

The real argument against confiscatory taxes is not to do with incentive, it is to do with the with the driving force of successful capitalist economies. That driving force is capital investment fuelled by saving and augmented by invention. Saving some of what is produced and using it to sustain life while things are built like, factories and machines, which help make more goodies, cheaper goodies, better goodies and new (previously unthought of) goodies.

https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-brennan/

FROM THE ULTRA LEFT MAGAZINE “THE NATION”

The Justice Department’s inquiry into the origins of Russiagate has now expanded into a criminal matter, raising alarm bells among intelligence officials, Democratic leaders, and media pundits who promoted the theory of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

There is no doubt that Donald Trump would like to exact political revenge on those behind the Russia probe, and it is fair to be skeptical of his Department of Justice. But it would be a mistake to reflexively dismiss the inquiry, which is led by US Attorney John Durham and overseen by Attorney General William Barr. The public deserves an accounting of what occurred. And given the intrusion of the nation’s intelligence’s services into domestic politics, a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on the left, vulnerable to similar investigations.

For more than two years, the FBI investigated a presidential campaign and then sitting president as a conspirator or agent of Russia. The story engulfed US media and political energy and had major consequences on domestic US politics and foreign relations. The probe found not only no Trump-Russia conspiracy, but barely even any contact between the two sides suspected of conspiring. Carrying a Russian passport (as the Russians in the Trump Tower meeting did), or falsely suggesting in an e-mail that you are acting at the Kremlin’s behest (as the British music publicist who arranged that meeting did), does not mean that you are actually working with the Russian government. Mueller, ultimately, showed no evidence that they—or any other suspected Kremlin intermediary—were Kremlin intermediaries. This helps explain why, as the report found, Kremlin officials trying to reach out to the Trump campaign after its election victory “appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”

https://jewishjournal.com/analysis/306066/three-jews-two-links-one-lesson/

On Nov. 10, Norman Podhoretz, the legendary editor of Commentary magazine, will receive the Herzl Prize from philanthropic and educational institution Tikvah. It is the latest in a long line of honors for Podhoretz, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom President George W. Bush awarded him in 2004. Now age 89, Podhoretz is the author of a dozen path-breaking books and countless essays on politics, literature, culture and religion.

Bush said: “Podhoretz ranks among the most prominent American editors of the 20th century. … Never a man to tailor his opinions to please others, [he] has always written and spoken with directness and honesty. Sometimes speaking the truth has carried a cost. Yet, over the years, he has only gained in stature among his fellow writers and thinkers. …[We] pay tribute to this fierce intellectual man and his fine writing and his great love for our country.”

Podhoretz takes his place among the Jews who, over the past century, have contributed immeasurably to both Zionism and Americanism, including Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis during World War I and renowned writer Ben Hecht during World War II.

When we examine their three lives together, we see they have two fascinating links, which provide a single, important lesson for our time. 

Brandeis was the first Jewish justice, whom Woodrow Wilson nominated in 1916. It was a controversial nomination because for the first time in its history, the Senate held hearings on a nominee, which lasted four months. Brandeis was confirmed only after a contentious process involving 43 witnesses. He served 23 years. 

He was born in Kentucky in 1856 to Jewish immigrants from Prague, who gave him no Jewish education. He never attended services, never observed Jewish holidays, and never made significant contributions to Jewish organizations before he turned 57. Then, in 1914, he agreed to head the American Zionist movement.

“Brandeis invigorated the American Zionist movement by articulating the connection between Zionism and American ideals.”

It was a time when most American Jews considered Zionism an unrealistic, possibly unpatriotic, European ideology. Out of 1.5 million Jews in the United States at the time, only 15,000 were members of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). As Tikvah senior director Jonathan Silver has written, Americans “saw themselves as having fled oppression, crossed the wilderness, and arrived in a new promised land.” American Jews considered themselves not in exile, but at home in a new place.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/28/baghdadi-

Though not yet manifest, the unexpected, astounding killing of ISIS “commander of the faithful” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over the weekend by Delta Force, with Rangers and other Army support, supercedes the 2011 takeout of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in its long-term magnitude.

In essence, ISIS is a sensationalist, media-savvy metastasis of Bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which conducted the 2001 attacks, but ISIS’ anti-American terrorism is of a different brand. Brookings Institution Mideast analyst Daniel Byman testified to Congress that “the primary target of the Islamic State has [unlike al-Qaida] not been the United States, but rather ‘apostate’ regimes in the Arab world” – but try telling the families of beheaded Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig that America, and its values and position in the world, are not squarely in ISIS’ sights.

As Radio France Internationale journalist David Thomson described it in 2017, “For ISIS supporters, Baghdadi is doing something concrete, controls territory, defies the entire world, unlike the old scholars of al-Qaida who appear behind the times.” As the trove of materials accompanying Baghdadi, retrieved by U.S. forces, are perused in the weeks ahead, the public will know in detail the importance of his leadership of the dislodged terrorist caliphate, and will learn of planned ISIS plots.

The carrying out of President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate Baghdadi will be paired with another big net minus for Democrats: U.S. attorney for Connecticut John Durham’s Russian election influence probe shifting into a criminal investigation. While some speculate that the criminal dimension may be in regard to peripheral matters, the speed with which Durham has come to this point, having only begun his work less than six months ago, strongly suggests otherwise. As does Democrats immediately – and groundlessly – accusing Attorney General William Barr of meddling in Durham’s probe. Highly unlikely since Durham has a Boy Scout-like reputation of integrity and thoroughness.

If I had to distill American strategic defeat and loss of purpose in the Middle East into a single image, it would be the Iraqi-Jordanian border post in June 2014. As I wrote in The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

Eleven years ago, a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, on little more than a whim, I rented a beat-up Nissan and, without telling the car-hire bloke, drove from Amman through the eastern Jordanian desert, across the Iraqi border, and into the Sunni Triangle. I could not easily make the same journey today, but for a brief period in the spring of 2003 we were ‘the strong horse’ and even a dainty little media gelding such as myself was accorded a measure of respect by the natives. The frontier is a line in the sand drawn by a British colonial civil servant and on either side it’s empty country. From the Trebil border post, you have to drive through ninety miles of nothing to get to Iraq’s westernmost town, Rutba – in saner times an old refueling stop for Imperial Airways flights from Britain to India. Fewer of Her Majesty’s subjects swing by these days. I had a bite to eat at a café whose patron had a trilby pushed back on his head Sinatra-style and was very pleased to see me. (Rutba was the first stop on a motoring tour that took me through Ramadi and Fallujah and up to Tikrit and various other towns.)

In those days, the Iraqi side of the Trebil border was manned by US troops. So an ‘immigration official’ from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment glanced at my Canadian passport, and said, ‘Welcome to Free Iraq.” We exchanged a few pleasantries, and he waved me through. A lot less cumbersome than landing at JFK. I remember there was a banner with a big oval hole in it, where I assumed Saddam’s face had once been. And as I drove away I remember wondering what that hole would be filled with.

Well, now we know. That same border post today is manned by head-hacking jihadists from the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’.