RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/10/no-isnt-moral-equivalence-communist-china-u

No, There Isn’t Moral Equivalence Between Communist China And The U.S.

Just as trade negotiations between China and the United States may be reaching their crescendo, an outspoken ex-conservative has made an assertion about the People’s Republic of China (PRC) likely to warm the hearts of the leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Writing in the Washington Post on his desire for an “unapologetic atheist” to someday ascend to the White House, Max Boot says:

There are too many examples of evil committed in the name of God to assume that people act morally because they are afraid of divine punishment. More likely, people are social animals who develop moral codes so they can live at peace with their neighbors. That’s why almost all societies, whether religious or not, have similar taboos against murder, robbery, rape and other sins.

Most of China’s 1.4 billion people have no religious affiliation, and fewer than 7 percent are monotheists. Is there any reason to believe that China is a less moral place than the United States, where 70.6 percent profess to be Christians? [Emphasis mine]

Boot’s apparent attempt to draw moral equivalence between China and the United States would be news to the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens living in the world’s leading surveillance state—to the extent they are able to read his article behind the Great Firewall, and not one of the 1 to 2 million Uighurs currently imprisoned in “re-education camps” or countless others held captive for challenging the Party line.

It would be news to members of the dissenting Chinese diaspora being tracked down and targeted by the Communist regime at every corner of the Earth. And it would be news to those peoples whose sovereignty is threatened by the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army that serves it—“it” being the Party, not the country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/democratic-party-tolerance-anti-semitism-exposes-intolerance/

An old hatred is finding a new home on the far left, and Democratic leaders have failed to condemn it forthrightly.

Last week, the New York Times was widely criticized after publishing a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon. And while the image was certainly shocking, it isn’t surprising given where we are today. Something has changed; we are living in a scary time in which anti-Semitism is being tolerated. I cannot comprehend why anyone would be anti-Semitic.

The media love to decry the president for everything he says, but they seem to have fallen oddly silent when it comes to the new anti-Semitism on the left. What we saw at the New York Times merely reflects my fear that anti-Semitism is finding a home in America on the far left.

I’m proud to represent Florida, which is home to the third-largest population of Jewish Americans in the country. Unfortunately, we saw anti-Semitism and hate rear its ugly head in Florida last year. I was the first governor in Florida history to make major investments to secure our Jewish day schools after a series of bomb threats. And after the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, I ordered state troopers to increase patrols at religious institutions all across the state.

We shouldn’t have had to do this — but unfortunately, anti-Semitism continues to be a major issue across our country. Just a few weeks ago, we saw the horrible attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California.

In a major departure from the norm, every major Democratic candidate for president refused to go to the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. This is unprecedented. It turns out that Democratic candidates for president were afraid to offend the sensibilities of the far-left anti-Semites among them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/08/progressives-face-a-bleak-post-mueller-landscape/

Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr’s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough evidence to recommend that Trump be indicted for obstruction of justice for the non-crime of collusion.

Progressives, who for 22 months had insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, were stunned. But only for a few hours.

Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice.

But now Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump. In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of misery Winston Churchill (1874-1965) In Parliament 1948

Capitalism is under attack. Democrats are fearful that their comfortable Washington lives may become subject to an investigation now that the Mueller investigation expired without a crime. The best defense, it is said, is a good offense, and that is the strategy being pursued by Democrats. One such attack is a renewed focus on income and wealth disparities – the “inherent vice” of capitalism, as Churchill noted. Doing so justifies their predilection for income redistribution. Inequality has become falsely synonymous with capitalism. Even some on the right have become fearful of defending capitalism. No one denies that income and wealth gaps exist. But, are today’s unusual? Most important, do they interfere with social and economic mobility?

While our two fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution say we are created equal and are provided equality under the law, neither says anything about equality of outcomes. The French, though, did in 1789, and they got a reign of terror, the dictatorship of Napoleon and a restoration of the Bourbons, before, eventually, falling into democracy. The Russian Revolution was supposed to bring equality, but it brought one of the harshest governments to which man has ever been subjected, and the Country remains unfree, with inequality higher than in western democracies. Inequality is the natural state of man.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberals-nod-as-comey-begs-the-question-11557090274

Former FBI director James Comey published an op-ed last week asserting that President Trump has “eaten” Attorney General William Barr’s “soul.” Mr. Comey’s piece is a remarkable exercise in question-begging—a series of bald assertions that assume their own truth.

It begins with this rhetorical question: “How could Mr. Barr . . . start channeling the president in using words like ‘no collusion’ and FBI ‘spying’?” If you don’t already agree that Mr. Barr’s words are outrageous and borderline-criminal, Mr. Comey makes no effort to bring you along. So it goes for another 800 words. The argument of the piece is identical to its premise: that Mr. Trump is a loathsome person and those who work for him—with a few exceptions, including of course Mr. Comey—are made corrupt. Media-savvy savant that he is, Mr. Comey knows that the typical reader of the New York Times, where the piece appeared, requires no persuasion on this point.

In that sense, Mr. Comey’s op-ed nicely captures what ails present-day American liberalism. Its defining characteristic is a labored ignorance of the other side. Liberals frequently neither know nor care to learn what nonliberals think. Their own views predominate in the universities and media; why bother considering lesser ones? Liberals take the other side seriously mainly when it has the bad manners to win an election and hold power.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/02/the-mueller-investigation-is-the-fruit-of-a-poisonous-tree-there-must-be-pardons/

There is an important reason why courts do not admit evidence that stems from corrupt law enforcement or prosecutorial activity—evidence known in law as “the fruit of the poisonous tree.” If corrupt governmental activities lead to convictions, and the threat of such convictions is used to trample upon the rights of free citizens, then those citizens will not, in fact, be free. They will not be citizens at all, in the proper sense of the term. They will, instead, become subjects of tyranny, victims of a government which can work its will without regard to the due process protections provided both by the Constitution and the customs of our law.

These protections are the guarantors of our freedom, and central among them is the bedrock principle in the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” Criminal inquiries should never be rooted in insinuation and gossip, much less politically motivated malice.

Thanks to the reporting of John Solomon, Sara Carter, Julie Kelly, Gregg Jarrett and others, we know that the so-called Steele dossier formed much, if not all, of the basis of the “Trump-Russia collusion” probe. Written by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, the dossier is full of falsehoods about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia. It is nothing more than opposition research, produced at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and circulated by high-ranking officials in President Obama’s intelligence apparatus.

https://www.steynonline.com/9346/the-best-of-all-possible-government-ministries

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai, is the driving force between government reforms aimed at making the United Arab Emirates the “best country in the world” by 2021, which is certainly faster than, say, the US Congress or Mrs May’s cabinet could pull it off.

So last week His Highness launched a new government ministry, with the inspired name of the Ministry of Possibilities. “The word impossible does not exist in our dictionary,” he declared. He could well be right on that – his dictionary’s in Arabic, after all.

The Ministry of Possibilities will have four subsidiary departments, including the Department of Behavioral Rewards (to be headed by Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Saif) and the Department of Anticipatory Services (to be headed by Ohoud bint Khalfan al Roumi, Minister of State for Happiness and Wellbeing). These are ingenious names of government departments for those of us who come from countries with dreary ministries like treasury and foreign affairs.

Obama should have moved Hillary to the Department of Anticipatory Services (run out of the Clinton Foundation) and Justin Trudeau should have punished Jody Wilson-Raybould by moving her from Justice to the Department of Behavioral Rewards.On the other hand, the Ministry of Anticipatory Behavior would make a grand name for Theresa May’s new Internet thought-crimes apparat.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-2-over-in-the-congress-its-the-

If you have read my April 1 “April Fools Day Hoax Roundup” — and maybe even before you had read that piece — it may have started to dawn on you that an absolute majority of what you see in the news media these days is in furtherance of one or another of the current wave of big hoaxes. The hoaxes covered just in that one short piece included the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax, the Climate Change Hoax, the Hate Crime Hoaxes (multiple examples including Jussie Smollett), and the Poverty Hoax.

For today, forget the news media and let’s take a look at the Congress. Do they even talk about anything over there any more that isn’t a hoax? To all appearances, it seems like they just move back and forth between and among one of the hoaxes and another on a kind of “hoax of the day” rotation. Lately the big ones have been the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax and the Climate Change Hoax.

Yesterday it was all “Trump/Russia Collusion,” with Senators grilling William Barr about nothing whatsoever. Today, it is the Climate Change Hoax, as the House has just voted on something called the “Climate Action Now Act.” According to Climate Home News, the bill has passed on a party-line vote of 231-190. The bill had 224 Democratic sponsors, but not a single Republican. (It won’t go anywhere in the Senate, of course.) By its terms, this Act would compel the U.S. to meet its “commitments” under the Paris Climate agreement of 2015.

May 1, 2019 was Holocaust Memorial Day, this year–Yom HaShoah.
I’ve attended most commemorations over the years and thus obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside for remembering the Holocaust.

Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to see to it that “Never Again” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949. Those made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways–at least according to President George W. Bush. I’ve also fought for relative justice for all peoples, Jew and non-Jew alike, with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for over half century now.

This year, however, I did not attend.

In honesty, however, there was another reason, eating away at me for quite some time, for my hesitancy to join once again in this annual public display of sympathy for dead Jews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273610/use-and-abuse-political-accountability-bruce-thornton

In the aftermath of the Mueller investigation, both parties are calling for accountability. Dems believe that despite Mueller’s findings of the president’s innocence of collusion, Donald Trump obstructed justice and must be held to account by impeachment. Republicans are demanding that the federal perpetrators of the Russian “collusion delusion” be made to answer for their violations of the Constitution and the laws limiting their powers.

Beyond the partisan divide, we are witnessing the uses and abuses of one of the fundamental building-blocks of political freedom––the assertion of the citizenry’s right to call out and punish those politicians and public servants who exceed the legal limits placed on a political power that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Like free speech, term limits, and regularly elected or appointed offices, accountability reinforces the central premise of political freedom: that power is not the personal possession of individual men or women, but belongs to the community of citizens as a whole. Accountability checks and deters the innate human tendency to abuse power, and thus to weaken political freedom with tyranny: “That arbitrary power,” as Aristotle defined it, “of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.”

There is no question that accountability is due for the sorry spectacle of the Russian collusion hoax. It was created and nourished by so-called public servants in the FBI and Department of Justice. Despite their responsibility to honor the Constitution and maintain political neutrality in performing their duties, officials like James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Bruce Ohr, Andre McCabe, and other members of the Obama administration abused their professional ethics in order to weaken one party in a presidential election and to help the other whom they preferred. Then after Trump was elected, they worked to cripple his presidency, engineering the appointment of a special counsel who spent two years investigating a charge that relied on flimsy and dishonest predicates easily debunked by information already public.