RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oooh….defenders of the Democrat party have their knickers in a knot….what to do about Ilhan Omar and anti-Semitic tantrums of other members of Congress. Their scoldings and her apology are perfunctory. I suggest they look for the locus of this resurgence of the ancient hatred of Jews which has seeped into the corridors of power in America.

Listen to the sermons in mosques throughout the nation. Read the New York Times. Check out the academics who teach “Mid-East Studies” in all the Universities in every single state in America. Their lectures are defined by MESA (Middle East Studies Association) which toes the line of Edward Said to schools which receive serious funding from the Arab Emirates.

And to legitimate their bias, there are myriad Jewish groups of “social justice warriors” who focus their hatred on Israel.

It is easy to target Ilhan, but difficult and not comfy to confront the disease and its promulgators. I call it the silence of the ostriches….rsk

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-on-the-green-new-deal-11549931107?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Democrats rolled out their Green New Deal last week, and by all means let’s have a national debate and then a vote in Congress—as soon as possible. Here in one package is what the political left really means when it says Americans need to do something urgently about climate change, so let’s see who has the courage of those convictions.

Thanks to the resolution introduced last week by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, there’s already official language. While it’s nonbinding, the 14 pages give a clear sense of direction and magnitude in calling for a “10-year national mobilization” to exorcise carbon from the U.S. economy.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/10/

Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

True Lies
Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.

Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.

Trump legitimately will be able to say of a 2020 opponent, “Candidate X wants over the next 10 years to junk your present car, to scrap your combine, to stop your jet travel, to ban your cruise ship, to take away your lawn mower and snow blower, to outlaw your snowmobiles and jet skis, to shut down the fracking industry, the heavy equipment manufacturing sector (I doubt there will be a replacement battery-powered Cat D-11), the pipeline and rail business, and to make every homeowner an indebted remodeler, refitting his house while for all his green trouble and expense he still will be paying more for solar and wind-generated electricity.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her “: Jesus Book of John 8:7

In the rubric above, Jesus is not denying the value of criticism; he is noting that mob-like attacks on an accused should be tempered by the realization we all have faults. He was not condoning the woman but urging the scribes and the Pharisees to maintain perspective. It was a subject covered by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. What we are witnessing today in Virginia is similar to the attack on Judge Kavanaugh. Each accuser became more vitriolic, while claiming the high moral ground. If youth were more exposed to the Bible and classical literature, understanding and forgiveness would be more forthcoming.

This is written not to excuse or take lightly the mocking of others, based on race, religion, gender or for any reason, but to place the Governor’s silly behavior of thirty-five years ago within context of its time and to highlight the hypocrisy of those who follow one another, in lemming-like fashion, down the path of self-righteous indignation. This is not written with the understanding we have achieved color-blind goals, though we have made strides. It is written in the belief that people change, and that we should not be judged solely on our behavior when young, especially when that past is more than a generation ago.

Governor Northram is accused of having posed for a photograph in 1984, which he admitted doing, dressed either as a black-face or as a member of the KKK. He didn’t recall which. The next day he denied being in the photograph, though he did admit to having dressed once as Michael Jackson. While his denial was disturbing – I have a problem with those who deliberately lie – the fact that he performed college-boy antics when he was a student was neither unusual nor – necessarily – racist. (There is, however, irony in the fact that the weapon of racism he used to defeat Ed Gillespie in 2017 is the one being used against him today.)

https://newswithviews.com/suicidal-jews/

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak.

But how to explain group suicide? Wikipedia lists numerous cases, starting in 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

● In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
● In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
● In 1978, 918 Americans––including 276 children––died of cyanide poisoning in the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.
● In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale–Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, while others––particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader”––simply followed orders.

In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one-thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/the-return-of-ancient

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers’ first loyalty would be to “Rome,” not the U.S.

Anti-Semitism grew even more deeply rooted, marked by Ivy League quotas on Jewish applicants and exclusionary clauses against Jews in clubs and neighborhoods. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans.

In the late 19th century, with the influx of Japanese and Chinese immigrants arose the “yellow peril” scare, a racist distrust of supposedly workaholic automatons and unassimilable immigrants whose first loyalty was to their close-knit Asian communities and homelands, not the U.S.

Most of these injustices grew from both original prejudices (as evidenced by slavery) and fears of demographic change. An original population that was mostly British, Protestant and white gradually was augmented by people who were not northern European, often Catholic and increasingly non-white.

The stereotyped hatreds were battled by the melting-pot forces of assimilation, integration and intermarriage. Civil rights legislation and broad education programs gradually convinced the country to judge all Americans on the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins or their religious beliefs. And over the last half-century, the effort to end institutional bias against African-Americans largely succeeded.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272764/moral-idiocy-our-times-bruce-thornton

One of the foundational myths of modernity holds that the progress of scientific knowledge and technology has been accompanied by moral progress. As wealth and knowledge increase, the old impediments to moral improvement such as poverty, religious superstition, and ignorance are being swept away, resulting in a kinder, gentler, and more pacific human nature.

Last week we were presented with evidence that this argument is woefully mistaken. In New York a bill was passed that removed restrictions on late-term abortions, allowing infants viable outside the womb to be killed “at any time” to protect the mother’s life or “health.” Worse yet, this regression into primitive custom was met with celebratory cheers and a standing ovation by the “lawmakers” who had approved it. In Virginia a similar law was proposed but rejected. It had been defended by Del. Kathy Tran and Gov. Ralph Northam (pictured above). They admitted that a baby could be killed even after the mother went into labor, or after delivery. Tran, by the way, on the same day as she introduced the bill to liberalize late-term abortions, also introduced a bill to protect gypsy moths and cankerworms.

In other words, infanticide, once a practice of savage and barbaric cultures like cannibalism, incest, and human sacrifice, has now been legalized by the culture that boasts of its moral progress and superiority. But this legislation is not just a return to ancient brutality, but a species of moral idiocy much worse than the savagery of the past.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13680/democracies-trouble

It is apparent that, over time, Jewish American Democrats will find themselves the voters and donors of a party that will initially seek to marginalize them, then ostracize them, and finally, demonize them.

With the last election cycle putting Islamists, who are openly hostile to Jews, in the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party has jettisoned even the pretense of repudiating their anti-Semites.

This transformation will be brought about by a group of new leaders who will have the means effectively to rebrand their emerging power base, either implicitly or explicitly, as the Neo-Islamic Democratic Party, thereby asserting a dominance that will make today’s political landscape unrecognizable.

It is more than painful, as anti-Semitic libels are whitewashed by the media or risk becoming part of the Congressional Record, to watch the American Jewish community being played by the political party that many have called “home.”

Are democracies in trouble?

As someone outside the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, it is concerning to see how many countries in the West are being transformed. In Europe, free speech continues to be seriously eroded, churches are desecrated, and religious Europeans murdered.

There are signs that the same transformation is beginning in the United States, as well.

https://spectator.us/donald-trump-state-union-greatness/

Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.”’ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning. ‘With my superior intelligence,’ Wodehouse gloated, I have outgeneraled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names.’

So, mutatis very much mutandis, did the president do tonight. SOTU 2019 bears a marked similarity to SOTU 2018. There was the same reaching across the aisle, the effort, as I put it last year, to restore the first person plural in American civic discourse, a ‘We’ that Democrats and Republicans and Independents could alike affirm.

Last year, the president spoke of putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in pursuing the goal of making a better America.

This year, he echoed that, noting that the choice before us was the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution, on the one hand, and cooperation, compromise, and the common good, on the other. ‘Victory,’ he said ‘is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country.’ Sounds good to me. Nancy, Chuck, what do you think?

Everything that makes America great is challenged- our educational standards, our national language and culture, our porous borders and homeland security, the ability to debate without rancor and insult, and there is a pernicious hatred of capitalism and wealth without which there would be no support for all our scientific, philanthropic, and cultural institutions.

President Trump is no great orator, but he is a straight shooter and that is why I continue to support him. I liked his speech, and it pleased me that our national leader is confronting the serious issues that plague our nation. I admire his “cool” in spite of the smirks of Pelosi and Schumer and the street theater Democrat damsels in white. His rousing promise that America will never succumb to Socialism gave me hope.

The reply by sore loser Stacy Abrams was pure boilerplate Trump bashing with hyperbole and nothing to recommend. rsk