RUTHFULLY YOURS

He was a patriot, a patrician, a World War 2 hero, a capable diplomat, and a lucky man to whom too much is attributed. The Cold War ended because of President Reagan’s tough talk and policy on the “evil empire” and President Bush adroitly navigated the formalities.

While a candidate for the 1980 primaries he ridiculed Ronald Reagan’s economic policies by referring to them as “voodoo economics.” Inexplicably, Ronald Reagan chose his vitriolic and less than conservative opponent as his Vice President- thus paving the way for his election as President. When elected he appointed the odious James Baker as his Secretary of State. Baker was a harsh critic of Israel and an obsequious admirer of the Arabs, particularly the Saudis.

Furthermore the first President Bush broke his first campaign promise…”read my lips….no new taxes….” for which he lost re-election.

He was the second American President whose son also became President. However he was no John Adams and his son was no John Quincy Adams.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opinion/antisemitism-europe-j

This is a good column marred by a specious claim : “The biggest threat is on the far right. This is the anti-Semitism of “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville, Va., and the killer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who ranted against globalists and the “kike infestation.” It is the anti-Semitism of Representative Steve King of Iowa and of alt-right Reddit boards and some of Donald Trump’s supporters.”

“Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.

For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.

Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.

Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)

Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/is-there-

President Trump’s challenges are not really his economic policies and foreign affairs agendas. For the most part, they are supported by the American people and are resulting in prosperity at home and security abroad.

The economy continues to deliver near-record-low unemployment, wage gains, strong growth and unmatched energy production.

No nation can remain sovereign and secure with insecure borders. There are few ways to stop massive illegal immigration other than building a wall, insisting on employer sanctions and recalibrating legal immigration to be measured, diverse and meritocratic.

For all the hysteria over Trump’s foreign policy, many observers quietly concede that the U.S. is far tougher on Vladimir Putin and Russia now than Obama was in 2016: stronger sanctions, more help to the Ukrainians and greater NATO expenditures.

America had reached a point of no return with China. It either had to renegotiate its enormous trade imbalances and confront regional Chinese aggressions or simply acquiesce to China’s agenda of predetermined global superiority. Yet there were few levers other than temporary trade tariffs to force China to trade equitably and to follow global commercial norms.

The status quo that Trump inherited with North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles was an unsustainable proposition. So was an Iran deal that would have guaranteed eventual Iranian nuclear capability.

Yet Trump cannot consistently reach 50 percent approval in the polls. And, like most presidents, he experienced a rebuke in the House during his first midterm elections.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/outsiders-trump-shane-save-the-day-but-are-ostracized/

The gunslinging outsider saved the vulnerable farmers, but they didn’t love him for it.

In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen have the money and the gun-toting cowboys.

Shane enters the mess but decides to settle down, incognito, with a farm family, shed his past as a hired killer, and begin leading a settled and honest frontier life.

Almost immediately, however, he senses his tragic predicament. The West is not yet so civilized. The farmers, the future of civilization, hardly possess the gun-fighting ability to survive against the ruthless cattlemen and their hired guns.

So a reformed Shane is insidiously brought into the fray, as he figures out how to aid his new hosts while, at least at first, playing by their rules of civilized behavior.

Shane ultimately accepts that his second chance life is not sustainable. He learns that his newfound friends, the sodbusters, lack the skills to survive against Wilson, the cattlemen’s psychopathic hired killer.

Sensing that there’s no solution to his dilemma, Shane finally puts on his killer clothes again, straps on his six-gun, and kills Wilson and the brutal ringleaders of the cattlemen.

NOW WATCH: ‘McConnell Rejects Vote On Bill To Protect Mueller’

Stevens’s movie gives us the familiar paradox of the ostracized outsider and savior in tragic literature and film (The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider . . . ). Although they hesitate to say so, the farmers, if they are to survive, must rely on the very antithesis of their own idealistic commitment to law, order, the settled life, and the way of the future. Shane himself wants to reject gunslinging and stay civilized.

But to do so would mean that Shane’s newfound friends would be killed or driven off by the cattlemen, and their farms returned to the open range — they don’t have the skills to win a range war against cowboys and hired guns. Yet by picking up his gun and going outside the law to take down the evildoers, Shane himself —apparently a former Confederate, Yankee-hating hired gun — loses his recent claim on civilized life.

Even the very farmers whom he will save are uncomfortable with the idea that Shane is willing to shoot someone to save them. Or as one self-righteous farmer puts it when Shane warns the sodbusters about the dangers of the cattlemen’s hired gun, Wilson, “I don’t want no part of gunslinging. Murder’s a better name.” Shane himself appears impatient with gradual change and seems to believe that he alone, not the distant law, can stop the murderous bullies.

The movie ends in classic tragic-hero fashion: Shane rides into cattlemen’s town alone, wins his gunfights, is wounded, and finally rides off alone into the stormy Grand Tetons — content that he rid the farmers’ valley of the hired guns. The means he used to save the sodbusters are precisely those that must have no place in an agrarian world that, thanks to him, is now peaceful. Only a small boy, Joey, will yell out, “Shane! Come back!”

Stevens leaves the exact fate of Shane is doubt — at least sort of. We do not know the true extent of his wounds. And where will he end up on the trail? As a gunfighter, he can never settle down in the turn-of-the-century, civilizing West that no longer has a place for either him or his enemies.

Or, as Shane puts it at the end of the movie to Joey, the son of his farming hosts:

A man has to be what he is. . . . Can’t break the mold. There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.

https://spectator.org/american-nationalism-is-a-good-thing/

Over the last month, President Trump has been assailed by shrieking critics within the U.S. and overseas by French President Macron regarding Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of the concept of American Nationalism. Many NeverTrumpers and neocons are charging that nationalism in America equals white supremacy, a forerunner to Nazism. Nothing is further from the truth. Their hysterical assertion is extremely misguided or a deliberate attempt to once again besmirch Mr. Trump, in the same way as when they blamed him for anti-Semitism and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue despite the fact that the shooter was anti-Trump and the President has been the most pro-Israel and genuinely Jewish-friendly president we have ever witnessed.

Loving America is a good thing inasmuch as America is a good country. As with any institution, including marriage and family, nothing is perfect; but America was founded on highly moral and workable principles and has consistently provided more fair pay, opportunity, and decency than any country in the history of the world. America is the first choice for those around the world seeking a haven or place to find work and dignity, and deserves to be loved. It is a badge of honor to identify with America as a nation.

Loving this nation and its people is highly proper and commendable inasmuch as the American people themselves are a good people. For over a half century I have traveled across America and, precisely because of my yarmulke, I have been greeted with enthusiasm and warmth by strangers due to their sense of spiritual and civic kinship with a member of the Jewish faith, whose biblical Testament had so much to do with the founding of this country and whose ancestral nation of Israel is so deeply ingrained within their outlook. Contrary to what liberal Northeasterners often accuse, I have been treated with utmost respect and sincere friendship by those in the Deep South. News Flash to NeverTrumpers and neocons: America is not Nazi Germany. Being a super-patriot or putting America first, is what we should do.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21815/shattering-the-obama-myth-a-wolf-in-presidential
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Fabian Society, a British think tank founded in London in 1884, is named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus whose battle strategy was one of harassment and attrition rather than violent military battles against the Carthaginian army under general Hannibal.

Fabius had much in common with the great Chinese warrior and strategist Sun Tzu who wrote the extraordinary military treatise The Art of War in the 5th century BC. According to Sun Tzu, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. . . the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Sun Tzu’s foundational premise was, “All warfare is based on deception.” His advice, “Engage people in what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment – that which they cannot anticipate.”
In 2008 Jerry Bower wrote a brilliant article appearing in Forbes titled, “Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist.”

Raised by a Fabian socialist, Bower defines the ideology, “Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect ‘fundamental change’ and ‘social justice’ was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites.”

Fabian socialism is Obama’s world. Bower continues, “He’s [Obama] telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better? Who needs Molotov cocktails when you’ve got Saul Alinsky?”

Barack Obama was sincere when he promised to fundamentally transform America. What most Americans did not understand in 2008 was that Obama was promising to bring evolutionary socialism rather than revolutionary socialism to America – the soft sell – revolution without bullets. Obama disguised the radical creed of Fabian socialism in the soft sell of a gifted con man. This is how it works.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/please-screaming-leftoids-louder-protests/
FROM AUSTRALIA—-UPFRONT FROM DOWN UNDER

As a connoisseur of the genre, I’ve established a strict protocol for ranking the quality of left-wing protests. This protocol has evolved through decades of observing leftists marching, shouting, attacking opponents, weeping, waving banners and cheering speeches from people you’d ordinarily find on a housing rental warning list.

Not all leftist protests, you see, are pitched at the same qualitative or creative level. They may all initially appear, before an inexperienced onlooker, to be of equal pointlessness and stupidity. But to an expert, every individual protest fits into a clearly defined and differentiated hierarchy of pointlessness and stupidity.

The next time you witness or read about a left-wing protest, please do not immediately dismiss it as a nonsensical indulgence committed by work-shy whiners whose collective contribution to cultural or civilisational advancement is less than that of a solitary day-old dust mite.

Instead, first consider where that protest qualifies under the rigorous and scientifically-sound Blair Protest Ranking System.

And then dismiss it. Let us begin.

Placed on the very lowest rung are protests that never happen. These are typically proposed during Australian and US federal election campaigns in which a conservative candidate may be victorious, and involve threats to move overseas if the conservative is elected.

Canada and New Zealand are the standard options, but there are others. During the 2016 US election, celebrities Chelsea Handler, Bryan Cranston, Chloe Sevigny, Barry Diller, Lena Dunham, Jon Stewart, Neve Campbell, Samuel L. Jackson, Amy Schumer, Miley Cyrus, Omari Hardwick, Keegan-Michael Key, Eddie Griffin, Ali Wentworth and Cher all vowed to flee if Donald Trump won. Their destinations included Spain, Canada, “another planet” (Jon Stewart), Africa, Italy, Mexico, Sydney and Jupiter (Cher). But then Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton and not one celeb phoned a removalist. What’s the difference between a Trump-hating millionaire leftist and Donald Trump? The President keeps his promises.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/22/an-outrage-meter

There was a daytime television show I remember from my youth called “Queen for a Day.” It had three essential features. Hard luck stories from a handful of women. Loot in the form of kitchen appliances, nights on the town, fashionable clothes, etc. And the central gimmick: the applause meter, through which the studio audience would register its enthusiasm for its favored candidate. The contestant who attracted the loudest response won the title and collected the pelf.

Someone should tweak the applause meter for the internet age, recalibrating it to record the chief entertainment of our day: the serial ginned-up outrage against things that President Trump says.

There is certainly a lot of that going around. And while it is about as sincere as the cataract of sentimentality that greeted the Diane-Arbus-like hard-luck stories on Queen for a Day, it is undeniably intense. A few enterprising souls have made video compilations of the skirling media announcing that now, at last, Donald Trump had reached a “turning point” and would shortly be escorted out of the White House, preferably in shackles, in the wake of the latest “bombshell” revelation.

Those compilations are good fun and remind us of just how ridiculous and unhinged are the president’s more doctrinaire critics. What I want, however, is a real-time Presidential Geiger Counter so that the public can predict just how foolish Rachel Maddow or Jim Acosta, or Anderson Cooper—and let’s not forget Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin—are going to be following some statement made or initiative undertaken by the Trump Administration.

This past week featured at least two promising candidates for the Outrage Meter: first, the back-and-forth between the president and Chief Justice John Roberts about the ruling of Jon S. Tigar, an Obama-appointed judge on the infamously left-leaning Ninth Circuit, that blocked the president’s executive order halting asylum claims at our Southern border, and second, the president’s statement on our relations with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of the Muslim Brotherhood propagandist and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I will be spending the holiday weekend with my children and grandchildren and friends so there will be no postings until Saturday November 26th.

I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. rsk

Two hundred years ago, the Congress of the United States issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation stating that it was “the indispensable duty of all nations” to offer both praise and supplication to God. Above all other nations of the world, America has been especially blessed and should give special thanks. We have bountiful harvests, abundant freedoms, and a strong, compassionate people.

I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom.