RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/02/dressing-for-the-role-zelensky-polonius-and-the-theater-of-politics/

I believe that most students, when first reading Hamlet, are inclined to regard Polonius as a sententious fool, present mostly for comic relief.

Sententious he may be. But it strikes me that most of his advice is wise and to the point.

Consider, to take one example, his famous speech to his son Laertes as the young man prepares to sail for France.

Is there a single item among Polonius’s “few precepts” that rings false?

I think that the speech, though pitched a bit high rhetorically, is full of good advice, from the bits at the beginning about holding one’s tongue to the concluding “to thine own self be true” admonition at the end.

Thinking about Volodymyr Zelensky’s performance in the Oval Office on Friday, it occurred to me that the Ukrainian president might profit by emulating certain of Polonius’s strictures. I am not thinking of Dane’s advice that one should “Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.” Nor am I thinking of Polonius’s sage advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Both, to be sure, are sound prescriptions that the President of Ukraine might practice to his advantage.

But no: what impressed me as I digested the theater of the Zelensky Oval Office outing was something apparently more trivial. It revolved around what Polonius said about clothes, especially his observation that “the apparel oft proclaims the man.” Before the fireworks really started, at about minute 40 of the 50-minute Oval Office press conference when Zelensky and J.D. Vance got into it, someone asked why the President of Ukraine was not wearing a suit.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/trump-2-good-bad-ugly/

The 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is a man with a plan. His predecessor, the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was not. Trump 45 portrayed himself throughout his first campaign as the embodiment of the electorate’s rage. That was effective in getting him elected and may have had the virtue of being true—but the role of rage-embodier provided little guidance when it came to the day-to-day task of being president. How were you to embody rage while at the same time repealing Obamacare, for example?

Trump 45 had no road map and no agenda. He had a vibe, and his first administration was an improvisation. Now, anyone who’s done (or watched) improv knows that moments of inspired brilliance can arise from a few disparate observations mashed together in an entirely new and unexpected way. But those unfortunate performers and audiences also know those indelible moments are usually outnumbered by the ones that go on too long, or are embarrassingly off-key, or just don’t work. The greatest improv of Trump 45 was the Abraham Accords, and a remarkable accomplishment they were. But then there was the bad improv, most notably the inconstant policy pronouncements and nightly briefings on the pandemic in 2020, which were so uncertain and discomfiting that they brought Trump 45 to its end.

Trump 47 ran for president for two years after the 2022 midterms, and the improviser was no more. His was a tight campaign and it had an overarching through line. The first, and most obvious, was that his successor had done a bad job and was so cognitively impaired, he wasn’t even really the president. That was the classic “binary choice” approach that every candidate running against a sitting president has to deploy: Do you want more of him or do you want to try me instead?

But it was more than that, and what we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump campaign is evidence. What Trump did, in every speech and every rally, was vow to take on and destroy two forces imperiling America’s present and condemning it to a dark future. The first was wokeness. The second was the weaponization of the law and the culture as a means of imposing wokeness on America. From the minute Trump took the oath of office on January 20, his determination to fulfill this vow—which unites even those parts of the right that remain skeptical or worse of Trump himself—has released a kind of primal political energy that has hit Washington with the force of one of those 2,000-pound bombs Joe Biden refused to send to Israel.

As I write, Trump has been president for three weeks. He has promulgated executive orders banning biological males from girls’ sports and recognizing two and only two genders. Other executive orders ended the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in government and extended the ban to institutions that receive federal funding. He has set loose the world’s richest man and most brilliant executive to root out waste in government, with no regard for prior political niceties—or niceties at all. He has targeted foreign aid, which collectively constitute the least popular doings of the federal government. He has sent illegal migrants who have committed criminal acts to Guantanamo. He has suspended government grants. He has moved American troops to the Southern border. He has threatened tariffs, then temporarily suspended them.

These are just the things he’s done that have popped into my head as I have been writing these sentences.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/02/28/well-zelenskyys-interview-with-bret-baier-was-interesting-n4937441

Just hours after being unceremoniously booted from the White House by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to salvage what was left of his diplomatic credibility in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier. And boy, was it a doozy.

Zelenskyy kicked things off with the expected platitudes, thanking President Trump and the American people for their support throughout Ukraine’s three-year war with Russia. “I was always very thankful from all our people. You helped us a lot from the very beginning… you helped us to survive. We are strategic partners, even in such tough dialogue,” Zelenskyy said—sounding like someone ready to capitulate to Trump to get this deal done.

But the winds changed when Baier pressed him on whether he owed Trump an apology for the Oval Office debacle. Instead of showing an ounce of contrition, Zelenskyy doubled down: “I respect president and I respect American people, and… I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad.”

Not sure you did something bad? Is getting thrown out of the White House after a shouting match with the leader of the free world not a big enough clue? Ironically, Zelenskyy also expressed that some of the issues ought to have been discussed privately—which is exactly what JD Vance said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/video-victor-davis-hanson-on-trump-zelensky-dust-up-at-oval-office/

In this new video, historian and pundit Victor Davis Hanson discusses the Trump-Zelensky dust-up on Friday at the White House, reflecting on how, “usually, in international diplomacy, the client doesn’t dictate to the patron.”

Don’t miss it!

https://www.city-journal.org/article/liberal-democracy-trump-populism-conservatives

The Trump administration is hitting its allies with tariffs, pulling out of international agreements, withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine, pardoning January 6 rioters who attacked police, and going after the Department of Justice. At the precise moment when liberal elites are lamenting their overreach on wokeness and mass immigration, these actions risk discrediting national conservatism across the western world.

Populism, which Trump has embodied, is an important check on what Yascha Mounk has termed undemocratic liberalism. However, national populists must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship to construct a new, mainstream vision of national unity. The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.

As progressivism has triumphed in the culture, its irrational and illiberal strands have come to the fore. This has pushed classical-liberal rationalists to the right, and convinced traditional conservatives to back free speech and Enlightenment truth.

The Right was not always amenable to the idea of evidence-based policy. James Burnham’s conservatism of the early 1960s, for example, still opposed Enlightenment reason and free speech, preferring tradition to planning and accumulated habit to consistent principle. That has changed, with free speech and science’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos now associated with the right. The new marriage is symbolized by Silicon-Valley tech elites throwing their lot in with national-populist conservatives like J. D. Vance.

Liberals have also been stunned into self-reflection by Trump’s convincing comeback. Whatever they think of Trump or the European populist Right, the lesson is clear: institutions must change if they are to regain the trust they have clearly lost.

https://reason.com/2025/02/26/why-do-many-americans-have-a-positive-view-of-socialism/

Socialism is popular!

A Pew study reports that more than a third of American adults view it positively.

How is this possible?

Little has brought more misery—first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, now Venezuela.

One reason young people support socialism is because their social media feeds show videos made by popular but economically illiterate people.

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton has 1.6 million subscribers. My new video shows her telling them: “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93 percent of the time!”

Where does she get 93 percent?

https://thespectator.com/topic/behind-vicious-attacks-elon-musk/

Why are Democrats mounting such a ferocious assault on Elon Musk? Why are mainstream media outlets so eager to go along?

The simplest answers are the best. Musk is the most prominent member of the new administration aside from the president himself. He is Donald Trump’s point man for exposing malfeasance in federal bureaucracies, determining where the money is going and cutting the engorged payroll.

The more Musk and Trump succeed, the worse for Democrats. They created those agencies; their supporters staff them; and those supporters funnel lots of public money to specially favored institutions and projects. When Musk attacks this partisan nexus, he is attacking a major source of Democratic power and influence.

That is what’s really at stake here, beyond cutting the budget. The pickings are easy, and they’re popular. The latest poll shows 60 percent think DoGE is helping and 76 percent support eliminating fraud and waste. (Who, for heaven’s sake, are the 24 percent who don’t support eliminating fraud and waste?)

Why does the mainstream media oppose these popular efforts, marching in lockstep with the Democrats? Because they are Democrats. That’s why 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview of candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear coherent and intelligent. She was neither, a point she continues to prove whenever she speaks. That’s why CBS refused to release the transcript before the election. Hey, what are friends for?

Of course, attacking Musk has its own attractions. He is the richest man in America and the best-known, aside from the president. Pillaring Musk for his wealth allows Democrats to pose as populists, hoping to regain voters they lost to Trump’s MAGA coalition.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/28/should-federal-workers-be-treated-differently-than-private-sector-employees/

In consuming the news, one could easily conclude that, as we said earlier in the week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. The wails and screeching breakdowns over the injustice of federal workers losing their jobs are ear-piercing. They are, we’re told, under attack.

After all, these are no everyday workers toiling for large corporations and small businesses – they’re federal employees who apparently are so indispensable to life as we know it that if they are no longer employed at taxpayers’ expense, America and maybe even western civilization will collapse.

Why else would there be so much fuss, so many tantrums, over a few of them losing their jobs?

We noted earlier that even if 100,000 federal workers lose their jobs, that’s a tiny 4% haircut off of nearly 2.3 million federal workforce. Yet we hear about an angry mob – our term – “getting fired up for the fight,” the birth of “fresh grassroots energy (that) came after a wave of layoffs hit government workers in recent weeks” and grousing about the administration’s “extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions.“

“It really is a witch hunt that is happening regarding our federal workers,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said.

Federal workers have sued to keep their jobs, there have been obligatory protests, and in a letter to department and agency heads, more than 100 Democrats showed their desperation to save the bureaucracy that works for them and not the American people. They bellyached about “Elon Musk’s public threat to dismiss any employees who” don’t respond to his email asking them to explain what they do at “work”; called his “threat” “reckless, cruel, unlawful, and unenforceable”; and demanded “immediate action.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/first-fire-all-the-generals/

The deeper issue with our top generals is that they are the creatures of a system geared toward bureaucratic conformity and a flavorless competence.

President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have outraged the Beltway by dismissing top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown.

Also ousted were the chief of the Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force, with perhaps others on the chopping block.

This is being called an “unprecedented purge” and a step toward the politicization of the military.

At the very least, though, these moves send a message that change is coming to an ossified Pentagon, and if they are followed up with reforms to how we promote and evaluate our generals, they will be a step toward a more effective and — to use one of Hegseth’s favorite words — lethal military.

Worries about the politicization of the military are rich after years of the civilian leadership pushing DEI on the ranks and insisting that climate change is a national-security threat. Here comes Secretary Hegseth saying that the military needs to be about “its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” and he’s the dangerous ideologue?

General Brown is an honorable man, but he’s the one who used his position as a political soapbox.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Brown released a video that began, “As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, and a senior leader in our Air Force, and an African American, many of you may be wondering what I’m thinking about the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd.”