RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/19/the_bleeding_wounds_of_our_constitutional_order_139505.html

America’s constitutional order faces mounting threats and too few principled defenders. The threats come from vitriolic partisanship, compounded by declining trust in government and the steady erosion of vital institutions, from churches and media to law enforcement. The warning signs are painfully clear.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, with the power of the purse – just as it is lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are tasked with ratifying or rejecting treaties, and offering “advice and consent” on federal judges and high-level administration appointees. President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency (“which I don’t have to do”) as a pretext to fund his border wall is an affront to our constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.

It is only the latest example. The issue here is not whether the wall is a good idea. It is whether a president can bypass constitutional norms to build it—with the acquiescence of his political party. The same dynamic was at work when President Obama unilaterally decided to change the status of immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. For years, he said he had no constitutional authority to do that. Then, he did it anyway. Obama also used constitutionally evasive tactics to pass the most important U.S. foreign policy pact in decades: the nuclear deal with Iran. In every substantive sense, this was a treaty. It should have been treated like one. Obama refused to acknowledge that because he knew the Senate would never ratify it (since that required a super-majority, and since he never bothered to consult senators as he negotiated the terms). So, he simply called it an agreement, not a treaty, and supine elected officials in the nation’s top legislative body let it pass. They have behaved that way for decades, passing off hard decisions to the White House or telling mid-level bureaucrats to make the rules themselves.

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-farrakhan-wicked-jews-use-me-to-destroy-womens-march/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1550564090&pushcrew_powered=1

Notorious Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, at his movement’s Saviours’ Day conference on Sunday in Chicago, accused the “wicked Jews” of using him to break up the women’s movement. His statement received a standing ovation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/farrakhan-praises-omars-anti-semitic-remarks-shake-up-that-corrupt-house/

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday praised Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D., Minn.) recent endorsement of an anti-Semitic trope and urged the freshman lawmaker not to bow to pressure from critics.

“Ms. Omar from Somalia – she started talking about ‘the Benjamins’ and they are trying to make her apologize. Sweetheart, don’t do that. Pardon me for calling you sweetheart, but you do have a sweet heart. You sure are using it to shake the government up, but you have nothing to apologize for,” Farrakhan said during his annual Saviour’s Day address in Chicago, in comments first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

“Israel and AIPAC pays off senators and congressmen to do their bidding, so you’re not lying. So if you’re not lying, stop laying down. You were sent there by the people to shake up that corrupt House,” he added.

Farrakhan, who has long engaged in anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering, went on to mock Omar’s Democratic allies, who have defended her remarks as the result of inexperience and lack of knowledge regarding the historic plight of the Jewish people.

“‘Oh she’s just young. She just got here. Don’t be so hard on her,’” he said, mocking Omar’s defenders. “My beautiful sisters, you were sent there to shake that House up. Your people voted you in, but God is the overseer.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/18/adam

He helped conceive a hoax so outlandish that only the most gullible, craven, or witless person could believe it.

The attack, as he called it, allegedly was executed by mysterious and politically motivated thugs with the intent to inflict harm. It exploited the political climate of the moment given that the chief goal of the ruse—and of the perpetrator himself—was to sow division in an already-fractured American populace for his own gratification. Nonstop news coverage and social media chatter ensued. The heretofore obscure perpetrator gained instant fame.

Lawmakers, journalists, and celebrities acted as accomplices, allowing themselves to be duped and conferring immediate legitimacy to the event. Public resources were diverted away from more serious matters. Whenever fair-minded observers voiced skepticism about the questionable nature of the circumstances and evidence at hand, they were riddled with insults.

As authorities began to expose the hoax, the mastermind lashed out, blasting his detractors and making incendiary accusations.

The public mostly went along with it because it sounded right or, at least, familiar like the narrative that Donald Trump and his people ultimately are at the center of everything wrong with our country today. And astoundingly, even as his story fell apart and his early supporters tried to distance themselves from the ruse, the hoaxster remained entrenched, beclowning himself and those who aided the scam.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/exposing_socialism.html

Sixty-two years ago, author and ex-communist Howard Fast wrote that he had “only one important task in front of [him] to define this thing, to explain it, to picture this unholy god in his own frightful nakedness; so that if there is another generation in [his] land that must face the agony of [his] generation, they will never see this avenue as a road to any future that man should face without loathing.” His 1957 book titled The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party was Fast’s coming “to grips with the “hollow, rigid, ‘political’ incantations of the movement’s cultural high priests.” It is a book that “explains, in terms of specific instances, the whys and wherefores of total commitment to a false ideal.”

This unholy god was communism, and it is with great alarm and fear that we must, yet again, teach Americans of the evil inherent in socialism which is always the first step to communism. With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hypnotizing impressionable and miseducated millennials we are headed toward a tattered future.

Howard Fast was devoted to communism but eventually realized that it needed to be exposed so that its tenets would wither and die. He wrote that “an idea must be bent over the anvil of truth to see if it can survive some strong blows.” As an important literary figure in the Communist Party, Howard Fast’s defection was a shock. He had spent thirteen years as a devotee to Communism until Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret report” finally revealed the “terror, the fear, the hollow pretenses, the bestiality, [and] the inhumanity that characterized the leadership.”

Khrushchev “exposed the mechanism of terror and the system of arbitrary rule that had dominated the country for thirty years. He deployed dozens of documents and a wealth of detail to reveal the brutal character of the terror. The document catalogued the assassinations, the lawless mass deportations of non-Russian peoples, and the methodical falsification of history written by Stalin himself.” Khrushchev revealed that “Stalin was a bloodthirsty criminal responsible for systematic physical and psychological terror.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22366/coups-cover-ups-and-context
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

After much media hype and online snippets the prime time CBS News interview of Andrew McCabe finally aired last night 2.17.19. It was a well-choreographed editorial hit-piece masquerading as journalism worthy of study by any legitimate journalism school if any still exist.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed McCabe for the show. Pelley handled McCabe with the deference, tenderness, and soulfulness of a dance partner, completely inappropriate for interviewing the disgraced former acting head of the FBI involved in an unprecedented coup attempt against President Donald J. Trump. CBS entertained America with their well-rehearsed dance sequence.

The stage is set for two. Pelley’s gentle voice leads McCabe as they tango around the political dance floor justifying motivations for removing the president. A dip here, a dramatic pause there.

McCabe, dressed in his best red white and blue dance costume takes the lead and reveals that he ordered an investigation into whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI director James Comey. Dancing McCabe’s Tango Walks naturally curve to the left as he claims he initiated the probe to safeguard and document the ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election so they could “not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

Pelley turns and moves his partner in a different direction. McCabe follows for a Reverse Slip Pivot and in a staggering admission that has gone viral on the Internet but being virtually ignored by the mainstream media, McCabe describes how the Justice Department considered enacting the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office.

Britain’s online newspaper The Independent reported on the admission in its stunning 2.15.19 article titled, “Trump 25th amendment: Justice Department considered attempt to remove president after Comey firing, former FBI chief reveals.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-60-minutes-avoid-discussing-why-russia-factored-in-james-comeys-firing/

Trump wanted Comey to state publicly what he had insinuated to the president privately: that Trump was not a suspect.

Andrew McCabe is a good witness and he made a favorable impression, at least on me, in his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley. Pelley and his editors did a great job highlighting McCabe’s down-to-earth likability. Unlike Jim Comey, a career prosecutor and corporate lawyer before he became FBI director, former deputy director McCabe is a career agent; his relation of events smacks of the Bureau’s “just the facts, ma’am” ethos. And McCabe’s account of Trump telling him to ask his wife what it was like to be a “loser” (after she lost a Virginia state senate race) is devastating, precisely because it sounds just like something Trump would say.

That aside, there are problems with McCabe’s story.

First, Pelley failed to ask him the screamingly obvious questions: What about Russia did Trump want included in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo supporting Comey’s dismissal? McCabe obliquely said Trump wanted Rosenstein “to put Russia in” the memo about Comey (I’m quoting from memory). But Pelley never asked what in particular about Russia Trump wanted included. What about Russia was Trump referring to when he spoke — in conversations with NBC News and Russian diplomats — of Russia’s part in Comey’s firing? Pelley highlighted the word “Russia,” but he sidestepped what Trump was concerned about regarding Russia.

The viewer was thus left to conclude, from McCabe’s other comments, that Trump must have fired the FBI director because he was fearful of the Bureau’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the election; because he was concerned that the FBI would find that Russia intended to benefit Trump and would therefore deduce that Trump was complicit.

But that is misleading. We know that what Trump wanted made public was something very specific about Russia, namely, that Comey repeatedly told the president he was not a suspect in the Russia investigation. Trump was frustrated — over time, ballistic — over the fact that Comey was privately telling him that he was not under investigation, yet making statements that would lead the public to believe Trump was suspected of conspiring in Russia’s hacking operations. Trump wanted Comey to state publicly that he was not a suspect; Comey’s refusal to do so made no sense to the president, especially after Comey gratuitously implied, in his stunning March 2017 House testimony, that Trump was a suspect.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jason-chaffetz-fbis-andrew-mccabe-should-be-on-trial-not-a-book-tour

Andrew McCabe lied multiple times to federal investigators.

That was the official finding in February 2018 of a scathing 39-page report by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General. They found McCabe, then Deputy Director of Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) “lacked candor” in answering questions about his authorization of disclosures in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The referral for further action went to the DOJ.

One year later he is publishing a book, being highlighted on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” and walking free after lying at least four times, three of them under oath, to federal authorities investigating his conduct. Trading on the notoriety he gained from his partisan loyalty, he will now have the opportunity to monetize the duplicity that shielded Hillary Clinton from justice.

For a time, McCabe was the acting director of the FBI. He of all people knew the rules, the law, and had a duty and responsiblity to tell the truth.

In stark contrast, the subjects of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations have been shown no such favor. Several are being prosecuted for lying to federal authorities. Much to my surprise, Mueller actually managed to get the DOJ to prosecute someone for lying to Congress – former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. That is a promising development.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-trump-panic-11550508578

The American people have largely taken the disruptive Trump Presidency in stride, going about their lives and expressing their approval or not the constitutional way—at the ballot box. The same can’t be said for many of the country’s panicked elites, as we are learning anew about the Federal Bureau of Investigation as former deputy director Andrew McCabe hawks a new memoir.

Mr. McCabe now says that, after Mr. Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey in May 2017, Mr. McCabe and senior Justice Department officials “discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the President of the United States under the 25th Amendment.” That’s according to Scott Pelley’s account of his interview with Mr. McCabe aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

In the interview, Mr. McCabe says Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein raised the 25th Amendment scenario “and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.” Mr. McCabe says he didn’t contribute much but seems to excuse the conversation because “it was an unbelievably stressful time.”

Mr. McCabe was fired last year for lying to FBI investigators, so it’s hard to know how much to believe. He’s also tried to qualify the interview after excerpts were disclosed, with a spokesperson saying that while Mr. McCabe “participated in a discussion that included a comment by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein regarding the 25th Amendment,” he did not participate in any “extended discussions” about removing Mr. Trump.

Today we honor the memory of our magnificent Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

On November 19, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery. In only ten sentences, 272 words and delivered in two minutes, the speech is a national treasure….rsk

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”