RUTHFULLY YOURS

PITTSBURGH — As the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill began to bury its dead Tuesday from the massacre in the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday, President Trump paid his respects, in a visit few had requested and many opposed. His motorcade was greeted by a demonstration of hundreds marchers calling to one another to “turn your back” on the president.

A line stretched far down the block for the funeral of Dr. David Rabinowitz, one of the 11 killed by a gunman whom police have identified as a 46-year-old man, whose social media posts indicate he was enraged by what he perceived as Jewish support for immigration. Rabinowitz, 77, was known for his compassionate treatment of AIDS victims. The service for brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal also drew a large crowd a mile and a half away. There was a heavy police presence outside the Jewish Community Center where Rabinowitz’s service was held, with officers from the Pittsburgh Police Department and nearby Carnegie Mellon University surrounding the facility.

Trump, who spent three and a half hours in the city, including a visit to a pop-up memorial to the victims and to wounded police officers recovering in the hospital, had been asked by Mayor Bill Peduto to delay the trip until all the services were concluded. City councilor Erika Strassburger, who lives near the Tree of Life and drives past the building every day, said her constituents had contacted her to oppose the trip.

“There are many, many constituents who’ve reached out to me by phone and email concerned that the president’s visit today will add to the trauma of the community and many community members,” said Strassburger early Tuesday afternoon before Trump’s arrival. “I won’t say that necessarily speaks for every single person in my district, that’s just what I’ve heard.”Strassburger’s constituents weren’t the only ones against Trump’s visit. Local officials — Peduto, county executive Rich Fitzgerald, Gov. Tom Wolf, and Sen. Bob Casey and Sen. Pat Toomey (all Democrats save for Toomey) — declined to join. Trump also failed to convince congressional leadership from either party to take the trip. Trump spoke with family members of at least one victim, according to Dr. Donald Yealy, but others reportedly rebuffed offers from the White House to meet the president, who has been blamed by commentators for inspiring violence with his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his demonization of “globalists,” a word that has been historically associated with anti-Semitism. His remarks shortly after the shooting that the gunman could have been deterred by an armed guard were also controversial. (Four police officers were injured in the apprehension of the shooter.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/pittsburgh_shows_two_faces_after_synagogue_shooting.html

No, I haven’t attended the vigils, the interfaith prayer services, the gatherings, or other feel-good manifestations of hand-holding kumbaya after the recent carnage in Pittsburgh. Or those of other slaughters in black churches, schools, workplaces, outdoor concerts, or wherever. It is not because I’m not appalled at the loss of innocent life there. I am. But the attendees leave, feeling they did something, resume their lives…’til the next time. For some, it is a form of healing.

But the gooey statements of mindless clichés that condemn the evil, preaching a form of artificial unity while condemning the inanimate weapon or mental illness for the horrendous deed, evading the issue of the hatred prevalent in some individuals and communities alienates me. Also, the leeching groups and individuals who latch on to the incident to promote their agenda – gun control, dislike of a political figure – desecrate the victims and diminishes the evil.

For example, on Monday, Pittsburgh’s mayor Bill Peduto (D) spoke movingly about the consequences of hatred.

Peduto took the microphone, speaking passionately about the Pittsburgh community and combating hatred.

“We come together tonight to mourn, and it’s the right thing to do. We lost eleven of our neighbors, and we’re here to mourn the way that they were taken from us. We’re here to mourn the fact that we live in a society where something like this could even exist. We’re here to mourn the attack upon our Jewish community. We’re here to be supporters. We’re here to make sure that those victims’ families have what Pittsburghers do, the understanding that we are all here for them and we will help them through this horror that they are living. We are here to recognize the officers and the two members of the congregation who are still suffering, and to let them and their families know, we’re here for you because we’re Pittsburghers and that’s what we do. We care and take care of those in need and we show it as a community of one.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/megyn-kelly-halloween-costumes-social-media-controversy/

Modern-day Robespierres send counterrevolutionaries to the virtual chopping block. They should recall his fate.

Celebrities, politicians, and almost anyone of influence and wealth are always an incorrect or insensitive word away from the contemporary electronic guillotine. Regardless of the circumstances of their dilemmas, the beheaded rarely win sympathy from the mob. Coliseum-like roars of approval greet their abrupt change of fortune from their past exalted status.

So, for example, perhaps few feel sorry for anchor Megyn Kelly, recently all but fired by NBC and now walking away with most of her $69 million salary package as a severance payout.

Kelly was let go ostensibly for making a sloppy but not malicious morally equivalent comparison between whites at Halloween dressing up in costumes as blacks, and blacks likewise appearing as whites. But she sealed her fate by uttering the historically disparaging word “black face” as some sort of neutral bookend to her use of “white face.” Her fatal crime, then, was insensitive thought and speech and historical ignorance.

For someone so familiar with the rules of our electronic French Revolution and the felonies of speech and thought, Kelly proved surprisingly naïve in a variety of ways.

First, she should have known that there are revolutionary canons surrounding victimization indemnities. And for all her success, she is actually protected by few of them, given that she is fabulously well paid, attractive, still young, white — and at one time conservative and a former Fox News anchor person.

So when Kelly said something historically dense and insensitive, she should have grasped that she, despite being an emancipated coastal female, was immediately (and ratings-wise) expendable, even if expensively expendable.

Had Kelly been unapologetically progressive (especially one deemed vital to the cause), like Elizabeth Warren, who fabricated and profited from an entire minority identity, then she might well have survived the incident. Perhaps had she been a minority, such as Sarah Jeong, and written (rather than spoken off the cuff) far more racially offensive things about whites, she would have kept her job — as did Jeong on the New York Times editorial board after her racist tweets surfaced, such as this, from 2014: “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

https://spectator.us/audacity-obamas-lying/

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think.

Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit.

Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key. If you are going to lie, don’t be shy. Capitalise on the public’s inherent goodwill — and its poor memory.

Another useful gambit: accuse others, preferably in violent terms, of precisely that of which you are yourself guilty.

Watch this: ‘What we have not seen before in our public life is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly, lying. Just making stuff up.’ Nice!

As in, ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’?

‘Nobody In My Administration Got Indicted,’ said the Big O, but consider Eric ‘kick ’em when they’re down’ Holder, the only Attorney General in history to have been held in contempt of Congress. Consider also Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official whose shameless ‘I take the Fifth’ performance before Congress was its own humiliating indictment. Or consider Hillary Clinton herself, whose list of possible felonies would have kept the the DOJ busy for years were it not for her best buddy, the disgraced James Comey, another Obama apparatchik who should be lawyering up.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/maga-bomber-worked-at-west-palm-nightclub-where-stormy-daniels-stripped-in-anti-trump-tour/

Cesar Sayoc, the alleged attempted bomber behind the suspicious packages sent to former president Barack Obama, former first lady Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and others, worked at a strip club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on the day before he was arrested. Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump, stripped at the same club in April — in her “Make America Horny Again” anti-Trump tour.

Ultra Gentlemen’s Club manager Stacey Saccal confirmed to WPTV that Sayoc worked there as recently as Thursday afternoon. He had worked there for two months as a DJ and doorman. Saccal said there had been no complaints about Sayoc from other employees before Sayoc’s arrest Friday.

The other employees were in “shock and disbelief” after learning about the arrest, the manager said. “I never knew that his van was covered in political stickers. I thought it was an ice cream truck,” Saccal said.

In April, porn star Stephanie Clifford — better known by her stage name “Stormy Daniels” — performed at Ultra, inspiring a protest. She stripped days before the president arrived at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, less than five miles west of the club.

Clifford’s performance was part of her “Make America Horny Again” tour, drawing attention to her alleged affair with President Trump.Stormy Daniels drew two types of crowds to Ultra. “They want to see what the big guy put his hands on,” Fabian Uribe, a limousine driver who drove a group to the club and stayed for the show, told the Palm Beach Post in April. “I’ll pay $35 just to see what she looks like. I guess the president didn’t want to come.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/30/the-hodgkinson

On June 14, 2017, James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer during the presidential primaries, opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball practice in northern Virginia. Four people were shot, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

President Trump addressed the shooting saying, “We may have our differences . . . We are strongest when we are unified and when we work for the common good.”

The New York Times noted favorably that “Mr. Trump steered clear of the possible political motivations of the gunman,” and instead issued a “dignified” call for unity.

There was general agreement that when a sociopath with a peripheral involvement in politics commits a violent act, it is unfair to attribute broad political blame.

Last week, someone sent devices that were meant to look like pipe bombs to two former presidents, their first ladies, congressional leaders, and an ex-CIA chief.

Another was sent to actor Robert De Niro, whose movie “Taxi Driver”was cited by a nut as the reason he shot President Reagan in 1981. Nobody ever blamed De Niro for John Hinckley, Jr.

Nevertheless, this time the media, prominent Democrats, De Niro, and some NeverTrump Republicans jumped at the chance to blame Trump. The story was sensationalized beyond the boundaries of readily ascertainable facts.

These were the rare explosive devices displayed at CNN like a party favor, photographed for Twitter, and shipped on America’s crowded highways (or worse, in airplanes) to Quantico, Virginia for further testing.

Which is how bombs are always handled. No, really.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/parents-protest-transgender-treatment-guidelines/

As the American Academy of Pediatrics gets set to host its annual national conference and exhibition in Orlando starting Friday, some parents are protesting the group’s controversial treatment recommendations for LGBT youth, which the conference will promote.

“Our own children have become obsessed with the notion that they need powerful puberty blockers and hormones and bodily surgeries to transition to the opposite sex,” wrote the anonymous group of over 1,100 parents in a press release opposing the treatments. “The American Academy of Pediatrics fully supports this. We do not.”

The AAP released new guidelines last month for parents and teachers of children who say they identify with a gender other than the one they were born with.

In a policy statement entitled “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents,” the group recommended “gender-affirming” health care for minors who do not identify with their birth sex. In some cases, this includes “surgical intervention,” as well as using gonadotrophin-releasing hormones to delay puberty up to age 16 and prevent the development of some sex characteristics, such as breasts or a deeper voice.

In a statement, the group of parents expressed “serious concerns” about the new AAP policies, which they believe will “continue, and possibly worsen, the harm brought to many children by the recent radical changes to treatment guidelines for transgender-identifying youth.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacares-red-state-trap-1540853774

Many readers no doubt take comfort in living thousands of miles away from the tax and spending misadventures of Illinois or Connecticut. But fair warning: One of the worst deals in state spending is coming to a red state near you, and that’s expanding Medicaid to adult men above the poverty line.

With the polls closed and new players in the House and Senate elected, join Paul Gigot, Kimberley Strassel, and Opinion columnists and contributors for our marquee Opinion Live event on Thursday, November 8, in New York. Space is limited, sign up here.

On Nov. 6 four states will consider ballot initiatives on expanding Medicaid: Nebraska, Utah, Idaho and Montana, the last of which would extend an expansion that is set to expire. More than 30 states have expanded the entitlement as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Republican failure to repeal the law ensured that this number would grow, and Governors of both parties are always eager to draw more money from Washington.

Proponents are working to make sure voters don’t know, but this is not about poor mothers and babies, who are covered by traditional Medicaid. Same for the disabled. Expansion extends the benefit to prime-age adults without children up to 138% of the poverty line. The feds pay more than 90% of the cost for the new beneficiaries, versus about half the tab in Nebraska for the truly vulnerable (closer to 70% in Idaho, Montana and Utah).

The perversity of spending more on childless men than pregnant women is reason enough to reject expansion, but there are others. Every state that has expanded Medicaid has blown the budget by spending more money on more people. The cost overruns are more than double on average.

https://www.steynonline.com/8954/finding-wisdom-as-the-branches-shrivel

Yesterday I was in Newton, Massachusetts, to speak to Christians and Jews United for Israel. At the end of the speech I was presented with a shofar, although, after all the yakking, my embouchure was too tuckered to make much noise with it. I’m happy to report that it made it back to New Hampshire in better shape than the didgeridoo did from Perth.

It was, obviously, a somewhat somber gathering, held in the wake of the worst slaughter of Jews in American history – at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. If your grip on scripture is a little wobbly, that name is from Proverbs. In the King James version:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom… She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.

As I said to the audience in Newton, we live in a time when man can find wisdom – almost the entirety of human knowledge – on a pocket-sized device he carries around with him all day. In theory, the tree of life should be spreading its branches broad and embracing over ever more of humanity. Instead, in the Age of Digital Wisdom, too many retreat into dark corners sealed off from any wider enlightenment.

In a world of hermetically sealed ideological ghettos, it is a melancholy fact that Islam, the secular polytechnic left and the subterranean skinhead right all meet at what Laura Rosen Cohen calls Jew-Hate Junction. Granted that, it was still disturbing to see American Jews rationalize mass murder by a fellow American on the following grounds:

And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it.

So the “root cause” was “the embassy move”. That’s Julia Ioffe of GQ magazine. I was asked a question about it in Newton yesterday, and replied that this kind of thinking reminded me of a passage by Anthony Hope – one I quoted in my introduction to The Mark Steyn Club’s serialization of The Prisoner of Zenda, from a more obscure fancy of his on earlier events in Ruritania:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/armed-father-stops-shooter-at-birmingham-mcdonalds/

An armed man stopped a potential mass shooting at a Birmingham, Ala. McDonalds Saturday afternoon.

The unidentified man was leaving the restaurant with his two sons as a masked gunman entered and began firing. The father drew his pistol and returned fire, killing the gunman, but not before he and one of his teenage sons were shot.

The father and son sustained non-life threatening injuries in the shoot out, according to police.

Markus Washington, a McDonald’s employee on duty Saturday, told WBRC-TV that he locked himself in a freezer when the shooting began and was unaware one of his customers had engaged the shooter.

“I’m feeling grateful,” he told the station. “Wrapping my head around it all, I was just wishing someone would come wake me up from this nightmare.”

“All we hear is like different gunfire, so in my mind, I’m imagining everybody is dead. He’s looking for us,” he added.

Washington said he was thankful the man who confronted the gunman was armed.

“He’s my hero. Because I can only imagine how it would’ve went if he wasn’t armed. We might not be here having this interview,” Washington said.