RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-ridiculous-news-part-five/

80-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a former relationship- and sex-advice columnist, just won a huge $83.3 million settlement from Donald Trump in connection with a previous finding that she was “defamed” by Donald Trump.

New York is not a hospitable place for any conservative politician or celebrity, much less one ex-president Donald Trump—as we have seen from prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who both promised voters that they would get Trump if just elected.

But here are some strange facts about the case—with the proviso we have no idea of what exactly happened when both Carroll and Trump consensually and strangely entered into ribald banter in a department store’s lingerie section, then mutually and apparently willfully entered a dressing room, at which point their stories radically diverge (as opposed to somewhat diverged, since Trump at various times said he didn’t recall meeting her at all).

Trump appeared raucously in person in court to turn the civil suit into a referendum on the supposedly coordinated leftwing efforts to damage his presidential candidacy. But he was fighting with a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, and with a New York liberal jury pool, in a suit concerning his denials of a sexual assault of Carroll some 30 years ago. She won an earlier ruling that his meae culpae were excessive and entered the realm of character assassination and therefore was suing for defamation damages. 

Judge Kaplan certainly grew tired of Trump’s editorialization and like most New York jurists probably did not enjoy Trump in his courtroom in the first place. And although a jury earlier did not find Trump guilty of “rape,” Kaplan de facto has stated that it was OK to claim publicly that Trump was nevertheless guilty of rape.Or as the judge put it, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

But if that’s true, Judge Kaplan, why didn’t the jury, on the judge’s prior own instructions, simply convict Trump of rape, which it certainly had the power to do? How can someone not guilty of the definition of rape be guilty of rape?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/02/the-bidenomics-worked-sham-kicks-into-high-gear-for-2024/

Bidenomics boosters in the media and on Wall Street are everywhere to be seen these days, selling the election-year idea that our president’s economic policies have somehow triumphantly raised our economy Phoenix-like from the ashes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A sampling of headlines going back to last summer show the adulation for Bidenomics among our supposedly objective economic cognoscenti (Latin for “know-it-alls”):

“Bidenomics Is Real Economics,” Time Magazine.

“Bidenomics is working,” New York Magazine.

And our over-the-top favorite: “Bidenomics’ critics are being proven wrong. Happy days are here again,” Fortune Magazine.

We could go on, but why bother? Popular pundits, media mavens and left-leaning economists are all selling you a bill of goods.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tracey-jacobson-afghan-allies-iraq-ambassador?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When America was retreating from its 20-year-war in Afghanistan in August 2021, Omar was one of the Afghan allies President Joe Biden promised to rescue. He had performed a perilous task for the U.S. military: identifying and neutralizing roadside mines embedded by the Taliban insurgency. 

Omar was supposed to receive a special immigrant visa, or SIV, which would have been his ticket to a new life in the U.S. now that his old life was in grave danger from the Taliban. 

He never got that SIV. Instead, after being stopped at a checkpoint last February, Taliban thugs dragged him from his home two days later and beat him to a pulp for helping the United States. His family found his unconscious body lying limp on the street. After four surgeries, Omar succumbed to his wounds and died that same month. (The Free Press is withholding Omar’s last name to protect his family) 

Nearly two years after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are 150,000 Afghans like Omar who put their lives at risk to work with the U.S. government, but are still waiting for their SIVs. Though the SIV process was supposed to provide an escape route for our Afghan allies, that process was “chaos incarnate,” said Tom Kasza, the executive director of the 1208 Foundation, which helps former Afghan allies obtain their visas.

And yet the woman in charge of the SIV Taskforce during the fiasco is getting a promotion. Last week, the White House nominated Tracey Jacobson, 59, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The last time Biden talked publicly about Jacobson was on August 14, 2021, the day before Kabul fell to the Taliban. The president said he was putting Jacobson “in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies.” 

America’s ambassador to Iraq is a crucial appointment now that the U.S. is engaged in a regional war with Iran and its proxies. Iran’s militias in Iraq, which draw their salaries from the government budget in Baghdad, have stepped up their attacks since Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. One of those militias, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, claimed credit Sunday for a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three service members and wounded at least 34 more.

https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-disturbing-news-part-four/

When Hatred Is Mainstreamed: The Strange Case of Joy Reid (Continued)

3) Given Reid’s free pass to collectively stereotype groups, mostly all whites in general, why—in an era in which cultural appropriation is a common leftist charge in matters of dress and grooming (do we remember the dreadlocks scandal in which whites were blasted for emulating African-American hairstyles?)—would Reid die her hair white/blond?

Note that hair and race are irrelevant. They only become so, when one sees racial differences as essential to our personas rather than incidental, such as Joy Reid herself.

That is, Reid has a long history of claiming hairstyles represent revolutionary politics. In the past, she claimed she deliberately wears her hair in a way that exudes black authenticity and naturalness. For example, a 2020 Forbes article took note of her MSNBC appearance: “It’s why Reid decided her history making new show was an opportunity to be intentional with her choice of hairstyle. It was indeed a political statement. Actually, her choice was a revolutionary act.” 

Or as Reid put it of her “revolutionary act,” “I think that Black women have come into our own in every aspect, including in insisting that we will be ourselves, including in the way we wear our hair. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to embrace our hair as it is, or how we reimagine it, and it’s an affirmation of our full arrival as citizens and cultural leaders. And yes, our natural hair is a political statement.”

If “our natural hair is a political statement,” what then is now Reid’s assessment of her latest style when she wears whitish blond dyed hair, even as she writes off the entire state of Iowa as overrepresented clueless white people who blindly vote for the evil Donald Trump?

https://victorhanson.com/how-to-ensure-a-big-ugly-war-with-iran/

Iranian-backed militias have attacked American installations and forces in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan some 170 times.

Ostensibly, these terrorist groups claim they are hitting US forces to coerce America into dropping its support of Israel and demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war.

In reality, these satellite terrorists are being directed in a larger effort by Iran to pry the US. out of the Middle East, in the manner of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing.

That way, Iran will be free to fulfill its old dream of becoming a nuclear shield for a new Shiite/Persian terrorist axis from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to the West Bank and Gaza—surrounding Israel and intimidating the Gulf regimes and more moderate states like Jordan and Egypt into concessions.

These Iranian appendages have made a number of unfortunately correct assumptions about America in general and the Biden administration in particular.

One, after the recent serial humiliations of the flight from Afghanistan, the passivity of watching a Chinese spy balloon traverse with impunity the continental United States, the mixed American signals on the eve of the Ukraine war, the troubled Pentagon’s recruitment and leadership lapses, and the destruction of the US southern border, both Iran and its surrogates feel that the United States either cannot or will do much of anything in response to their aggression.

They see the U.S. military short thousands of recruits, its leadership politicized, its munition stocks depleted by arms shipments to Ukraine and Israel, and the massive abandonment of weapons in Kabul.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/31/hows-life-in-obamas-fundamentally-transformed-america-working-out-for-you-so-far/

It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now that we are living in the fast-hardening cement of what Barack Obama promised to wildly cheering crowds on the campaign trail in 2008—”a fundamental transformation of America.”

Anyone who can remember back to the decades before the Obama presidency will recall a country committed to fairness and common sense: judging a person based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; welcoming a person who came lawfully into this country who applied for citizenship through traditionally prescribed means; never giving a second thought about girls’ and women’s sports being reserved only for a person born female and without a speck of steroids, let alone testosterone, in their bodies; expecting that immensely immature men dressed as fat-slob, over-face-painted, faux women would remain hidden inside “special” bars and clubs and not held up as twerking examples to kindergarten children; acknowledging unequivocally that Marxism was a bad idea and not a glorified ideal; realizing that only a tyrant would actually jail their political opponents for simply questioning highly-suspicious presidential election results; and, generally, in a more fair-minded time: no one even considered ever gleefully calling “evil good and good evil.”

This, of course, is but a very short list of the slop that is being shoveled on a daily basis down the throats of ordinary, common-sense Americans. (We will leave it to the reader to shout out a few dozen more.)

All of this slow-boiling of the pot, with the American-citizen frog paddling lethargically within, began with the nomination of Barack Obama.

People so desperately wanted what Obama was peddling, “Hope and Change,” that they inserted into that second word whatever it was their hearts desired most. And certainly the color of the man’s skin was the huge selling point. Sure, the candidate had no track record, and, let’s face it, had he been white, Hillary Clinton would have been the Democrats’ candidate that election season. But the biracial aspect was seen, perhaps even symbolically, as a way of finally unifying this country after so much racial tension throughout the previous decades.

Many conservatives like to push back on the charge that America is “systemically racist” by pointing to the 2008 election. The basis of their argument: “Would a racist nation vote a black man into office?”

However, isn’t it more accurate to say that voting for someone based on their skin color is also racist? Racism goes both ways. That’s why anyone who says that Blacks cannot be racist is making a racist statement.

“It’s not about skin,” a friend once told me, “it’s about sin.”

https://victorhanson.com/trump-has-reason-to-rage-but-needs-to-stay-calm-and-get-even-rather-than-mad/

Donald Trump gave one of his best and most conciliatory speeches of his political career after his win in the recent Iowa primaries—that might explain why the media would not cover it. Later, to answer an ad hoc ambush reporter’s question whether he would hold grudges, he emphatically said he did not.

Yet after his win in New Hampshire, Trump went ballistic at Nikki Haley’s earlier charges that he, rather than Joe Biden, was cognitively challenged, past his prime, and a perennial loser of popular votes.

In response, Trump shed his short-lived Iowa temperance. He went wholehog after Haley’s dress and her affectations and trashed her character. He tweeted that she was a “birdbrain,” and on and on.

For six years, observers have noted the disconnect between Trump’s stellar record of governance, his occasional sense of humor and even self-criticism—and his ad hominem venom that often turns off the 3-7 percent of the electorate in the suburbs who otherwise might vote for him.

Reasonable calls to tone it down by pundits, aides, and friends do not work with Trump, and perhaps for several understandable reasons.

One, Trump is reactive in his “they started it, I finish it” mode. His theory of deterrence is to be disproportionate in retort to eliminate future preemptive attacks. Almost all of Trump’s crudeness was in disproportionate response, sometimes even to minor offenses.

In such a world of Trump deterrence, if you do not relish a crude Trump, then don’t first talk about cutting off his head, blowing him up, stabbing him, shooting him, or lighting him on fire, or don’t spread lies like “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” or that the influence-selling Biden consortium was innocent of shaking down foreign interests for millions of dollars that were routed into the clan’s coffers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/31/economic-shock-2-3-of-voters-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-under-biden-ii-tipp-poll/

Democratic politicians seem befuddled by the general lack of respect for what they believe are the accomplishments of Bidenomics. But they shouldn’t be. Because, despite some rebound in the economy since the COVID shutdown, Americans continue to struggle.

While the U.S. remains a wealthy country compared to others, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they are “living ‘paycheck to paycheck’ these days” in the latest I&I/TIPP Poll, conducted from Jan. 3-5 from among 1,401 registered voters. The poll has a +/-2.6 percentage point margin of error.

This shocking result comes as some on Wall Street and many politicians applaud recent data showing solid growth in the fourth quarter, along with a slowing rate of inflation.

What’s equally surprising is that the public’s concern is bipartisan, with 63% of Democrats, 67% of Republicans, and 62% of independents saying they’re just scraping by each payday.