RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/progressive-meltdown-left-cannot-cope-with-loss-of-power/There’s no better explanation for the current progressive meltdown.

Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged protesters to hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations, or department stores.

Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant, or buffoon. Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.

What is behind the unprecedented furor?

Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, neither is Trump. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States. Trump pledged to do the same and more — but in the exact opposite direction.

The Trump agenda enrages the Left in much the same manner that Obamacare, the Obama tax hikes, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks, and the Iran nuclear deal goaded the Right.

Yet the current progressive meltdown is about more than just political differences. The outrage is mostly about power — or rather, the utter and unexpected loss of it.

In 2009, Obama seemed to usher in a progressive revolution for a generation.

Democrats controlled the House. They had a supermajority in the Senate. Obama had a chance to ensure a liberal majority on the Supreme Court for years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270615/sex-lies-and-deep-state-daniel-greenfield

At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs. Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.

And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.

The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe. They also betrayed the duties of the two men and two women.

The affairs were not private matters. The two illicit sexual relationships were also illicit political arrangements. As the Inspector General’s report noted, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Clinton ally who has since been fired, used Page as his liaison with Strzok to circumvent the chain of command on the investigation. McCabe used Page as his conduit and Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.

BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/guilt_by_inadvertent_association.html
“Should we never cite a wise word from someone who also said things we disagree with – even if it’s sympathizing with a loathsome political movement?”

The propensity to condemn others, usually writers, for what we might call guilt by inadvertent association is a method of abuse or disparagement often used by those who are incapable of intelligent rebuttal. It is a technique favored by the left and its legion of trolls, who like to point out that an author quoted in a conservative argument has dubious affiliations or, analogously, that the founder of a political organization is responsible for some of the suspicious characters who gravitate around his banner.

In my own case, for example, I have been excoriated for citing passages from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who are certainly contestable philosophers, Heidegger in particular. Yet Hannah Arendt, a much beloved political writer among the left and Jewish to boot, was Heidegger’s student and lover and never disavowed him despite his Nazi sympathies. I detest Heidegger and have no truck with his indigestible philosophical tomes, but many of his occasional essays are valuable contributions to modern thought. They should not be readily junked.

More recently, I have been gleefully informed that authors whose insights I have referred to, such as Kerry Bolton and Vilifredo Pareto, among others, were conscripted by fascists. This may be true, but it does not negate the substance of their arguments. Tommy Robinson is another case in point. He is routinely condemned for the outlying circle of mental asteroids – hooligans, Nazi sympathizers – attracted for reasons of their own to his laudable mission protesting the violence and social disruption perpetrated by the U.K.’s growing Muslim community.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/as-trump-builds-the-resistance-shouts-destroy/

“To every thing,” observed the sage of Ecclesiastes, “there is a season…. A time to be born, and a time to die; … A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up,” et cetera. What this estimable observer of human life omitted from his bracing catalogue of oppositions is the fact that one side of these partnerships tends to be much easier to accomplish than the other.

To the eye of experience, this is obvious. How much time, labor, and inherited expertise go into building an automobile, a house, a city, a civilization. How quickly they can be destroyed by disaster or neglect.

Our house on Long Island Sound was built in 1924 as a summer cottage. Over the years, various owners added this and that, until it was a modest suburban home. Over the course of a few hours in October 2012, it was all but destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. It took more than a year, much labor and a lot of money, to put everything back together.

Look at Venezuela. With the world’s largest proven oil reserves, the South American country emerged from military rule in 1959 and became a bastion of prosperity in the Southern hemisphere. Then came the socialist Hugo Chavez in 1999. His policies pushed the country into decline, slowly at first, and then rapidly. Today, under the rule of Chavez’s hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the country is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is running at 40,000 percent, there are widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities, looting and corruption are rampant, people and capital are fleeing the country.

It did not take long to destroy Venezuela. It will take many years, much heartache and suffering, and enormous resources to put it back together.

There is a lesson here for the loud and unseemly American Leftists and their unlikely brethren, the soi-disant “conservative” Never Trumpers, who are trampling on civility, rejecting the processes of democratic governance, and encouraging violence. “There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith observed to a disconsolate Brit during the American Revolution, especially a nation as prosperous and stable as the United States.

But even here there is a ne plus ultra, a threshold of destructiveness beyond which “things fall apart,” as Yeats put in it in The Second Coming, and “the centre cannot hold”: CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/04/trump_the_founders_and_independence_day_137428.html

Independence Day is, or should be, a time to reflect on the great gifts bequeathed to us by the American founders, and to judge ourselves by their standards. How well are we maintaining the country they built for us, and the principles which helped to make it great?

The answer is at once not so well—we have drifted far from the founders’ vision, mostly to our detriment—but also better than we have done in many years. That’s because Donald Trump’s political philosophy is closer to the founders’ than was that of any president since at least Reagan.

This assertion will no doubt occasion some sniggering. But Trump’s approach to politics addresses many of the American founders’ central concerns, in ways they would likely recognize and approve.

For the founders, government has one fundamental purpose: to protect person and property from conquest, violence, theft and other dangers foreign and domestic. The secure enjoyment of life, liberty and property enables the “pursuit of happiness.” Government cannot make us happy, but it can give us the safety we need as the condition for happiness. It does so by securing our rights, which nature grants but leaves to us to enforce, through the establishment of just government, limited in its powers and focused on its core responsibility.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/04/democrats-2018-the-reds-the-

Since Democrats are still in a mood about losing to Donald Trump nearly two years ago, we shouldn’t expect to see them waving Old Glory today. The Women’s March, the March for Science, the Dreamers March, the Travel Ban March, and the Families Belong Together March undoubtedly have these serial protestors worn out; they’ll probably skip the neighborhood Fourth of July parade, too.

With four months until the pivotal midterm elections, Democrats are angrier and more chaotic than they were in the days following the 2016 presidential election. Each Trump tweet or policy announcement sparks a spasm of collective outrage; the Left is so unmoored from rational thought that some folks are actually mad at an octogenarian for deciding to retire from the Supreme Court. Kicking the president’s press secretary and her family out of a restaurant is cheered as a Rosa Parks moment in reverse. Children are used as props to bully lawmakers about gun control, climate change, and immigration.

And everyone has the sads.

The flag is not flying high for Democrats in 2018. Its colors don’t symbolize strength or unity; instead, they represent the party’s calamitous palette of socialism, identity politics, and petulant outbursts:

The Reds: Socialism has long been the recessive gene in the modern Democratic Party’s DNA. The Obama presidency featured plenty of socialist tendencies, from collectivizing health care to expanding federal regulatory powers to spying on political foes. This is why, under Obama’s reign, Democrats lost control of nearly 1,000 seats nationwide.

But rather than reversing its leftward lurch, Democrats are accelerating it. Trump is exposing the anti-capitalist core of the modern-day Democratic Party and even converting one-time defenders of democracy and capitalism on the Right into mini-Che Guevaras, guerilla tactics and all. (Who will ever forget the tender moment when neoconservative Bill Kristol admitted that he just “found his inner socialist”?)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270616/america-america-bruce-bawer

I missed Darkest Hour when it played Norway, and The 15:17 to Paris never made it to my town, so I pre-ordered the DVDs of both films and watched them back-to-back the day they arrived. Both proved to be masterpieces. And thematically they made for a perfect double feature: Joe Wright’s movie about the early days of Winston Churchill’s prime ministership and Clint Eastwood’s picture about the three young Americans who took down a would-be terrorist on a French train in August 2015 are both about the existential threat posed to Western civilization, then and now, by two different varieties of totalitarianism – and about the massive difference that one man (Churchill), or three men (Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos), can make in that struggle.

They’re also about something else, which is relevant to this 242nd anniversary of America’s founding. At the end of Darkest Hour, Churchill addresses the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. Faced with a considerable number of colleagues who – after a period of weeks during which the Nazis have conquered Denmark and almost completed the occupations of France, Norway, and the Low Countries – think that Britain doesn’t stand a chance and should work out a deal with Hitler, Churchill delivers his classic “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, the most celebrated passage of which reads as follows:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender….

Only slightly less famous are the words that immediately follow these, and that form the speech’s conclusion:

…and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270626/independence-day-and-recovery-true-freedom-bruce-thornton

We are celebrating this Independence Day in the midst of a conflict over what freedom really means. Whatever the crisis du jour that dominates the news cycle, whatever the conflicting policies and clashing ideologies, look deep enough and you’ll find the ancient war between those who believe in true freedom and citizen autonomy, and those who have reduced it to just doing what one wants subject to the intrusive power of Big Government guardians.

Start with the origins of today’s holiday, which were the American Colonists’ desire for political freedom and autonomy. The thirteen colonies, their customary rights for self-rule violated by England, took the momentous step of creating an independent state that empowered citizens to debate and decide how they would collectively chart its course and pursue its aims. This political community would be free and sovereign because it would not be subjected to any earthly power beyond the collective consent of the citizens as expressed through laws and political institutions to which politicians could be held accountable.

Yet this idea of freedom was dependent on citizens’ knowing how to use this freedom responsibly and for the proper aims. For freedom is not “doing as one likes,” which is not true freedom, but what the 18th century called license, a selfish indulgence that cares nothing for the good of the state as a whole, but everything for the needs and ambitions of one faction or ideology. This selfishness breeds tyranny and the loss of freedom, for to act on whatever selfish appetites and passions that arise in one, is to enslave the soul to them and subject the self and the political community to their destructive effects. As Russell Kirk wrote, “The worst enemies of enduring freedom for all may be certain folk who demand incessantly more liberty for themselves.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

The birth of a nation like the birth of a child celebrates unity and separation simultaneously. The child is born and exists outside the mother’s body as a separate entity and at the same time becomes a part of an expanded family unit. So it is with countries. When America was born in 1776 she became a separate entity existing outside of Great Britain. America’s Declaration of Independence celebrated the country’s separateness at the same time it established the unity of an extended family of American citizenry.

Most discussions focus on the benefits of unity – few examine the advantages of separateness. Our country is young but our Founding Fathers had centuries of European history to teach them the value of separateness.

In trying to form a more perfect union our Founding Fathers examined the political systems of their day and rejected them all. They said NO to monarchies, NO to totalitarianism, NO to authoritarianism, NO to theocracies, and NO to every form of collectivism that prioritizes the group over the individuals in it.

Separateness from Great Britain, separation of church and state, and the separateness of the individual were essential to American freedom, liberty, and upward mobility. On July 4, 1776 the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence and declared their separateness as the United States of America.

For almost two centuries people came to America in search of religious freedom and the opportunity for upward mobility that was the American dream. Coming to America was a chance to be free of monarchies, theocracies, caste systems, and authoritarian, totalitarian political systems demanding subservience to the state. America was the land of opportunity because it was the land of individualism, the meritocracy, and upward mobility.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-decline-never-seems-to-arrive-1530572850?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=5&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

EXCERPT:

“……And yet somehow, the flag has continued to fly. Why does American power look so fragile and remain so resilient? One reason is that the U.S. emerged just as the pace of human history was accelerating. In the mid-18th century, the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution unleashed ideas and technologies that would transform the world. Modern capitalism exploded into being. The social turmoil, geopolitical instability, and technological change now battering the global system are only the latest stages in a long process whose end we can’t yet see.

The U.S. has stood the challenge better than most. Now in its 230th year, the American political system is one of the world’s oldest. But the revolutionary force of capitalism isn’t finished with us. The social and political changes of the 21st century challenge the institutions that humanity so painstakingly assembled in the second half of the 20th. Across the globe, societies must renew themselves as the information revolution reshapes the way people work, think, interact and engage in politics.

This is doubly hard for the U.S., which must not only reform its own domestic institutions but also act as custodian of a world system under strain from globalization, technological disruption and great-power rebalancing.

As Franklin well knew, there are no guarantees that the American experiment will work. Yet he and his fellow Founders designed a system of government to weather the stress and the strain of revolutionary times. The strength and flexibility of Madisonian federalism have enabled the American system to flourish amid more than two centuries of successive upheavals.

But constitutions, however elegant, can’t breathe life into dead polities. It is the union of sound institutions with a strong national spirit—ordinary Americans’ patriotism, democratic faith and enterprising ambition—that has made America such a force in the world.

Noisy extremists on the political fringes notwithstanding, that spirit still rules in America today. As long as it does, the country will continue to astonish the world with its creativity and its capacity for renewal. For now, at least, we can still answer Francis Scott Key’s anxious question in the affirmative: our flag is still there.