RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/that_silent_coup_in_the_white_house.html

With reference to the much ballyhooed early September op-ed piece in the New York Times authored by “Anonymous,” which set off iterative bomblets throughout the kingdom of Donald and his closest and supposedly most trusted aides, several points to keep in mind:

With technology available to all, not least to tech-savvy Millennials trolling the current presidency, feigning (perhaps) respect for their CEO, President Donald Trump, it is a simple thing to suss out writers’ frequent usage of standout terms and phrases, such as, of course, the so-called telltale “lodestar.” Even specific grammatical constructs can be programmed and revealed by the same modality.

It’s called forensic linguistics.

A few days ago, TheWeek.com wrote about this in a piece called “The delicate art of using linguistics to identify an anonymous author.” It noted: “There’s the anonymously-authored book Primary Colors, closely paralleling Bill Clinton’s campaign…”

Mike Pence took a lot of the initial suspicion of being the author of the Times piece, but he denied it, and there is no other evidence besides a single word – his common use of “lodestar” – to argue he was involved. That White House chief economics man, Larry Kudlow, has used such words, too, is no guarantee of anything dispositive, either, as it would be highly uncharacteristic of Kudlow to pen such a combative piece against a man he has professed as worthy of our attention and respect. Thus, the frequency of such idiosyncratic terms as “lodestar” is debunked: any high-schooler could have divined that Pence, say, hit that word X number of times. It would be, furthermore, a usage that would deflect adults into a slotted canyon of blame; a Millennial would savor that. An adult over the age of normalcy and thought would not have done that word usage search and then planted that telltale, so-called.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/09/10/bob-woodward-accuracy-issues-watergate-trump/

Bob Woodward’s new book “Fear” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Woodward has a muddy history with a trail of allegations that he embellished the truth or otherwise misled his readers.
Media coverage of Woodward’s book has been largely positive and ignores Woodward’s controversial record.

Longtime journalist Bob Woodward’s best-selling new book, “Fear,” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump and his ability to perform his duties as commander-in-chief.

While senior Trump officials including Secretary of Defense James Mattis have denied quotations attributed to them in the book, media coverage of “Fear” has been largely positive, emphasizing the 75-year-old Woodward’s experience and trustworthiness.

But that coverage has left out part of the story: repeated, credible charges — including from well-respected fellow journalists — that in previous books Woodward embellished the truth, made dubious bombshell claims or was otherwise misleading.

Woodward’s former editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, though publicly complimentary of Woodward, privately doubted some of the more dramatic elements of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate-era bestseller, “All The President’s Men.”

Bradlee and Woodward’s former assistant at the Post, Jeff Himmelman, revealed Bradlee’s nagging doubts in a 2012 biography of the longtime editor.

Bradlee gave Himmelman full access to his files, which revealed that details about Woodward’s relationship with infamous Watergate source “Deep Throat” gnawed at Bradlee years later. Details such as Woodward communicating with Deep Throat by placing a flag in a potted plant on his balcony, or their dozens of shadowy garage meetings.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12987/are-we-remembering-9-11-or-forgetting-it

Instead of being angry at the perpetrators of 9/11, some people are angry at those who waterboarded three (only three) terrorists, including one of the chief planners of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As a result of information he revealed, a plot to crash a plane into the Los Angeles Library Tower was broken up, saving thousands of lives.
The attack of 9/11 was not only an act of war. It was also a horribly costly lesson. Let’s not waste it….This does not mean that we should involve ourselves in every conflict in the Middle East. But if it is, we should use not a “light footprint” but a size-14 boot stomp. Our object should be to encourage our friends and frighten our enemies, not the opposite….
Some argue that the terrorists are trying to goad us into getting involved more deeply, so we should do nothing. These people forget the long series of terrorist attacks that led up to 9/11….In fact, by doing nothing, we are goading the terrorists into escalating.
The purpose of remembering 9/11 is not merely a history lesson. Like remembering the Holocaust, the purpose is never again.

Rick Rescorla, chief of security for Morgan Stanley, safely evacuated all 2,700 employees on 9/11, except for six. Four of the six were himself and his three deputies (two pictured above): Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velasquez, and Godwin Forde. That’s true multiculturalism.

Rick was last seen going back into Tower 2 shortly before its collapse. When he was told he should get out, he replied, “As soon as I make sure everyone else is out.” His body was never recovered, but U.S. troops at Fallujah remembered him well.

Then there is Mike Kehoe, the firefighter who was photographed going up the stairs when most people were going down. From the expression on his face, I would guess that he had doubts about his survival. But he did survive. He got out about 30 seconds before the tower collapsed. But 343 of his fellow firefighters were not so lucky.

And what about Todd Beamer? He was a passenger on United Flight 93. What happened was verified by the telephone supervisor with whom he spoke. They recited the Lord’s Prayer together, and he made her promise to tell his wife and sons he loved them. He then said his timeless words: “God help me. Jesus help me. Are you ready? Let’s roll!”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/11/the-only-subject-

Ben Sasse is a man of contradictions.

The junior senator from Nebraska is a frequent critic of President Trump but Sasse votes with him nearly 87 percent of the time. He laments inaction by Congress on big issues, but can boast of few legislative accomplishments that are his own. Sasse now claims he might leave the Republican Party—a threat he also made before Trump was elected—but he has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Republican donors and interest groups.

He blasts the president’s lack of civility, but he regularly demeans his colleagues, to say nothing of the president. Sasse complains that folks in Washington have no long term plan for the country, but he stumbles when asked for his own specific vision. And the father of three wrote a book chock full of advice about how to raise kids all before his own have even left home. (If Senate work doesn’t work out for him, perhaps he might find a bright future as a parenting blogger?) He has a new book to sell now, which could explain his latest PR stunt.

All of this has—of course—earned him the fawning admiration of establishment conservatives who view Donald Trump with horror and disdain. Sasse’s name has been floated by NeverTrumpers either as a primary or third-party challenge to the president in 2020, a proposition the 48-year-old, two-thirds of a first-term senator does not rebuff. The Ivy Leaguer is a perfect fit for outlier Republicans who sneer at Trump’s working-class base and his crass mannerisms.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271292/remembering-911-age-trump-bruce-bawer

One day in the early stages of the AIDS crisis – so early, in fact, that I don’t think the disease had yet acquired that name – I fell into conversation with a young man at a gay bar in L.A. It turned out that he, like me, was from New York. But whereas I was in L.A. on a trip, he had recently pulled up stakes and moved there. Why? Because, he told me, his friends back east were beginning to get sick and die, and it was having an impact on the “scene.”

I pointed out that the gay population of San Francisco was also hard hit, and that even if the situation was not yet quite as dire in L.A., it would surely catch up soon enough. He admitted as much, but estimated that in L.A. he had another six months during which he could keep leading the freewheeling life he’d enjoyed in the Big Apple. His attitude, in short, hovered somewhere in the dark, uncharted territory between denial and fatalism.

On September 11, 2001, New York – along with Washington, D.C. – was struck by mass death in another form. It shook the world. Mainstream European commentators attributed the terrorist attacks to legitimate Muslim grievances against America, and breezily dismissed suggestions that Europe might soon be struck as well. Sweeping aside Osama bin Laden’s claims, President Bush asserted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which he called a “religion of peace.” He then sent armed forces to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq, on the premise that the people of those countries, if allowed to vote in democratic elections, would choose a democratic path.

It all turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The European savants were shown up by the horrific attacks on Madrid, Beslan, London, and elsewhere. Their perpetrators put the lie to the “religion of peace” rhetoric, repeatedly announcing that they were committing jihad, a core Islamic concept. Some people in the West understood. But the West’s cultural elite turned away. And Western leaders, while sending young men to fight abroad, left the gates wide open at home.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12986/why-did-the-clintons-share-the-stage-with

But the “shoe on the other foot” question remains: would he [Former President William Jefferson Clinton] have acted similarly if it had been [David] Duke rather than [Louis] Farrakhan?
Farrakhan is at least as bigoted as Duke. This is a man who only last year called Jews members of the “Synagogue of Satan” and claimed that Jesus called the Jews “the children of the devil.” Farrakhan is also a homophobe, claiming that “Jews [are] responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men.”
There are not “good people” on the side of anti-Semitism, any more than there are “good people” on the side of white supremacy. There is no place for a double standard when it comes to anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semitism should not get a pass on account of the oppression suffered by so many Black people; neither should “progressive” tolerance of anti-Semitism of the kind shown by Bernie Sanders’ support for Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Semite who heads the British Labour Party and may well become the next prime minister of America’s closest ally.

Imagine President Trump being invited to speak at the funeral of a white singer whom he admired (say Ted Nugent, if he were to pass) and seeing that David Duke was on stage in a place of honor. Imagine the reaction of the media if President Trump actually gave a speech in the presence of David Duke. Well, President Clinton gave a speech in the presence of Louis Farrakhan. (Hillary Clinton was sitting off to the right, but did not speak.)

Why would President Clinton, a good man and a friend of the Jewish people, do this? There are several possible answers:

(1) He was taken by surprise at Farrakhan’s presence and didn’t want to do anything that would disrupt the service. But the “shoe on the other foot” question remains: would he have acted similarly if it had been Duke rather than Farrakhan?
(2) Clinton doesn’t believe that refusing to sit alongside a bigot is the proper response to bigotry. Again the shoe on the other foot question: would he sit alongside Duke?
(3) Clinton doesn’t regard Farrakhan as comparable to Duke. But that is simply wrong: Farrakhan is a blatant anti-Semite with an enormous following.
(4) Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is not as serious a problem as Duke’s white supremacy. But without getting into comparative assessments of bigotry, anti-Semitism is surely a serious and growing problem.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/colin-kaepernick-nike-ad-democrats-midterm-message/

Nike has set a political trap for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections, and the party’s candidates are walking right into it.

The Democrats’ winning midterm campaign message would seem simple enough: Trump is bad and must be opposed. Yet at the moment the party risks being associated with a somewhat less attractive message: The American flag is bad and must be opposed.

Last week, left-wing Democrat Ayanna Pressley ousted long-term incumbent Michael Capuano from the John F. Kennedy/Tip O’Neill House seat in the Democratic primary while praising the NFL anti-flag protests, which her opponent called “wrong.” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says — in Texas! — that there is “nothing more American” than kneeling for the national anthem. The judicious center-left New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes in his daily newsletter that “the anthem is a trap for Democrats.”

That Nike rolled out Colin Kaepernick as its new spokesman not only knocked a couple of billion dollars off the value of the company, it also amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Republican party. The Left and its base of activists, pundits, and (increasingly) woke capitalists simply can’t let this issue go, much less acknowledge that its flag-dissing is conceptually flawed. Demonizing a huge population based on stereotypes derived from the actions of a few of its members is exactly the kind of anti-American impulse that liberals once stood so valiantly against.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/10/maxine_waters_impeachment_impeachment_impeachment_impeachment_im_gonna_get_him.html

The California Congresswoman spoke about impeaching President Trump while accepting an award from the Stonewall Young Democrats on Saturday in Los Angeles.

She said she was upset by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein apologizing to Brett Kavanaugh for the disrespectful protests which interrupted his confirmation hearings, saying: “We don’t ask permission to protest. We protest.”
The crowd seemed to love everything she was saying, cheering and clapping frequently.

“When we understand that we have to make America hear us and see us, and understand that we all have something to say,” Waters said, recalling the time she told supporters to confront Republicans in restaurants, gas stations, and restaurants.

“There are those who said we lacked civility when I got up and talked about the President’s Cabinet, and I said if you see them anywhere, if you see them at a restaurant, if you see them in a department store, even at a gasoline station, just tell them you’re not welcome here or anywhere,” she said to wild cheers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/09/under-trump-jobs-boom-has-finally-reached-blue-collar-workers-will-it-last/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9eec4aebe000

Blue-collar jobs are growing at their fastest rate in more than 30 years, helping fuel a hiring boom in many small towns and rural areas that are strong supporters of President Trump ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Jobs in goods-producing industries — mining, construction and manufacturing — grew 3.3 percent in the year preceding July, the best rate since 1984, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Blue-collar jobs, long a small and shrinking part of the U.S. economy, are now growing at a faster clip than those in the nation’s much larger service economy. Many factors collided to produce the blue-collar boom. Some are linked to short-term boom-and-bust cycles, but others may endure.

The rapid hiring in blue-collar sectors is delivering benefits to areas that turned out heavily for Trump in the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institution, a shift from earlier in this expansion, when large and midsize cities experienced most of the gains.

The biggest drivers of the blue-collar hiring surge are the rebound in oil prices, the need to rebuild after disasters such as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and rising demand generated by a growing economy.

“I could work from sunup to sundown seven days a week,” said Steve Klebenow, 30, who owns and operates Gallatin Valley Welding in Churchill, Mont., a town of fewer than 900 people that had only two roads, one of them dirt, when he was growing up.

As wealthy families from California, Oregon and Washington flood into the area looking for mountain views and a lower cost of living, the region is transforming, and Klebenow is helping to build it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/10/obama_comes_out_of_retirement_with_same_tired_message_138026.html

The Democrat establishment beckoned, and former President Obama appeared.

After months of desperate entreaties, highlighted by a summer New York magazine cover story titled “Barack Obama, Where Are You?,” Obama returned on Friday with a longwinded speech at the University of Illinois. It featured his greatest hits of identity politics, income redistribution, and tax-spend-and-regulate leftism.

Obama tried to rewrite history, claiming that his administration “returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record,” “covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance,” and “cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.”

Reality check: Obama presided over the slowest economic recovery in American history, with the unemployment rate not falling back below 8 percent for good until his second term. While in office, the economy never hit 3 percent annual growth — the first president never to meet that threshold since Herbert Hoover.

Somewhere between most and virtually all of the new insured population came through the Obamacare provision to dramatically expand Medicaid — a deeply flawed program — to able bodied adults well above the poverty line.

Obama doubled the size of the national debt over his time in office. And the only reason why the deficit was cut was because Congressional Republicans valiantly opposed his spendthrift policy proposals. To top it off, he raised taxes, which — by taking money out of the private economy — did the opposite of helping “folks coming up behind.”

Even more galling than his revisionist history is his attempt to take credit for the current economy, which is the hottest in a generation. “When you hear how great the economy’s doing right now,” he protested, “let’s just remember when this recovery started. I mean, I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers, suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle. I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016.”