RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/would-you-like-some-strife-with-your-meal-1527807733

My hometown became a foodie paradise starting a decade or so ago, when I lived in California. At first it was beautiful. With each visit home, I noticed new food carts selling everything from Korean tacos and Thai-Hainanese chicken and rice to Texas-style pulled pork. Later came breweries, exotic doughnut shops and haute-hipster ice-cream parlors.

But these days politics is ruining the scene. One of the first victims, Sally Krantz, in 2016 opened a bistro, Saffron Colonial, featuring historical recipes from the British Empire. Furious social-justice warriors accused her of racism and glorifying colonialism. Mobs gathered outside the establishment, and detractors swamped its Yelp page with negative reviews and insults. Suppliers boycotted her. Eventually Ms. Krantz gave in and changed the name to British Overseas Restaurant Corporation.

Blood was in the water. In the spring of 2017, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly were accused of “stealing” Mexican culture—by selling burritos from a truck. They received death threats and shut down their business and their social-media presence.

Then an anonymous Google spreadsheet began circulating warning about restaurants that served ethnic cuisine: “These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC”—people of color—“to run successful businesses of their own . . . by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/29/obama-says-didnt-scandals/

At a Las Vegas tech conference last week, former president Barack Obama told an audience that his presidency had been scandal-free. “I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked, according to Newsweek. We hear this talking point quite often from Democrats.

Now, perhaps the president didn’t experience the fallout from a scandal, which is very different from never having been involved in one. For this confusion, Obama can thank the political media.

Why does it matter now? For one thing, historical revisionism shouldn’t go unchallenged. Democrats are running to retake power, and many of them were participants or accomplices in numerous corrosive scandals that have been airbrushed.

The other reason, of course, is that when we start to juxtapose the mythically idyllic Obama presidency with the tumultuous reign of Trump, we’re reminded that many journalists largely abdicated their responsibilities for eight years — which has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in today.

It’s not about Obama’s brazen lying about Obamacare or even recurrent abuse of power. I’m talking about supposed non-scandals like “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.

The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons. An off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.

Despite the incompetence, absurdity, recklessness, and fatalities of the program, the entire affair never really received scandal-like attention. No one lost his job. There will almost certainly be a tweet from Trump this week that political media will afford more attention than a story in which an American border agent was murdered with the gun Obama’s ATF provided.

Not even when the administration refused to cooperate with congressional investigators was it handled like a scandal. Not even when a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the gun-walking operation was it treated as a scandal. Not even when we learned that Obama attorney general Eric Holder misled Congress about when he was made aware of the program did it rise to the importance of a Trump tweet. Holder became the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats — and Obama still never paid a political price.

As it was, the Obama administration persistently ignored courts and oversight, breaking norms because it was allowed to do so. The president was articulate, friendly, and progressive. He might have executed an American citizen without a trial (not a scandal!), but his contempt for the process could be forgiven.

Flash back to September 2016, and let’s revisit a rumor that circulated widely in certain circles. It has been recounted so many times that it serves almost as a bedtime story for the Right. The scene: it’s the first joint appearance between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—the Commander-in-Chief Forum sponsored by NBC—and it has just finished. Backstage, the now-disgraced moderator Matt Lauer is waiting to shake hands with the former first lady— but, instead, he is confronted by a furious Clinton and her entourage.

What faux pas had he committed? Apparently, Lauer had asked Clinton a question about her illegal email server that she was not prepared to answer, a question that she had not pre-approved.

According to the NBC insider who witnessed the scene, Clinton “proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and threw it at the face of her assistant and the screaming started.” She then lost her temper and began shouting at her staff. “You f —ing idiots, you were supposed to have this thing set up for me and you’ve screwed it up! If that f—ing bastard wins we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished…and if I lose it’s all on you ass—-s for screwing this up.”

This is a fantastic scene, one which would be hard to believe, if Clinton had not spent most of 2017 whining about her loss in assorted public forums, and blaming everyone but herself. The American public now understands that profanity-laced displays of manic rage are perfectly in keeping with the character of the former first lady so aptly nicknamed “Lady Macbeth” by a portion of the press. What makes this tirade so interesting, of course, is the dire prophecy that a Trump presidency would see Hillary and her gang not just humiliated or defeated but hanging by nooses—that is, presumably executed for treason.

Our Dumb Intelligence Community
Fast forward to 2018, and the scene now makes perfect sense. A growing segment of the American public now knows that the country’s intelligence community was spying on the Trump campaign, and then attempting to sabotage the Trump Administration with false allegations of “Russian collusion.” That’s #Spygate in a sentence.

Hey, what’s up. Long time no talk.https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/30/dear-ex-friends-in-the-resistance/

I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.

And you lost your fucking minds.

I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.

The weirdness started on social media late on Election Night, as it became clear Hillary was going to lose. A few of you actually admitted that you were cradling your sleeping children, weeping, wondering what to tell your kindergartner the next morning about Trump’s victory. It continued over the next several days. Some of you seriously expressed fear about modern-day concentration camps. Despite living a privileged lifestyle, you were suddenly a casualty of the white patriarchy. Your daughters were future victims; your sons were predators-in-waiting. You threatened to leave Facebook because you could no longer enjoy the family photos or vacation posts from people who, once friends, became Literal Hitlers to you on November 8 because they voted for Donald Trump.

I admit I was a little hurt at first. The attacks against us Trump voters were so personal and so vicious that I did not think it could be sustained. I thought maybe you would regain your sanity after some turkey and egg nog.

But you did not. You got worse. And I went from sad to angry to where I am today: Amused.

As the whole charade you have been suckered into over the last 18 months starts to fall apart—that Trump would not survive his presidency; he would be betrayed by his own staff, family, and/or political party; he would destroy the Republican Party; he would be declared mentally ill and removed from office; he would be handcuffed and dragged out of the White House by Robert Mueller for “colluding” with Russia—let me remind you what complete fools you have made of yourselves. Not to mention how you’ve been fooled by the media, the Democratic Party, and your new heroes on the NeverTrump Right.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/clapper-disinformation-campaign-1527636194?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, gained a reputation among liberals as a liar for covering up the existence of secret data-collection programs.

Since becoming a private citizen, he has claimed that President Trump is a Russian “asset” and that Vladimir Putin is his “case officer,” then when pressed said he was speaking “figuratively.”

His latest assertion, in a book and interviews, that Mr. Putin elected Mr. Trump is based on non-reasoning that effectively puts defenders of U.S. democracy in a position of having to prove a negative. “It just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election,” he told PBS.

Mr. Clapper not only exaggerates Russia’s efforts, he crucially overlooks the fact that it’s the net effect that matters. Allegations and insinuations of Russian meddling clearly cost Mr. Trump some sizeable number of votes. Hillary Clinton made good use of this mallet, as would be clearer now if she had also made good use of her other assets to contest those states where the election would actually be decided.

Mr. Clapper misleads you (and possibly himself) by appealing to the hindsight fallacy: Because Mr. Trump’s victory was unexpected, Russia must have caused it. But why does he want you to believe that he believes what he can’t possibly know?

There’s been much talk about origins. Let’s understand how all this really began. James Comey knew it was unrealistic that Mrs. Clinton would be prosecuted for email mishandling but also knew it was the Obama Justice Department’s decision to make, own and defend. Why did he insert himself?

The first answer is that he expected Mrs. Clinton to win—and likely believed it was necessary that she win. Secondly he had a pretext for violating the normal and proper protocol for criminal investigations. He did so by turning it into a counterintelligence matter, seizing on a Democratic email supposedly in Russian hands that dubiously referred to a compromising conversation of Attorney General Loretta Lynch regarding the Hillary investigation.

Put aside whether this information really necessitated his intervention. (It didn’t. This is the great non sequitur of the Comey story.) Now adopted, Russia became the rationale for actions that should trouble Americans simply on account of their foolishness.

Think about it: The FBI’s original intervention in the Hillary matter was premised on apparent false information from the Russians. Its actions against the Trump campaign flowed from an implausible, unsupported document attributed to Russian sources and paid for by Mr. Trump’s political opponents. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bret Baier, in his April interview with Jim Comey on Fox News, asked him if he had seen John Brennan and Jim Clapper together since his firing. “No, no,” Comey replied at first, then said, “Actually, I had dinner with the two of them together with our spouses.” Baier asked him if they discussed “Trump cases” on the triple date. “No, we did not,” he answered.

Add that to Comey’s voluminous record of whoppers. The idea that the three stooges of Spygate, whose red-hot antipathy for Trump is nothing if not all-consuming, went out to dinner without discussing the investigation of him strains all credulity. No doubt one of their anxieties at the dinner was: When will the American public find out about the spy we sent to infiltrate the Trump campaign’s ranks?

Beneath all of their flailing attacks on Congressman Devin Nunes lay the fear that his oversight would kick loose scandalous nuggets buried within their probe: a FISA warrant cribbed from Hillary’s campaign smears, national security letters based on insanely thin justifications, an embarrassing reliance on sketchy foreign intelligence (which consisted largely of Russian disinformation and re-circulated nonsense from Hillary’s hired gun, Christopher Steele), and an infiltration plot involving a swampy old CIA asset.

The three stooges have yet to utter the name of Stefan Halper, the spy at the center of the Obama administration’s farcical plot. Rubbing his bald pate as usual, Clapper claimed total ignorance of Halper. He apparently was at the children’s table at Brennan’s interagency gatherings. “I didn’t know about this informant,” Clapper said.

Of course, his I-know-nothing routine didn’t stop him from serving as an authority on the knowledge levels of others: “No one in the White House knew. Certainly the president didn’t know.” But amidst all this defensiveness, Clapper worked up a sweat defending the spying as a “good thing,” which raises the obvious question: If it was all so normal and praiseworthy, why not tell Obama?

Just as Clapper’s denial of FISA warrants on the Trump campaign disintegrated, so too will that one. Sooner or later it will come out that Obama knew damn well that the Trump campaign was under surveillance and signed off on it. How could he not have? After all, we’ve been told repeatedly that spying on the Trump campaign was a national security matter of unspeakable gravity. How could such a matter be withheld from the person most responsible for national security?

www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-russia-investigation-obama-administra Where was its concern about Russia during its eight years in power? As I argued in my weekend column, it is hard to imagine a more idle question than whether the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. Of course it did. If you want to argue the point, imagine what the professors, pundits, and […]

https://pjmedia.com/video/5-most-inspiring-lines-from-president-trumps-memorial-day-speech-at-arlington-cemetery/

On Monday, President Donald Trump gave brief remarks at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who made the ultimate sacrifice. In a sign of true humility, he clapped perhaps more than he spoke, and his remarks extolled the fortitude and nobility of America’s fallen heroes.

Here are five of the most moving lines Trump delivered at Arlington on Memorial Day. The video follows below.
1. “A love more deep than most will ever know.”

Trump began his Memorial Day remarks extolling the love America’s fallen heroes showed for their country.

“Theirs was a love more deep and more pure than most will ever know,” he declared. “It was a love that willed them up mountains, through deserts, across oceans and into enemy camps, and unknown dangers. They marched into hell so that America could know the blessings of peace. They died so that freedom could live.”
2. “We cannot imagine…”

Trump directly addressed the families who lost loved ones in the service of American freedom.

“Most importantly we’re joined today by the families of American heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice,” the president said. “We cannot imagine the depth of emotion that this day brings each year: the grief renewed, the memories relived, those last beautiful moments together cherished and always remembered. And you also feel that incredible pride, a pride shared by one really and truly grateful nation.”

“To every parent who weeps for a child, to every child who mourns for a parent, and to every husband or wife whose heart has been torn in two, today we ask God to comfort your pain, to ease your sorrow, and to wipe away your tears,” Trump said. “This is a very special day, and today our whole country thanks you, embraces you, and pledges to you we will never forget our heroes.”
3. Hope Stubenhofer.

During his remarks, President Trump addressed Hope Stubenhofer, whose father — U.S. Army Captain Mark Stubenhofer — died while fighting in Iraq in December 2004, mere months after her birth.

“Although she never got the chance to meet her great father, she can feel his love wrapped around her every single day,” the president said. “And when Patty [Mark’s widow] puts her children to bed and kisses them goodnight, she can see Mark’s legacy beaming back at her through their bright and glowing eyes.”
4. Christian Jacobs.

President Trump then addressed 7-year-old Christian Jacobs, whose father — Marine Sergeant Christopher Jacobs — died in a training accident in 2011 when Christian was only 8 months old.

Trump movingly told the story of Christian visiting the White House in a Marine Corps uniform. “He wanted to look good, he told me, as a tribute to his father,” the president recalled.

“Christian, I want you to know that even though your father has left this world, he’s left it for the next, but he’s not gone. He’ll never be gone,” the president declared. “Your dad’s love, courage, and strength live in you, Christian. And as you grow bigger and stronger just like him, so too, does your father’s incredible legacy.”
5. Why we remember America’s heroes.

The president concluded his speech with another moving declaration. Of the fallen, he declared, “They fought and bled and died so that America would remain forever safe and strong and free. Each of the markers on that field, each of the names engraved in stone, teach us what it means to be loyal, and faithful and proud and brave and righteous and true.”

“That is why we always will remember, because here on this soil, on these grounds, beneath those fields, lies the true source of American greatness, of American glory, and of American freedom,” Trump said. “As long as we are blessed with patriots such as these, we shall remain forever one people, one family, and one nation under God.”

In the current time of tragic polarization, these Memorial Day remarks at Arlington National Cemetery are more important than ever. Watch Trump’s tribute to America’s fallen heroes below.

General Douglas MacArthur said of the American soldiers: “However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.”

In his farewell speech to West Point on May 12, 1962 he gives an eloquent tribute to those who choose to serve and defend America:

“Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.

But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.

In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.

From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory’s eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.

I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light.

And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.

Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory – always victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.”

On the eve of Memorial Day, here’s a piece we get a lot of requests for. It was first written for The Chicago Sun-Times and other papers in 2004, and is anthologized in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn. A lot of the controversies mentioned below – Abu Ghraib, etc – are forgotten, and others – Guantanamo Bay – became mysteriously less controversial after, oh, late January 2009. Time passes, and moss and lichen creep across ancient grave stones. But the men beneath them are forever young:

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays “Anchors Aweigh,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America” and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens’ “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)” (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town’s selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War’s great poetry. There’s a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.

Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day – a day for going to the cemetery and “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.

I wish we still did that. Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.