RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271155/john-mccains-failed-second-act-bruce-thornton

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum about no second acts in American life is only partially true. There are second acts, but those that fail to live up to the promise of the first are far more interesting. An assessment of John McCain’s political career suggests that the Senator from Arizona squandered the immense capital of his five and a half years of bravery and integrity while a captive in Viet Nam.

McCain’s earlier career reminds one of George Armstrong Custer, another “maverick” whose reckless audacity won him plaudits during the Civil War, but ended in failure at the Little Big Horn. McCain was an indifferent student at the Naval Academy, and at times a careless pilot. During flight training he dumped a jet in Corpus Christi Bay, and while flying too low in Spain took out some power lines. At this point he seems to have been, like several Kennedys, a typical feckless scion of a storied American family whose elite connections mitigated his questionable behavior.

But McCain redeemed himself with his heroism during his captivity in Viet Nam. Regularly tortured and abused, enduring disease and solitary confinement, he turned down an offer to be released ahead of other captives who had been there longer. He ended his first act as an iconic American hero, tough in the face of brutal treatment, and committed to the very American sense of fair play that eschewed exploiting for his own gain his father’s status as head of the U.S. Pacific Command. Finally released in 1973, McCain was poised, like many other celebrated military veterans in American history, for a political career likely to end in the White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/26/the-ideology-

Statue smashing is back in the news.

One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down “Silent Sam,” a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War.

The bronze figure is portrayed as static, quiet and without ammunition for his gun—and facing northward—apparently a postwar “silent sentinel” impotent, but still defiant.

The Confederate states fought the Civil War to preserve slavery, if not expand it. One can certainly object to the state showcasing an icon that can be seen as inseparable from that evil institution. Yet not all Confederate soldiers thought slavery was their own cause. In North Carolina, about 5 percent of the population, or a quarter of family households, held slaves. The vast majority of the population did not. No doubt some of the non-slaveholding citizenry opposed the idea of indentured servitude. Yet somehow, they squared the circle of fighting for a bad cause by redefining it as protecting their ancestral homeland.

In other words, some, or even many, Confederates, like many German and Japanese soldiers in World War II, found themselves fighting for morally wrong causes they may not have supported but saw little realistic alternative to avoiding service.

Latter-Day Damnatio Memoriae
Yet in today’s frenzied ahistorical climate on campuses, there is only melodrama or rather media-fueled psychodrama of the zealous, but otherwise mostly ignorant. Few grasp the essence of tragedy in bravely fighting for a disreputable cause, sometimes one that is repugnant to one’s own sense of morality.

Nor were all Confederate generals of the same moral caliber or perhaps worthy of like commemoration. For example, General James Longstreet, who did untold damage to the Union army at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chickamauga, nonetheless was a postwar supporter of Reconstruction and used force to protect black citizens. Longstreet fought the war for what he believed were quite different reasons from those of the brilliant tactician, but often cruel General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a prewar slave-trader, and future head of the Ku Klux Klan.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/26/millennials-are-breaking

Millennials have already changed our country. This generation was raised in groups starting in daycare. They are linked constantly via social media. They never experienced the classic freedom of American childhood, playing outside on their own for hours on end, and seem to lack an instinctual feel for freedom. They don’t know how to stand up to bullies. They’ve been shaped by their leftist teachers. They are far more vulnerable than other adults to the uncritical conformity dubbed “hive mind.”

Ominously for our country, young women, gays, and nonwhites have been separated out, and emotionally manipulated to fear and reject their white, heterosexual fellow citizens. Their bigotry against Christians and whites is sanitized and misrepresented as respect for diversity. Obama often boasted that our demographic destiny, as nonwhites approach a majority (already 44 percent among Millennials, the majority of our five-year-olds), would create a permanent one-party progressive rule. Obama’s legacy was to be protected by a vanguard of the young.

Obama’s activist army is still calling the shots for the Democrats, still loudly dominating the public sphere, but they have failed to completely cow Millennials. A narrow majority of white Millennials quietly voted for Romney. It was the minority kids, including other anointed victim groups such as feminists, our growing Muslim population, and LGBTQ voters, who gave us Barack Obama’s second term. These are precisely the kids herded into groups who are rewarded and exploited by identity politics. This situation means that the Democratic Party is far gone from the days of the New Deal Coalition. There’s no going back, no course correction. They march and scream under the false banner of financial inequality and social justice.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/25/john-mccai

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) died of brain cancer today. His family announced on Friday that he would discontinue treatment for the deadly disease he has battled for more than a year. He was 81.

McCain has assumed many titles over the past 50 years, including prisoner-of-war, presidential candidate, political maverick, and senator. His lasting legacy might be his latest role: An ardent foe of President Donald Trump. The two have exchanged barbs for the past few years, and this week will feature many recriminations about what Trump has said about the former senator, and how “pro-Trump” outlets and pundits handle the news of McCain’s death. In many ways, the Trump-McCain battle represents the fault lines of the contemporary Republican Party.

But tonight, most of us are remembering the pain of losing someone we love—particularly a parent—at the hands of a cruel and destructive disease. No one is immune from cancer’s unrelenting, agonizing, and humiliating rampage. When you watch someone you think is invincible succumb to an unyielding physical monster that the smartest people in the world cannot stop, it humbles you in a way that nothing else can. No title and no amount of money can insulate you from the doom prescribed by the most potent forms of cancer.

There will be a time to evaluate John McCain’s record, his impact on the Republican Party, and influence on national politics. But tonight is not the night. Tonight is the night to pray for Cindy McCain and his entire family. Even if you aren’t the praying type, it’s a time to remember your loved ones who have suffered from this horrific disease. And toast the days that you—and those around you—are cancer-free.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/john-mccain-dies-at-81-war-hero-finally-claimed-by-brain-cancer/

On Saturday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) passed away at the age of 81. His family announced on Friday that he had decided not to continue medical treatment for his glioblastoma. A prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years, McCain launched a powerful presidential bid in 2008 and served 31 years in the U.S. Senate.

An aide told the Associated Press that McCain had passed away around 8:30 p.m. EST Saturday.
The Associated Press
✔ @AP

BREAKING: Aide says senator, war hero and GOP presidential candidate John McCain has died.

Long dubbed a “maverick,” McCain often bucked political trends. He tussled with Donald Trump, and ultimately voted against the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. That vote made him a hero among liberals and Democrats, and anathema to many Republicans.

Despite their disagreements in the past, President Donald Trump expressed his “deepest sympathies and respect” to McCain’s family. “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!” Trump tweeted. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-medical-innovation-meets-politics-1535147861

An Iowa teenager last summer found himself conscripted into a national debate over health care. The state’s largest insurer, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, was threatening to pull out of the ObamaCare market. One reason, a Wellmark executive said, was a single patient whose care cost $1 million a month. The young man (never publicly named) has hemophilia, which prevents his blood from clotting. The standard treatment, infusions of the missing clotting factor, is expensive. In severe cases, a patient can require several infusions a day.

What if there were a cure? Researchers are developing therapies that could permanently alter a patient’s genes, allowing his body to produce the clotting element. The early results are promising. Patients would live longer, better lives. And with thousands of hemophilia cases nationwide, the potential savings for insurers—and for Medicaid—are enormous. But when?

Part of the answer depends on the Food and Drug Administration, where hundreds of applications involving gene therapy for various diseases are pending. At the helm is Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who operates without much publicity but may have the most consequential job in Washington given the furious pace of scientific change and his potential for long-term impact. For years Dr. Gottlieb, 46, wrote forcefully, often in these pages, about how to reform the FDA, including by overcoming an “excessive desire for certainty” that delays treatments.

That’s a countercultural sentiment at the FDA, where Dr. Gottlieb, who has also practiced internal medicine, was a deputy commissioner from 2005-07. Now he’s running the agency during a historic time for medical innovation.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/impeachment-for-dummies/

At the very moment the GNP is humming along at 4.1 percent, the S & P is at record highs, and unemployment is at record lows (for blacks and Hispanics too), the infantile buffoons in the Democratic Party and their mainstream media lackeys are calling so loudly and incessantly for the impeachment of the president you’d have to be on the North Col of Everest not to hear them. And even then you’d have to be wearing the most expensive noise-canceling ear muffs extant.

And of course they are screaming equally loudly, “Russia-Russia-Russia” when anyone with an IQ within spitting distance of triple digits knows the real problem for the USA has been China by roughly 400X for the last decade or longer.

If you’re looking for someone to impeach, how about Dianne Feinstein who, we just learned, had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for twenty years, even while she was chair of the Senate Intel Committee? At virtually the same time — 2010-ish, when Obama was president — close to the entire U.S. spy network in China, several dozen people, were apprehended by the Chinese on their soil in an unprecedented intelligence disaster. Only a few survived. Connection? Perhaps the New York Times or the Washington Post will investigate (as if).

Meanwhile, China, until quite recently and, still to a great extent, had the run of the U.S. higher educational system via thousands of exchange students and their Confucius Institutes. These are the same American universities where professors urge the president’s impeachment while promoting the virtues of socialism even though Venezuela, once by far the wealthiest country in Latin America, is imploding at an extraordinary pace with unheard of inflation, banknotes used for toilet paper, because of…. socialism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-cohen-hush-money-president-had-lack-of-criminal-intent/

The prosecutor must establish that Trump understood that his conduct was illegal. The government is unlikely to meet such a demanding burden of proof.

You can be forgiven if you’ve forgotten there even is a Mueller investigation.

Just a week ago, the country was on tenterhooks as the jury in Paul Manafort’s trial headed into the weekend without having reached a verdict. Would they hang? Had Special Counsel Robert Mueller overreached? Did federal judge T. S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia undermine the prosecutors?

Such is the permanent frenzy of the Trump news cycle that, even with Tuesday’s convictions, Manafort and Mueller seem like old news. They’ve been superseded by Michael Cohen’s guilty plea; specifically, by the fallout of Cohen’s having implicated the president in felony campaign-finance offenses during his allocution in Manhattan federal court late Tuesday afternoon — an otherworldly media moment, simultaneous with the jury verdict in Manafort’s trial 200 miles south.

“Implicate” is a loaded word.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/24/nevertrump-turns-to-porn

As Julie Kelly established in these pages last week, when stripped of its Oz-like bluster, Conservative, Inc. is just Bill Kristol behind a curtain pulling levers. The cynical purpose is to create a mirage that scares people into providing tribute to the great and powerful punditocracy.

The “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” protests that followed Kelly’s report that Kristol cribbed off the Steele dossier in July 2016 to conjure Putin’s disembodied head surrounded by fire and smoke were certainly telling, eh?

This week, for the 71st time in Trump’s presidency, the sneering smart people in Washington who are threatened by a popular movement that overruled their veto and put him in office, declared once again that it is “finally over.”

As in the campy serial cliffhanger of yore, they have the hero strapped to a conveyor belt moving slowly toward a buzzsaw. He will not be able to escape his own lawyer’s guilty plea for paying the porn star, they think.

One wonders what comes next in their fantasy. Maybe 62 million Trump voters subscribing to The Weekly Standard to read 4,000-word essays about Montenegro’s crucial but underappreciated role in NATO?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/james-buckley-pioneer-conservative-thought-and-politics/

James L. Buckley, a pioneer in conservative thought and politics, looks back over an eventful life.

In the beautiful landscape of northwestern Connecticut, far from the madding crowd, lives James Lane Buckley, the 95-year-old elder brother of William F. Buckley Jr. and founder of the conservative movement.

That is not a title that political historians often bestow on James. The honor is often reserved for Bill, the tireless apostle behind National Review and Firing Line, whose influence in forming the American Right is incalculable. Yet the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964 won its first electoral victory in 1970, when Jim Buckley was elected U.S. senator from New York on the Conservative ticket in a three-way race. Though the last third-party candidate elected to Congress, he played a vital role in turning the GOP into a party that could elect Ronald Reagan.

His current residence stands in the shadow of Great Elm, the elegant house bought by his father, William F. Buckley Sr., in 1923. It took its name from the largest such tree in Connecticut, which governed the 46-acre estate until it fell victim to Dutch elm disease. When the family moved in, Jim was a few months old, preceded in birth by Aloïse, John, and Priscilla, while Jane, William, Patricia, Reid, Maureen, and Carol were yet to come.