RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dossier-debunking-1535413060

Michael Cohen’s accusations have replaced Russian collusion as Washington’s reason-du-jour to impeach Donald Trump, which may explain why few are reporting that Mr. Cohen has cast further doubt on what was supposedly a key piece of collusion evidence.

Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, confirmed last week that Cohen has never been to Prague in the Czech Republic. This is one of the main claims in the Steele dossier that was commissioned by oppo-research firm Fusion GPS, paid for by the Clinton campaign and used by the FBI in its Trump investigation.

The dossier claims Mr. Cohen traveled to Prague in August or September of 2016 to discuss with Kremlin officials how to make “cash payments” to hackers of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Davis now says that the Prague trip and all other allegations about Mr. Cohen in the dossier are “false.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/video-the-view-hated-mccain-before-they-loved-him/

Oh, what a difference a few years and Donald Trump make when it comes to how the media treats Senator John McCain.

A few months ago I wrote about how one day the left will be nostalgic for Donald Trump. I noted how the left’s perceptions of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney have gone from “literally Hitler” to literally “okay.” With regards to John McCain, I noted how Madonna compared him to Hitler during a concert, how he was likened to Nazis in an episode of The Family Guy, and how Slate called him “worse than Bush.”

The media today now have pretty much only nice things to say about the late Sen. John McCain (who’s record of independence has aligned him with Obama and against the GOP on several issues, and even more importantly, against Trump), but this is in stark contrast to how they treated him when he was Barack Obama’s opponent in 2008.

It was a battle of a moderate war hero and a radical noob. McCain’s status as a war hero was somehow not as important as Obama’s community organizing and candidness about his smoking marijuana. McCain was just a crusty old white guy and Obama was the cool young black candidate, and if you didn’t like him, you were racist.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/8_27_2018_14_36.html

Fake news media’s sudden overwhelming fondness for Republican Senator John McCain is insidiously evil and disgusting. Coldly and calculatingly, the American Left exploits and spins even death to further its mission to undermine President Trump, the Constitution and traditional American principles and values.

The same Democratic hacks and leftist media operatives now praising the late John McCain called him a racist for being white, Republican, and opposing Obama in 2008. As the GOP presidential nominee, McCain’s absurd strategy was to get into the presidential boxing ring with Obama and not lay a glove on him. McCain even instructed his team not to use Obama’s middle name, “Hussein”. Fake news media still mercilessly attacked McCain, even accusing him of “race-baiting”.

These same leftist hypocrites are arrogantly attempting to dictate to Kelli Ward and President Trump how they should respond to McCain’s death.

I attended the final rally of Dr. Kelli Ward’s bus tour in Yuma, Arizona. Ward offered a moment of silence and a prayer for John McCain and his family. I guarantee that Ward’s classy gesture will not be reported by fake news media.

As I stated, the American Left shamefully sees McCain’s death as its latest bludgeon to beat up on conservatives, Republicans, and President Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-supporting-the-nra-against-cuomo-1535397103

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has earned a new opponent in his assault on liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Better late than never, the American Civil Liberties Union is standing up against Mr. Cuomo’s abuse of the National Rifle Association. The happy result could be not just expanded liberty in New York but safer financial institutions as well.

All year long, Mr. Cuomo has been doing whatever he thinks he needs to do to ensure that actress Cynthia Nixon doesn’t threaten his lock on the Democratic nomination and his expected November re-election. On Wednesday, Ms. Nixon and Mr. Cuomo will meet in their one and only debate before September’s Democratic primary. The New York Daily News reports: “Sources close to her and other political observers believe she will come in armed with a number of one-liners aimed at the governor in hopes of getting the notoriously prickly Cuomo off his game.”

Mr. Cuomo has been much worse than prickly to gun owners and those who wish to do business with them. Of course the NRA is the perfect foil for a northeastern politician looking to fend off a challenge from the “progressive” left. But Mr. Cuomo’s infringement of fundamental rights threatens all New Yorkers with progressively greater harm. And it could haunt Empire State citizens long after he leaves office.

In May this column described how Mr. Cuomo was using the state’s financial regulatory agency to intimidate insurance companies, banks and other firms into turning down business with the NRA. The gun-rights group sued Mr. Cuomo after he ordered the state’s Department of Financial Services to tell the firms it oversees “to review any relationships they may have with the National Rifle Association and other similar organizations. Upon this review, the companies are encouraged to consider whether such ties harm their corporate reputations and jeopardize public safety.”

https://pjmedia.com/video/schweizer-exposes-more-joe-biden-corruption-its-going-to-be-a-central-issue-in-2020/

Rumors swirl that former Vice President Joe Biden will be a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Extremely early polls find strong support for him in his party. But investigative journalist and bestselling author Peter Schweizer has unearthed Biden’s history of corruption, and that will prove a major issue in the upcoming election.

“This is, I think, going to be a central issue” for 2020, Schweizer, best known for uncovering Hillary Clinton’s corruption but also the author of the new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” told Fox News’ Steve Hilton.

Schweizer’s book came out in March, but since then new evidence of the Biden family corruption has come to light. Schweizer told Hilton about a bank account unearthed in a New York conviction against Devon Hunter, a friend of the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.

“A bank account that Hunter Biden drew a lot of money from and that a lot of foreign entities put a lot of money into,” the author noted. “Just to give you an idea, over a 14-month period, from 2014 through early 2016, while Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, a Ukrainian company called Burisma — it’s controlled by a very corrupt oligarch — sends three million dollars into this account.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/27/americas-crisis-i

Last week brought to the fore a serious problem now threatening to undermine the very foundations of America’s constitutional republic: we no longer have equal application of justice under the law. The rule of law has become trifurcated, with a different application of the law depending upon one’s position in the political hierarchy.

First, there’s one application of the law for members of the powerful elite who have the right political connections. Here, the law is more a series of suggestions that might or might not be followed with almost no legal consequences for non-compliance.

Example A, of course, is Hillary Clinton. Many people have gone to jail for doing what she did, including members of our armed forces. Yet she paid no consequences for violating laws on the use of classified information on her unsecured and illegal private server. She played games, likely for personal gain, with our national security. Yet she and her enablers and co-conspirators like her aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin are apparently above the law, even escaping consequences for lying to federal agents.

There is also the case of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). Her erstwhile Pakistani IT staff, who also worked for dozens of Democratic members of the House, had a history of highly questionable behavior, with some even suggesting that they potentially were running a spy ring inside of Congress, accessing computers and uploading sensitive information to the cloud to be accessed by foreign powers. Not only did federal prosecutors refuse to pursue anything regarding those allegations, but just this week, as Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are having the book and the kitchen sink thrown at them over bank fraud, one of these staffers, Irwan Awan, got a slap on the wrist for a charge of bank fraud to which he pled guilty, will have no fines, and will serve no jail time. It seems likely that an investigation of these staffers would have turned up too much dirt on Democratic members of Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271153/trying-bring-down-president-scandals-no-one-cares-daniel-greenfield

The left has a problem.

The echo chamber and message discipline has never been this coordinated outside the USSR. The enlistment of elements of the Obama police state on the surveillance and prosecution side, not to mention the able assistance of the judiciary, has been unprecedented.

We’ve seen abuses like these locally in Wisconsin and Texas, but never nationally.

There’s just one problem. All that adds up to is a bunch of scandals that no one outside the left cares about.

After a week that saw President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman convicted on eight counts of fraud and his former lawyer plead guilty to felony campaign finance charges, the president’s job approval rating remains virtually unchanged, new polling from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal shows.

The polls show that many people have generally accepted the media’s version of events. It just doesn’t really move the dial because no one really cares. The entire Russia story is a bizarre conspiracy theory that no one outside the bubble really believes or cares about.

The media’s ten thousand Mueller pieces to most people come off like their cousin who can’t stop explaining to them that fire can’t melt steel.

Conspiracy theories are deeply compelling to conspiracy theorists. Deeply offensive to their opponents. But boring to most other people.

And then there’s Stormy Daniels. No one cares. And if the economy stays solid, no one is going to support impeaching the President of the United States over something no one is shocked by or cares very much about. The Democrats are about to go where Republicans have gone before.

Trump’s approval ratings reflect general public perceptions of the economy. Every hysterical media story has had a very little impact, whether it’s border kiddies or the Russia conspiracy theories.

How do you bring down a president with a scandal no one cares about?

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.