RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/05/did_you_know_that_president_trump_stood_on_concrete_in_the_hot_sun_and_shook_the_hand_of_every_single_naval_academy_graduate.html

I am a fairly avid consumer of political news, and I watched the live coverage of President Trump’s address to the Naval Academy graduates at their commencement ceremony. (If you happened to miss the inspiring speech, Rick Moran’s coverage of it was excellent. But Rick and I, and probably you, did not hear about the fact that the President of the United States, a 71 year old man, stood in the Maryland sun and heat, wearing a suit jacket, and took the time to shake the hand and thank every single one of the 1,191 graduates. I learned of this via Glenn Reynolds and The Newly Press.

It was not exactly a secret, yet got little play in the media. You can see the entire process, speedy up, in this tweet:
Josh Caplan @joshdcaplan

Awesome video of Pres. Trump shaking hands of Naval Academy graduates for 90 minutes. Here’s every single one in under a minute.
dagny @dukeblu85

71 year old, stood straight backed in the sun on concrete and shook hands for 90 minutes. What an incredible tribute. Thank you President Trump. Meaningful. #MAGA

These new Naval Officers and Marines will remember the gesture for the rest of their lives. I don’t recall President Obama doing anything similar.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/28/the-destiny-of-amer

President Coolidge delivered this speech on Memorial Day, May 30, 2923, in Northhampton, Massachusetts.

Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country. In no other nation on earth does this principle have such complete application. It comes most naturally from the fundamental doctrine of our land that the people are supreme. Lincoln stated the substance of the whole matter in his famous phrase, “government of the people; by the people, and for the people.”

The authority of law here is not something which is imposed upon the people; it is the will of the people themselves. The decision of the court here is not something which is apart from the people; it is the judgment of the people themselves. The right of the ownership of property here is not something withheld from the people; it is the privilege of the people themselves. Their sovereignty is absolute and complete. A definition of the relationship between the institutions of our government and the American people entirely justifies the assertion that: “All things were made by them; and without them was not anything made that was made.” It is because the American government is the sole creation and possession of the people that they have always cherished it and defended it, and always will.

Why Patriotic Societies Come to Be
There are two fundamental motives which inspire human action. The first and most important, to which all else is subordinate, is that of righteousness. There is that in mankind, stronger than all else, which requires them to do right. When that requirement is satisfied, the next motive is that of gain. These are the moral motive and the material motive. While in some particular instance they might seem to be antagonistic, yet always, when broadly considered or applied to society as a whole, they are in harmony. American institutions meet the test of these two standards. They are founded on righteousness, they are productive of material prosperity. They compel the loyalty and support of the people because such action is right and because it is profitable.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/27/hillary-and-t

Hillary Clinton couldn’t resist referring again to her historic defeat while addressing the graduates at Yale last week. This brought to mind her remarks at a speaking event in India in March, which can still rankle.

At that time, she declaimed that Trump’s “whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards,” and added for clarification: “You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights; you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs; you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are—you know, whatever your problem is, I’m gonna solve it.”

In this assignation of bigotry to, you know, the white working-class Americans who voted Trump, she makes clear that she just doesn’t listen, and didn’t get the message these voters were sending to the Democratic Party.

This is the party that was supposed to be looking out for them, that always boasted it stood for the “little guy,” for the good jobs, fair wages, and tight labor market favorable to working families. Clinton is also giving these voters additional reasons to steer away from that party in the future. You can’t trust the Democrats who pretended to be horrified by her words. Her view is theirs, too. They are panting for the demographic shift they believe will give them the permanent majority. After all, Hillary also claimed she regretted her “deplorable” remarks, (or was that only because they helped cost her the election?), but here she was, repeating them again.

An Opinion-Sharing Global Elite
Her remarks echoed those of snotty British writer Martin Amis, who pronounced on Trump supporters in a discussion with Ann Coulter as the 2016 returns were coming in on election night. Like Hillary, Amis spoke with sneering condescension. “The fallback position of every white man [in America] is,” he asserted, “I may not be much, but I’m better than any black man in this country, and they look at Obama and they suddenly realize that they’re not anymore. And the whole prestige of being white, working class, heterosexual has melted away from them. They’re called the left behind.”

https://usa.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/for-your-eyes-only-a-short-history-of-democrat-spy-collusion/

Who what where when why? The desiderata school teachers drill into their charges trying to master effective writing skills apply also in the effort to understand that byzantine drama known to the world as the Trump-Russia-collusion investigation.

Let’s start with “when.” When did it start? We know that the FBI opened its official investigation on 31 July 2016. An obscure, low-level volunteer to the Trump campaign called Carter Page was front and centre then. He’d been the FBI’s radar for a long time. Years before, it was known, the Russians had made some overtures to him but 1) they concluded that he was an “idiot” not worth recruiting and 2) he had actually aided the FBI in prosecuting at least two Russian spies.

But we now know that the Trump-Russia investigation began before Carter Page. In December 2017, The New York Times excitedly reported in an article called “How the Russia Inquiry Began” that, contrary to their reporting during the previous year, it wasn’t Carter Page who precipitated the inquiry. It was someone called George Papadopoulous, an even more obscure and lower-level factotum than Carter Page. Back in May 2016, the twenty-something Papadopoulous had gotten outside a number of drinks with one Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat in London and had let slip that “the Russians” had compromising information about Hillary Clinton. When Wikileaks began releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee in June and July, news of the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos was communicated to the FBI. Thus, according to the Times, the investigation was born.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/obama-administration-politicized-intelligence-law-enforcement-apparatus/

The Obama administration blatantly politicized the government’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.

‘Isn’t it a fact that you’re a scumbag?”

Our contretemps over the nomenclature of government informants has me unable to shake this arresting moment from my memory. In Manhattan, about 30 years ago, I was among the spectators basking in the majesty of Foley Square’s federal courthouse when we were suddenly jarred by this, shall we say, rhetorical question. The sniper was a mob lawyer in a big RICO case; the target was the prosecution’s main witness, the informant.

Until this week, I’d always thought the most noteworthy thing about this obnoxious bit of theater was the reaction of the judge, a very fine, very wry trial lawyer in his own right.

The prosecutors, of course, screamed, “Objection!”

The judge calmly shrugged his shoulders and ruled: “He can answer if he knows.”

Did he know? I don’t remember. I was laughing too hard to hear any response.

The court’s deadpan was not just hilarious. In its way, it was trenchant.

The judge was not insouciant. He was a realist. The witness had done what covert informants do: He pretended to be someone he wasn’t, he wheedled his way into the trust — in some instances, into the affections — of people suspected of wrongdoing. And then he betrayed them. But that’s the job: to pry away secrets — get the bad actors to admit what they did, how they did it, and with whom they did it, until the agents and prosecutors decide there is enough evidence to convict the lot of them.

The judge understood that. For all the melodrama, whether the informant was a hero or a villain hinged on how one felt not about him but about the worthiness of the investigation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-marine-gets-his-medals-1527287941

‘A nice town, with good people” is how Lance Corporal Jimmy Reddington described his Pennsylvania hometown of Scranton to a fellow Marine who shared a foxhole in Vietnam, according to a story in the local Times-Tribune. Within three months of deploying to Vietnam, Reddington was killed in action. Fifty-one years later, in time for Memorial Day, this Marine will finally get the 12 medals he earned there, including two Purple Hearts.

The Marine with Reddington was Joe Silvestri, who was wounded but survived the same battle that took his friend’s life. Since discovering Reddington’s grave in 1994 in Scranton’s Cathedral Cemetery, Mr. Silvestri has been coming back, along with other Marines, to tend the grave and pay respects to their brother-in-arms.

The medals make this year’s commemoration a little more special. Because Reddington’s father died when he was young and his mother and sister have since died too, the medals will be presented to the local Marine Corps League. They will be presented by retired Lieutenant General Ron Christmas, a Marine legend for his actions in Hue, one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. Marines from Reddington’s Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines will also be on hand—some old now, some in wheelchairs, but all determined to see that one of their own gets his due.

There are Jimmy Reddingtons all around us. They wear different uniforms—Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard—but they have in common a way of life that elevates service to country. Amid the cookouts, parades and flags that mark the last weekend in May, the stories of the men and women who didn’t live to make the trip home will rightly be told at thousands of Memorial Day celebrations in little towns and big cities across the United States.

Fifty-one years is a long time to wait for recognition. But the people of Scranton know it is never too late for the living to show our gratitude for the sacrifices that make America’s freedom possible.

For the past several days, the American public has been treated to quite a spectacle. Since President Trump first suggested in March 2017 that his campaign had been “wiretapped” by President Obama, we have been assured by our betters across the political spectrum that claim was not true and Trump’s accusations were the unhinged hallucinations of a mad man.

But as congressional investigators get closer to the truth, and the media begins casually to admit that yes, Obama (i.e., his Justice Department) did wiretap (i.e., surveil) the campaign (i.e., Trump Tower) as well as one member of his transition team, we are getting a shiny new spin: Well of course the Obama folks investigated the Trump campaign and of course it was not conducted by spies and of course this was all for the good of the country and of course it is Trump’s fault anyway.

The most mendacious tale now emerging from the news media, Democratic propagandists, and the NeverTrump Right is how the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign just months before Election Day actually helped Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. Why? Because voters allegedly were unaware that Trump campaign associates were being “investigated” by the FBI for their tenuous ties to Russia; if we had known before November 8, 2016, Hillary would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The latest dream sequence from #TheResistance originates from the May 16 scoop in the New York Times about President Obama’s FBI initiated probe called “Crossfire Hurricane” which was tasked to investigate four Trump campaign aides exactly 100 days before the presidential election. The general angle of the lengthy story is how former FBI Director James Comey was far tougher on the Clinton email probe and more cautious about the Trump campaign investigation. (Pause to chortle.)

The Times story appears to serve two purposes: First, to soften the blow of the upcoming Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton email investigation, which is expected to cite misconduct by a number of Justice officials; and second, to get ahead of the news that the Obama Justice Department spied (yes, spied) on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn beginning as early as August 2016.

But it was this little nugget—“News organizations did not publish Steele’s reports or reveal the FBI’s interest in them until after Election Day”—that sent Trump foes into the stratosphere. The voters-didn’t-know-about-the-FBI-investigating-Trump! meme joined Russian social media bots and brainwashed suburban moms as the latest part of the continuously evolving excuse for why Clinton suffered the most humiliating loss in electoral history.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/25/the-open-secret-of-the-fbis-investigation-of-trumps-campaign/
For days, the anti-Trump mob has leveraged that single sentence into a whole new plotline: The FBI helped Trump win the election by concealing the investigation from voters.

https://spectator.org/the-london-to-langley-spy-ring/?utm_source=American+Spectator+Emails&utm_campaign=ba81b6746c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_25_06_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-ba81b6746c-104438465

The roots of Obamagate become clearer.

Even before the first Republican primary, a London-to-Langley spy ring had begun to form against Donald Trump. British spies sent to CIA director John Brennan in late 2015 alleged intelligence on contacts between Trumpworld and the Russians, according to the Guardian.

Here’s the crucial paragraph in the story:

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Notice it doesn’t say the “Trump campaign” but “figures connected to Trump.” One of those figures was Michael Flynn, who didn’t join the campaign until February 2016. But Brennan and British intelligence had already started spying on him, drawing upon sham intelligence from Stefan Halper, a long-in-the-tooth CIA asset teaching at Cambridge University whom Brennan and Jim Comey would later send to infiltrate the Trump campaign’s ranks.

It appears that Halper had won Brennan’s confidence with a false report about Flynn in 2014 — a reported sighting of Flynn at Cambridge University talking too cozily with a Russian historian. Halper had passed this absurdly simpleminded tattle to a British spy who in turn gave it to Brennan, as one can deduce from this euphemistic account in the New York Times about Halper as the “informant”.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-constitutional-crisis-1527201552

Democrats and their media allies are again shouting “constitutional crisis,” this time claiming President Trump has waded too far into the Russia investigation. The howls are a diversion from the actual crisis: the Justice Department’s unprecedented contempt for duly elected representatives, and the lasting harm it is doing to law enforcement and to the department’s relationship with Congress.

The conceit of those claiming Mr. Trump has crossed some line in ordering the Justice Department to comply with oversight is that “investigators” are beyond question. We are meant to take them at their word that they did everything appropriately. Never mind that the revelations of warrants and spies and dirty dossiers and biased text messages already show otherwise.

We are told that Mr. Trump cannot be allowed to have any say over the Justice Department’s actions, since this might make him privy to sensitive details about an investigation into himself. We are also told that Congress—a separate branch of government, a primary duty of which is oversight—cannot be allowed to access Justice Department material. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes can’t be trusted to view classified information—something every intelligence chairman has done—since he might blow a source or method, or tip off the president.

That’s a political judgment, but it holds no authority. The Constitution set up Congress to act as a check on the executive branch—and it’s got more than enough cause to do some checking here. Yet the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have spent a year disrespecting Congress—flouting subpoenas, ignoring requests, hiding witnesses, blacking out information, and leaking accusations.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has not been allowed to question a single current or former Justice or FBI official involved in this affair. Not one. He’s also more than a year into his demand for the transcript of former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s infamous call with the Russian ambassador, as well as reports from the FBI agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn. And still nothing.

Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, is being stonewalled on at least three inquiries. The House Judiciary and Oversight committee chairmen required a full-blown summit in April with Justice Department officials to get movement on their own subpoena. The FBI continues to block a fuller release of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report.

Not that the documents that Justice sends over are of much use. Mr. Grassley this week excoriated the department for its routine practice of redacting key information, and for similarly refusing to provide a “privilege log” that details the legal basis for withholding information. His team recently discovered that one of the items Justice had scrubbed from the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts was the duo’s concern that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had a $70,000 conference table. (Was it lacquered with unicorn tears?) A separate text refers to an investigation that the White House is “running,” but conveniently blacks out which one. The FBI won’t answer Mr. Johnson’s questions about who is doing the redacting.

This intransigence is creating an unprecedented toxicity between law enforcement and Congress, undermining what has long been a cooperative and vital relationship. It is also pushing lawmakers ever closer to holding Justice Department officials in contempt or impeaching them. Congress hasn’t impeached a member of the executive branch (presidents excepted) since the 19th century. Let’s agree such a step would amount to a real crisis. And the pressure to use these tools to get disclosure is growing, as congressional Republicans worry about losing their oversight authority in the midterms, and suspect the Justice Department is stringing them along for that very reason. CONTINUE AT SITE