RUTHFULLY YOURS

The selection of the artists painting the Obamas’ new portraits commissioned for the Smithsonian revealed much more than two pieces of “art.”

One would surely think that the chosen artists of the former president and first lady of the United States would have been carefully vetted – for quality of work, appropriateness of artistic style for the venue, and reputation in the community.

Barack Obama’s selection of Kehinde Wiley for his portrait is proving to be more atrocious than the painting itself.

The major media outlets, though, such as CNBC, were quick to observe a momentous occasion, breathlessly reporting that “The Obamas made history not only as the country’s first African-American presidential couple featured in the gallery but also for selecting the first African-American painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum.”

That same CNBC piece also recounted the history of Obama’s personal selection of Wiley, writing that Obama “thinks ‘it’s safe to say Kehinde and I bonded'” and “how much he and Wiley had in common.”

It was the painting itself, however, and not the artist, upon which my friends in the conservative Twittersphere focused at first. I couldn’t help offering my own opinion, sarcastically tweeting my suggested title: “Obama Manspreads in Sea of Poison Ivy.”

The peculiarities of Obamagate keep growing.

John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, gives himself this description on his Twitter account: “Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future.” In other words, Brennan is still in the disinformation business.

Liberal partisan who is very concerned about our collectivist future — that would be a more apt description for one of the most politicized CIA directors ever, whose ascent to the top of the CIA began with a lie-detector test in which he revealed that he was a supporter of the Soviet-controlled American Communist party.

Brennan was the fox guarding the henhouse — a role he played to the hilt for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as he set in motion a sham investigation into the Trump campaign. NBC recently signed Brennan up as a “national security” correspondent. So the fox will now get to comment on the henhouse he raided.

Where are the successors to the Kalb brothers to tsk-tsk news programs for using as “correspondents” on a story figures who have a vested interest in its outcome? Brennan is under Congressional investigation for possible perjury. But instead of challenging his yarn-spinning about the Steele dossier, NBC gives him a platform to continue it. How much longer before the media adds Sally Yates, Susan Rice, and (if they could get him) Christopher Steele as “correspondents”? What a farce.

On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.

Her term having ended 15 minutes before, Rice was technically back in private life, where private people have private email accounts — even notepads if they want to scratch out a reminder the old-fashioned way. Yet, for at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier, at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done “by the book.”

Funny, though: The “by the book” thing about contemporaneous memos is that they are, well, contemporaneous — made at or immediately after the event they undertake to memorialize. They’re written while things are as fresh as they will ever be in one’s mind, before subsequent events motivate the writer to spin a decision, rather than faithfully record it.

An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done.

The Trump–Russia Investigation as of January 5

January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA and the Office of the National Intelligence Director.

January 20, 2017, was inauguration day for president Donald Trump and last day on the job for national security advisor Susan Rice. At 12:15 p.m. that day, Rice sent herself an email about a January 5 meeting with POTUS 44, FBI boss James Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and vice president Joe Biden.

In this meeting, Rice wrote, “The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.” From a national security perspective, however, the president “said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

Senators Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, among others, found the email highly unusual. Former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler countered that Rice was simply “memorializing an important discussion for the record.” The discussion did not involve the Steele dossier and “any insinuation that Ambassador Rice’s actions in this matter were inappropriate is yet another attempt to distract and deflect from the importance of the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in America’s democracy.” Others offered a different explanation for Rice’s eleventh-hour message.

“She’s obviously trying to rewrite history,” Judge Andrew Napolitano told Fox News. “She’s trying to make it look as if something happened that didn’t happen.” Those present “learned something between January 5th and January 20th which caused them to want to change the narrative about this meeting.”

At least 17 people were killed as a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., opened fire on campus today.

Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old expelled from the school for disciplinary reasons, fled the scene but was apprehended and arrested a short time later. Misspellings of his first name were circulating earlier among media and social media.

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters that the shooting began outside of the school. Twelve of the victims were found in buildings, two were killed outside on school grounds, and one person was shot to death outside of school property on Pine Island Road. Two more shooting victims died at a hospital.

Israel noted that victims among the 17 wounded taken to hospitals are still undergoing surgery. Three people were in critical condition.

Though he didn’t have a breakdown of how many victims were students and how many were teachers, the sheriff said the deceased were a mixture of young people and adults.

Israel said investigators have begun dissecting Cruz’s social media, and “some of the things that have come to light are very, very disturbing.” He said the shooter had multiple magazines and used at least one AR-15.

Some witness accounts said the shooter may have pulled a fire alarm to get people out of rooms; the sheriff wouldn’t comment on the report. But Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), after receiving a federal briefing, told CNN that Cruz had a gas mask and smoke grenades, and did pull the fire alarm.

“We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” math teacher Jim Gard, who said Cruz had been in his class last year, told the Miami Herald. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus.”

Students who spoke with local media after the shooting expressed little surprise that Cruz was arrested as the suspect. One told WFOR-TV that other students “knew it was going to be him.” Student Matthew Walker told ABC News that “everything he posts [on social media] is about weapons”; he said Cruz’s selection of victims appeared to be random. CONTINUE AT SITE

You hear it all the time from Trump supporters: “I like a lot of what he’s done, especially the judges and tax cuts. But I wish he’d stop tweeting and picking fights. I wish he acted more presidential and stopped insulting reporters, entertainers, senators, foreign leaders and Gold Star families.”

Sounds right, seems smart. Yet for millions of Trump voters it misses the point entirely. Mr. Trump’s style is part of his substance. His most loyal supporters back him because of, not despite, his brash behavior. He would not be in the Oval Office today had he followed a conventional path or listened to the advisers telling him to tone down his rhetoric and discipline his behavior. If Republican primary voters had wanted a border wall, tax cuts and sound judges without the drama, they could have picked Ted Cruz. Instead they elected Mr. Trump for exactly the reasons that the mainstream media, late-night comics, and party elites cannot stand him.

GOP voters have traditionally demanded their leaders demonstrate fealty to conservative principles through life experience: by offering a spiritual conversion story, standing with a supportive spouse and children, talking about the deer bagged during last year’s hunting season. The apparent authenticity mattered, given that many competing politicians converged around the same policies. Hence the damage when a candidate came across as inauthentic, as in 2007 when Mitt Romney said he had hunted “a number of times,” mostly “small varmints.”

The reality was that voters trusted candidates who were like them in beliefs, habits and appearance. Knowing this, candidates tried to find common ground with regular people. That’s why Democrats in red states cut ads showing them shooting guns and professing their faith. It’s why Marco Rubio repeatedly told the story of his father, the immigrant bartender, and why John Kasich offered paeans to his father, the mailman.

But what was really achieved by all those years of supporting politicians with perfect church attendance and lifetime memberships in the National Rifle Association? Relatively little in enacted legislation. That’s why in 2016, after years of broken promises about repealing ObamaCare, balancing the budget and imposing term limits, conservative voters decided they’d had enough. They decided to support someone whose primary virtue was that he would not back down from fighting for them. CONTINUE AT SITE

The unveiling of the portraits of the Obamas for the National Portrait Gallery puts me in mind of Winston Churchill’s reaction to the ghastly Graham Sutherland portrait (left) presented to him for his 80th birthday, which Churchill (a talented painter in his own right, keep in mind—see his great short essay “Painting as a Pastime”) called “a remarkable example of modern art,” to much laughter in the audience. That was, of course, his way of saying he didn’t like it. Clementine Churchill later had the painting destroyed in a backyard bonfire, which the artist, Sutherland, complained bitterly was “an act of vandalism.”

The real vandalism was letting Sutherland paint Churchill in the first place. And ponder the vandalism that is the official portraits the Obamas apparently chose for themselves and approve. You may think the Obamas simply have no taste, but the departure from the traditional mode of presidential portraits is yet another subtle signal of their contempt for American traditions. They won’t have the good sense to throw these ghastly portraits on a bonfire. (And remember: Trump is vulgar.)

To the contrary, these portraits fuel the bonfire of their vanities, especially their vanity of being different and better than the ordinary run of Americans and the presidents they followed. Just take a look, and spot the one that doesn’t belong:

When your entire public life has been blessed with the adulation of courtiers it can be very difficult not merely to determine how many of their hosannas are genuine but also the worth of what you imagine to be your own good taste.

Take Barack Obama, for example. The only editor of the Harvard Law Review never to have contributed a bylined essay to the publication, he was nevertheless hailed by admirers as a genius of jurisprudence. Make a dreadful mess of US policy and actions in the Middle East and those blunders are deemed to be of no accord. An ambassador is butchered in Libya and the grim facts of his murder are draped in layers of lies about an obscure YouTube clip allegedly prompting an entirely understandable reaction on the part of Islam’s faithful. No matter what Obama’s offence against competence, truth and US national interests, a claque of editorialists could be counted on to pound their keyboards in his defence.

Having for so long been bathed in the admiration of sycophants and the feting of toadies, Obama’s newly unveiled official portrait testifies to the perils of accepting flattery as fact. The picture, reproduced above, is perhaps the biggest advertisement for oddness since the New York Post profiled a nasty piece of work with the memorable front-page headline “Ghadafi Goes Daffy: Libyan leader is a transvestite druggie.”

What is the artist, Kehinde Wiley, trying to say? That Obama needs be regarded as a somewhat advanced form of vegetation? That he is the fairy at the bottom of the garden? That his most notable achievement was using White House antiques as outdoor furniture? Don’t laugh, all those options are possibilities from an artist whose earlier schtick was the depiction of black women brandishing the severed heads of white people.

Apparently Obama likes it, which tells you everything you need to know about the man and his judgement.