RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Associate Justice John Paul Stevens was a foe of any broad reading of the Second Amendment while he served on the U.S. Supreme Court. He dissented from the 2008 majority decision in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, which held that there was an individual right to bear arms. Mr. Stevens is now going even further in his retirement, writing an op-ed column for the New York Times entitled “John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Stevens is of the view that the Second Amendment is an artifact with no current beneficial purpose to serve. “Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states,” he wrote in his op-ed column, “led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that ‘a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

In his op-ed column Mr. Steven sharply criticized the Heller decision, which he wrote “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Mr. Stevens added: “Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

Mr. Stevens provides no reasoning in his op-ed column to speak of for getting rid of the Bill of Rights amendment to the Constitution protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms that comes right after the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, free exercise of religion, the right to petition the government and the right of assembly. We need to look back at his dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, joined by liberals Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer, to get a sense of his disdain for any continuing relevance of the Second Amendment in today’s society. In his dissent, he rejected the notion that the framers of the Constitution “intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution” or had “the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms.”

Christopher Steele, the author of the Steele Dossier that alleges Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, also penned a report for the FBI that supposedly sheds light on one of the most puzzling incidents in recent history.

Mikhail Lesin was a former Russian media tycoon who was minister of the press early in Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president. Later, he played a role in stifling Russian independent media and used thuggish tactics to acquire huge holdings in Russian media companies.

Lesin was found dead in his DC Dupont Circle Hotel room in 2015. He died as a result of head and body trauma — an “accident,” the coroner said. Authorities say that Lesin died as a result of multiple falls after going on a two-day drinking binge.

But nobody ever bought that explanation. It was 11 months before a severely redacted autopsy report was released and to this day, even with many FOIA requests and digging by reporters, the mystery surrounding Lesin’s death persists.

Steele gave the FBI a report gleaned from several Russian sources that states that Lesin was murdered unintentionally — that he had a falling out with an oligarch close to Putin who wanted to send a message to Lesin but killed him by accident. The bureau got the report from Steele as it was helping D.C. police investigate the case.

BuzzFeed has the story:

Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.

The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.

Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.
The Steele report is not the FBI’s only source for this account of Lesin’s death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.

Even more surprising, federal prosecutors called witnesses before a sitting grand jury in 2016. It is not known what those witnesses testified to, but 150 pages of information were amassed and are being sought by numerous news outlets. CONTINUE AT SITE

Stoneman Douglas students’ passion is not wisdom.

All you needed to know about student activist David Hogg’s speech at the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., over the weekend was that he affixed a price tag on the microphone to symbolize how much National Rifle Association money Senator Marco Rubio took for the lives of students in Florida.

The stunt wasn’t out of place. Indeed, it perfectly encapsulated the braying spirit of the student gun-control advocacy in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.

These young activists are making our public debate even more poisonous and less civil, and are doing it as teenagers. They are precocious that way.

The Stoneman Douglas students experienced a horrific trauma. No one can deny their grief or blame them for being impassioned. And allowance has to be made for the fact that they are teenagers, who universally believe that they know better than their hapless elders (Hogg says the problem is that their parents don’t know how to use a democracy).

Yet none of that excuses their scurrilous smears of the other side in the gun debate. The student activists presume that there is a ready solution to mass shootings that everyone knows, and the only reason why someone might not act on this universally accepted policy is malice or corruption. This makes the other side the equivalent of murderers.

Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren, three lefty millionaires, got together to solve “income inequality” in a town hall broadcast live from the Capitol visitors center.

Washington D.C., where two out of the three parasites do business, has the worst income inequality in the country. The bottom fifth of Washington D.C. account for just 2% of the city’s income. It has one of the highest poverty rates in the country and the highest food stamp use. And under Obama, the Imperial City of the politicians and the poor was surrounded by some of the wealthiest districts in the country.

“Income Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class,” the Sanders, Warren and Moore town hall, comes to progs from the most unequal and oligarchic city in America

If Bernie, Liz and Michael really want to see income inequality, they can take a walk away from the marble and glass edifices of big government to see what big government had wrought. It isn’t any of their usual villains, the corporations and banks, who made Washington D.C. so miserable.

It’s the triumph of socialism.

Washington D.C. and its bedroom communities are what the entire country would look like if the left got its way. A socialist apartheid state divided between the business of government and the poor.

But the three socialist stooges aren’t just in the business of politics. They’re millionaire poverty pimps.

Bernie Sanders made over $1 million pushing conspiracy theories about income inequality. Denouncing big business let him rent a private Delta 767 with a menu of herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache and fine cheeses. The Sanders clan is up to 3 homes now and Bernie is using his clout to get two of his kids elected to political offices. Who better to lecture us on the “Rise of Oligarchy” than an oligarch?

Double standards are a way of life in Washington, but they can still manage to take you aback. Witness the different standards applied to the recent punishments of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Mr. McCabe on March 16, acting on the recommendation of career employees in the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. That followed Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s finding that Mr. McCabe made an unauthorized disclosure to the media about the Hillary Clinton server investigation, but more importantly lacked candor under oath with internal investigators.

Democrats and various media voices described the McCabe firing as vindictive, because it disqualified the former agency No. 2 for early retirement benefits and came amid Donald Trump’s crass attacks on Mr. McCabe.

On Friday Mr. McCabe defended his conduct in the Washington Post. “Amid the chaos that surrounded me,” Mr. McCabe wrote, “I answered questions as completely and accurately as I could. And when I realized that some of my answers were not fully accurate or may have been misunderstood, I took the initiative to correct them.” He says he “may well have been confused and distracted.”

The country will have to wait for Inspector General Horowitz’s report to judge this claim. What we do know is that federal law has a policy of zero tolerance toward anyone who makes false statements to the FBI—a felony charge with up to a five-year prison sentence. Presumably the critics would have preferred the Attorney General to hold Mr. McCabe to a lower standard than that for average citizens.

Compare the conventional wisdom after the McCabe firing to its efficient disposal of Michael Flynn. In January 2017, Mr. Flynn denied to the FBI that he had discussed Obama-era sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak prior to Mr. Trump’s inauguration. As incoming National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn would have known the government was monitoring Mr. Kislyak’s phone, which makes it unlikely he’d intentionally lie.

He agreed to talk to the FBI’s agents with no counsel present. And in March 2017 former FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that the two agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn concluded he hadn’t lied but had forgotten exactly what he’d discussed.

Still, what he told the FBI was false, and in December Special Counsel Robert Mueller extracted a guilty plea from Mr. Flynn on the charge of lying to the FBI. There is reason to believe Mr. Flynn took the deal to end the threat of financial ruin, or the prosecution of his son, Michael, Jr. Be that as it may, it’s hard not to notice that in what is considered polite Washington society today, Mr. McCabe has been elevated as a martyr to the anti-Trump cause, while Mr. Flynn’s fall is necessary justice.

No one knows where the Mueller investigation is going to end up. But the country would be better able to absorb the result if it believed that Washington was playing it straight, and not playing favorites.

The ideological crack-up between Left and Right was readily apparent when thousands of students marched against guns – guns that killed 17 Florida students in a violence that would awaken passion in even the most cold blooded. What it means, however, is seemingly less significant than the symbolism. Educators and politicians who should know better encouraged students to engage in protests. Mayor De Blasio in New York said students would not be punished if they left their desks to participate in the rallies.

Surely press notices and most spokesmen congratulated the students on their public consciousness. Yet for anyone observing this event without an ideological lens, you might ask what was going on. Students were demonstrating against guns, and the NRA was generally the target, but what was the legislative goal, a modification in the Second Amendment? Guns can kill, but so can knives. A gun in the hands of St. Francis is not a weapon. Therefore, the gun owner is the critical factor in this equation. All parties agree that a person with mental illness should not have a gun. All parties agree that criminals should not be able to obtain guns. Surely on those matters alone consensus can be achieved. But this is not the real issue.

These demonstrations are actually the full-throated anger of the Left organized in large part by instructors who are manipulating students during this period of grief and rage. Suppose, for the sake of argument instructors were to call for a national rally to protest abortions and the one million fetuses killed each year. Would there be any response?

“He is a forthright man of peace who understand the dangers of pacifism in a world where evil is rife. He would applaud, and rightly, the Roman military historian Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. ‘Yes’, screamed an editorial in The New York Times, ‘John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous’. Bolton is a ‘hawk’s hawk’, an ‘extreme ideologue’ and ‘warmonger’ whose appointment ‘scares people’ and ‘puts us on a path to war’. Adds Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, ‘and it’s fair to say [sure it is, Fred] that President Donald Trump wants us on that path’. In short, ‘the time to panic is now’. Argh!!!

Hysteria has its pleasures. But if we step outside the echo chamber of this feverish anti-Trump mad house, we soon discover that John Bolton is not the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. On the contrary, he is an informed and thoughtful commentator on international affairs. The over-caffeinated chihuahuas yapping at his heels are in a panic because he doesn’t like the ‘deal’ (what some of us would describe as the craven capitulation) that Barack Obama made with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Obama shovelled more than a billion dollars in cash to the Mullahs and said in effect ‘pretty please do not make any nuclear bombs’. The New York Times, in one of its excoriations of John Bolton, wrote that ‘The Iran deal has substantially halted the nuclear program and needs to be maintained’. But anyone not blinded by ideology knows that the third thing the Iranian leaders do each morning, after proclaiming ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’, is to chivvy their scientists to get on with their work making a bomb with which to obliterate the Zionist entity and threaten the Great Satan.

Some years ago, I wrote a column about adultery and politicians. In light of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal interviews concerning their alleged (and probable) affairs with President Donald Trump, it is time to revisit the subject.

I do not agree with those—Right or Left, religious or secular—who contend that adultery invalidates a political or social leader. It may invalidate a pastor, priest or rabbi—because a major part of their vocation is to be a moral/religious model, and because clergy do not make war, sign national budgets, appoint judges, run foreign policy or serve as commanders in chief. In other words, unlike your clergyman or clergywoman, almost everything a president does as president affects hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of non-Americans. If a president is also a moral model, that is a wonderful bonus. But that is not part of a president’s job description.

But even anti-Trump conservatives still assert character matters a great deal in a president and other political leaders.

There are two problems with that argument.

The most obvious is that adultery is frequently an inaccurate measure of a person’s character. Indeed, many otherwise great men have been unfaithful to their spouse. And while it is always a sin—the Sixth Commandment doesn’t come with an asterisk—there are gradations of sin.

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history––the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda.

Progressivism, like its totalitarian cousins, is an ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism. The complexity and mystery of a flawed human nature and its actions are reduced to Lenin’s simple analysis: “Who, whom.” In the fight between righteousness and evil, who will win, the oppressor or his victim? The revolutionary is strengthened by his perceived own moral superiority, his certainty that he on the side of history’s angels. After all, he is struggling for the brave new world: heaven on earth, the utopia of radical equality and social justice, and the final banishment of misery and oppression. In such a cosmic battle, who has time for critical thought or empirical evidence?

This leftist melodrama has always been attractive for the callow young, as the hinge-year 1968 showed. Teenagers are prone to grandiose self-regard, impulsive behavior, and a preference for feeling rather than thinking. They are attracted to sentimentalism and melodrama, the emotion that validates their inflated egos rather than the thought that challenges their exaggerated self-importance.