RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two op-eds in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal and one on this website brilliantly call attention to aspects of the vast political and cultural change, still in its early stages, that is gathering force in this country as inexorably as the spring thaw breaks up a frozen river, first as a trickle and then a torrent. Donald Trump figures in all three stories. He is at once a cause and an effect of the change—the Tea Party movement embodied and in power, and as much a rejection of the existing order of things as the mob that swarmed onto British ships in Boston Harbor 245 years ago and flung overboard their cargo of tea whose tax they refused to pay in a gesture of defiance that declared “No more!” And they meant it.

Peggy Noonan’s Journal column observes that after Trump there will never again be a “normal” president. Never again, that is, will we elect some apparatchik from the haughty, out-of-touch, overpaid political class that has given us generations of arbitrary rule by the Administrative State’s unelected “experts” too inept to see a financial hurricane brewing; that has allowed the Supreme Court to cram the ethical beliefs of the coastal elites down the throats of a gagging nation—so that nuns have to sue not to hand out birth control, as if freedom of conscience were not the first of our freedoms; that admits immigrants by the carload without a thought of whether they will help or harm America and Americans; that goes to war foolishly believing that toppling dictators will magically turn their tribal subjects into democratic republicans; and that lets the IRS tax as tyrannically as George III. No more!

In the same paper, Shelby Steele points out that the lesson we should draw from the National Football League protestors—whose kneeling at the National Anthem drew much-publicized jeers from Trump and drove fans away from the stadiums—is that the days of black protest are over, because past years of heroic protest succeeded in making black Americans truly free (as Gene Dattel’s Reckoning With Race argued recently). The campus snowflakes’ worries about microaggressions, the Black Lives Matter protests, the armies of deans of diversity are all obsolete. For all their vociferousness, they are lost in a vanished past, and we no longer have to listen to them. The problem now, Steele notes, is that too many blacks feel naked without their victimhood, feel ashamed that most of Chicago’s or Baltimore’s myriad murderers are black, and don’t know what to do with their freedom. Time to man up, make a worthwhile life, and stop whining. No more!

Donald Trump continues to baffle. Never Trump Republicans still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by its supposedly odious author. Or surely it soon will be discredited by the next Trumpian outrage. Or his successes belong to congressional and Cabinet members, while his failures are all his own. Rarely do they seriously reflect on what otherwise over the last year might have been the trajectory of a Clinton administration.

Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.) Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.

To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.

In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States.

Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change, entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative state.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling Common Core advocacy as altruistic when in fact it was designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democrat Party with its “Resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy the capitalist infrastructure of American democracy and replace it with socialism.

Common Core is a deliberate information war targeting American children. It is a deceitful campaign to undermine established American Judeo-Christian cultural norms celebrating patriotism, the meritocracy, and American sovereignty. The Leftist/Islamist axis is promoting collectivism in preparation for one-world government. This is how it works.

Serious educational reform enacted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 was designed to provide high standards and measurable goals to improve individual outcomes in education. Federal funding was correlated to test performance. Rather than improving education the net effect of NCLB was education reformatted to teach to the tests. Education critic Alfie Kohn argued that the “NCLB law is ‘unredeemable’ and should be scrapped – its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills.” There were loud calls for reform.

Enter Common Core State Standards (CCSS) launched under Obama in 2009 deceptively marketed by a propaganda campaign emphasizing the positive benefits of national standards and uniformity in curriculum guidelines with measurable effectiveness for American public education K-12. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are mistakenly understood to be a derivative of the No Child Left Behind Act – they aren’t.

Obama’s 2009 Race To The Top program was introduced as a competitive grant program that awarded points to states for satisfying performance-based evaluations of teachers and principals based on measures of educator effectiveness. Sound familiar? It should because measurable effectiveness = student test scores. Even though Race to the Top did not mandate adoption of Common Core, to receive federal stimulus money states had to “commit” to adopting Common Core standards. Forty-two states now operate public and private education under the Common Core program.

Controversy surrounds Robert Mueller and his investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion mirage. Some maintain that he is the ultimate professional dedicated to following the truth, but others say he is a political hack.

There is no need to wonder about how Mueller operates. His history has made it quite clear. One needs only to study his actions as FBI director when he managed the FBI’s most important investigation ever.

In September of 2001, an entity began mailing anthrax through the U.S. postal system, hitting such prominent targets as NBC and Senator Tom Daschle’s office. The terrorist attacks killed five and left others hospitalized. The world panicked.

Under Mueller’s management, the FBI launched an investigation lasting ten years. The bureau now brags about spending “hundreds of thousands of investigator hours on this case.” To fully appreciate the Mueller response – whom his people investigated, targeted, and found guilty – it is appropriate to first build context.

The anthrax letters began just a week after the 9/11 attack. Simultaneous to planning the airplane hijackings, al-Qaeda had also been weaponizing anthrax. One of their scientists who ran an anthrax lab in Afghanistan also housed 9/11 hijackers. In fact, one of the hijackers, Ahmed al Haznawi, went to the emergency room in an American hospital with a skin lesion, which a team of bioterrorism experts from Johns Hopkins confirmed was probably due to anthrax. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were also trying to obtain crop-dusting airplanes.

So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?

Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The Johns Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued; Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed were possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.

A few weeks later, the FBI released a remarkable profile of the attacker. FBI experts eschewed analysis of the content of the letters, where it was written in bold block letters, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great.” Instead, they focused on a “linguistic analysis,” stating that the letter’s author was not “comfortable or practiced in writing in lower[]case lettering.” They therefore concluded that the author was likely an American.

The investigators hypothesized that the attacker was a lonely American who had wanted to kill people with anthrax for some undefined time period but then became “mission-oriented” following 9/11 and immediately prepared and mailed the deadly spores while pretending to be Muslim.

I started watching Miss America and Miss Universe competitions when I was a little girl, mostly because I loved the gowns. To this day, I still tune in, especially toward the end, when all the gowns are on display. A couple of years ago, I saw my all-time favorite! As the expression goes: TDF––to die for!

I also love the Country Music Awards shows because it’s the only time I hear genuinely thrilling voices without the caterwauling and preposterous over-production that camouflages the dearth of talent in the pop-music industry.

But with rare exceptions, I never tune in to the orgies of self-congratulation, self-importance, and self-indulgence known as the Golden Globes, the Emmys, and the Academy Awards, not only because the presenters and winners are so insufferably narcissistic and vapid but because movies and TV shows have devolved to such a point—with notable exceptions, of course—that this past summer, according to The Los Angeles Times, Hollywood suffered its worst-attended summer movie season in 25 years!

Apparently, this is because the moguls who now run Hollywood and TV and the print media are so out of touch with mainstream America—unlike their bête noire, President Trump, who has his finger on the very pulse of America’s wants, needs, and desires—and so obsessed with leftwing politics, and so hysterical that all their efforts to undermine and sabotage and defeat and impeach him have utterly failed, that they’ve done what millions of losers have done in the past, i.e., doubled down on their efforts.

Who are these desperate people? They are not just the moguls, but all the lefties, including the pussy hat women who have now given up that symbol because it’s too pink and not sensitive enough to perhaps darker colors of the female sex organ and not transgender enough to be “fair” to all women. Can’t make this up!

CHOOSING COLORS

When our Founding Fathers chose the colors of the American flag over 240 years ago, they chose white to signify purity and innocence, red to signify hardiness and valor and the blood they spilled in the cause of freedom, and blue to signify vigilance, perseverance and justice.

On Israel’s flag, the blue lines symbolize the stripes on a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and the Star of David is the widely acknowledged symbol of the Jewish people and of Judaism.

The big recent news in the fundamental corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI is that various Congresspeople have now been allowed to see the FISA application submitted in 2016 seeking authority to surveil the Trump campaign, and multiple sources are now confirming that at least part of the basis for the successful application was the piece of Clinton campaign-financed phony opposition research known as the “Trump Dossier.” However, although the FBI allowed a viewing of the FISA application, it did not allow the making of copies. (Try that gambit next time the FBI subpoenas you for documents!) So we are now all awaiting additional details. My assumption is that there is lots more disgusting information to come about how our “law enforcement” agencies weaponized their powers to support the favored political candidate against the disfavored adversary. But meanwhile, rather than making speculations that may turn out to be wrong about what is to come, let me take this opportunity to educate readers about some of the other fundamental corruption of our exalted law enforcement agencies that gets far less attention.

Just a few weeks ago, in a post titled “The Reputation Of The FBI — And Of The Justice Department — In Tatters,” I advised readers that “you would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys.” Reasons included not only that they regularly misuse their powers for political purposes and prosecute things that are not crimes, but also “they are entirely likely to create an entrapment scheme to manufacture a crime to nail you.”

The word is that in the last few days Special Prosecutor Mueller has been seeking an interview with President Trump. Does my advice to not cooperate apply equally to the President in these circumstances? Sadly, it applies especially to the President. Let’s review the output of the Mueller investigation to date. When you look at it, the effort appears to amount to little more than the manufacturing of crimes that did not previously exist in order to nail disfavored people.