RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do we remember today the media hysteria between 2003 and 2007 that surrounded the special counsel’s investigation, prosecution, and trial of Scooter Libby?https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/26/back-to-the-future-from-scooter-libby-to-donald-trump/

During the progressive furor over the Iraq War, media-driven charges arose that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had deliberately leaked the covert status of Valerie Plame—a supposedly undercover CIA operative.

Soon all hell broke loose. Remember, these were the unhinged years of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the Bush-Hitler slurs, snuff Bush novels and films, and “Bush lied; people died” gospels.

Sensing a chance to embarrass or wound the Bush Administration, the political and media opponents of Cheney and Bush advisor Karl Rove first went after Libby. They apparently had hopes that he could be charged with something to leverage confessions and thus indictments of his superiors as co-conspirators in the supposed Libby leak of Plame’s CIA status. The leak purportedly was a way of punishing Plame’s stridently anti-Bush husband, Joseph Wilson, who had made unsubstantiated accusations of conspiratorial wrongdoing against the Bush White House.

Finally, the Bush Administration bowed to the growing media-driven pressures. We may forget now that it was none other than acting Attorney General James Comey on December 30, 2003, who appointed his friend Patrick Fitzgerald (sound familiar?) as special counsel. He had appointed Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation “into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee’s identity.”

If we review news stories from this year alone that did not warrant a special counsel investigation—FBI investigators assigned to Robert Mueller’s legal team exchanging venomous texts about the target of their supposed disinterested inquiry; the Obama Administration secretly shutting down government investigations of the terrorist organization Hezbollah’s global drug-trafficking to enhance its signature Iran deal; or the Clinton-funded phony Steele/Fusion GPS file that was peddled to the FBI and may have been used as an argument to get a FISA order to surveille Trump campaign officials and leak their names during and right after the 2016 election—we can remember just how hysterical those times were. The entire country was set afire over the ambiguous status of a single CIA employee and the loud, unfounded conspiracies theories of Plame’s often buffoonish spouse, Wilson.

A conservative cynic from birth, I foolishly thought I had seen it all when it came to leftist madness. But then I saw, posted on CNN’s website, “Why kids love ‘fascist’ cartoons like ‘Paw Patrol’ and ‘Thomas’.” The article referenced several other articles that described Thomas as “a premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia,” “imperialist racist and sinister,” and “classist, sexist, and anti-environmentalist.”

This caught my attention because my six-year-old boy — like children all over the world — loves stories of Thomas the Train. I recently took my children to Thomasland in Massachusetts and now my boy wants to visit the Thomasland in Japan. The Thomas cartoon is so popular that 1 billion dollars of merchandise related to the show is sold every year.

Reverend Wilbert Audrey, creator of Thomas the Train, has recounted how, when his 3-year-old son was ill with the measles, he told him stories about trains. Audrey says that in his own childhood he had to read boring books about perfect children so that he would learn from their moral example. He decided to write interesting books about engines with human characteristics in a fictional island he called Sodor. The trains would push the envelope until they got in trouble, be punished, and after making amends would be “bought back into the family so to speak.” Morality in the world of Thomas was making oneself useful to society, being a good friend, and keeping the railroad functioning smoothly. The human aspect of his trains is part of their appeal to children and the moral aspect of his stories was part of their appeal to the adults who read the stories to their children.

Now left-wing critics label the Thomas the Train show “racist” because the diesel villain is black. They call it totalitarian because trains are supposed to do what the manager of the rails, Sir Topham Hat, tells them to do. They call it sexist because there are more male trains than female trains. (In 2013 the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary actually called out Thomas for its lack of females.) When Thomas is awarded two female passenger cars to pull because of good behavior, the feminists call this sexist too.

Late on Christmas Eve, the 2017 finalist for Twitter’s most unhinged leftist compared House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to Judas Iscariot, the notorious traitor who delivered Jesus Christ into the hands of the authorities leading to the Crucifixion. Ryan’s crime? Tweeting about Christmas.

“paul ryan — don’t talk about Jesus after what u just did to our nation — u will go straight to hell u screwed up fake altar boy #Judasmuch,” O’Donnell tweeted.

O’Donnell’s tweet referred to the Republican tax reform bill, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday. While tax reform was passing the U.S. Senate, O’Donnell sent a barrage of deranged tweets, well documented by PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser.

“call 911 — crime in progress US SENATE,” O’Donnell tweeted Tuesday night.

Also that evening, she sent out a bribery offer, explicitly offering “2 million dollars” to Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) if they “vote NO NO I WILL NOT KILL AMERICANS FOR THE SUOER RICH DM me susan DM me jeff so sh*t 2 million cash each.”

Contrary to her deranged ravings, the tax bill will not kill anyone. The biggest count against it — from a liberal perspective — is that it will repeal the hated individual mandate in President Obama’s signature health care law, also known as Obamacare. This repeal has led to the charge that tax reform will result in 13 million people “losing” health insurance. In reality, the tax law merely removes a penalty for not signing up for insurance. This frees people who would not normally purchase health insurance from choosing between paying a hefty fine and buying something they would not normally buy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Remember that scene in “The Blues Brothers” when the dimwitted siblings, portrayed by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, enter a honky-tonk where they plan to play a show?

“What kind of music do you usually have here?” says Mr. Aykroyd.

“Oh, we got both kinds,” replies a chirpy barkeep. “We got country and western.”

The exchange came to mind last week when the best-selling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates quit Twitter in a huff after an argument with fellow black author Cornel West. Both men are committed liberals, but Mr. West, the veteran activist and Marxist academic, thinks that Mr. Coates’s writings don’t go far enough. Hard as it may be for some readers to fathom, Mr. West critiques Mr. Coates from the left.

What so upset Mr. Coates was a recent op-ed for the British newspaper the Guardian in which Mr. West praises his younger rival’s use of books and essays to highlight “the vicious legacy of white supremacy—past and present” and its “plundering effects” on black people. But he faults Mr. Coates for not connecting “this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.”

Ultimately, Mr. West writes, “Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable.” Mr. Coates’s focus on white absolution, in Mr. West’s view, is necessary but insufficient. “The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, U.S. military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading.”

Mr. Coates’s defenders in academia and the media dismiss these attacks as little more than jealous rage. Back in the 1990s, they contend, Mr. West was one of liberalism’s black intellectual darlings, but his star has since faded (along with his scholarly output), and now he’s lashing out in frustration at a younger generation of black thinkers. CONTINUE AT SITE

Gorsuch confirmed, ISIS defeated, taxes cut: The Trump administration has compiled a solid record of accomplishment in its first year, one that compares well with the records of many of its predecessors.

Two of the biggest accomplishments came late in the year. The prime minister of Iraq declared victory over ISIS on December 9. Republicans reached a deal that seemed to secure passage of a tax bill on December 15. Until then, it appeared possible that 2017 would end without an all-Republican government enacting any major legislation.

Now the Republicans’ policy record looks better, at least as most conservatives see it. The tax bill advances several longstanding conservative objectives. It cuts tax rates for most Americans, slashes the corporate-tax rate for the first time in decades, expands the tax credit for children, limits the reach of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, and scales back the tax break for expensive homes. By scaling back the deduction for state and local taxes, it may encourage a more conservative fiscal politics in the states. And it allows drilling to proceed in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The tax bill also partly makes up for the failure of Republican efforts earlier in 2017 to repeal Obamacare. The health-care law imposes fines on people who go without insurance. The tax bill sets the fines at zero. The least popular feature of Obamacare is thus effectively nullified.

Some conservatives would have considered voting for Trump in November 2016 worth it just for Justice Neil Gorsuch. His appointment to the Supreme Court means that Justice Scalia’s seat will remain filled by an originalist for the next few decades. If one of the Democratic appointees or Justice Anthony Kennedy leaves the Court while Republicans hold the Senate, Trump will have the opportunity to create the first conservative majority in modern constitutional history. Trump has also nominated many well-qualified conservative jurists to the appeals courts. (The quality of his district-court nominees appears to be significantly lower.)

The administration has begun to rein in regulation. It has withdrawn and modified several of the Obama administration’s regulations, often in concert with Congress. It has stopped or slowed the progress of many others that were barreling down the tracks. The Environmental Protection Agency, now run by Trump appointee Scott Pruitt, has also taken steps to end the practice of “sue and settle,” in which activist groups get the agency to adopt new policies through lawsuits.

Amid the debate over tweets and tax reform, perhaps the most significant change brought by the first year of the Trump Presidency has been overlooked: reining in and rolling back the regulatory state at a pace faster than even Ronald Reagan. This is a major reason for the acceleration of animal spirits and faster economic growth in the past year.

A rules rollback is harder than it sounds because the inertial tendency of bureaucracies is to expand, and the modern administrative state has expanded almost inexorably under presidents of both parties. New rules are published in the Federal Register, and Barack Obama presided over six of the seven highest annual page counts ever. In 2016 his regulators left town with a record-breaking binge of 95,894 new pages, according to Wayne Crews, who tracks the administrative state for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

George W. Bush wasn’t much better. His Administration added 79,435 pages in 2008, its most expansive regulatory year. By contrast in the first year of the Trump Presidency through Sept. 30, 45,678 pages were added to the Federal Register. Many were required to follow-up on legislation and rules from the Obama era, so the Trump trend is even better.
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Ten days after his inauguration, Mr. Trump issued an executive order directing his departments to scour the books for rules they could rescind or repeal without damaging the law. He also directed that for each single regulation issued, agencies should identify at least two for elimination. In one his best appointments, he named Neomi Rao to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs that must clear new rules.

Teddy’s description of the Chappaquiddick “accident” was enough to convict him of involuntary and voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Today you can add homicide by vehicle while intoxicated, a mandatory three-year prison term in most states.

The facts are simple. Kennedy drove fast, probably drunk, off a bridge at about 11:30 P.M. The pond was only about six feet deep. The front end of the car was angled down.

Kennedy walked away, went to his hotel, and waited until the next morning to report to the police. The car was discovered by two boys fishing in the morning. The boys, unlike Teddy, went to a nearby house to report the car in the water. Had Teddy done this instead of leaving, Mary Jo Kopechne probably would have been saved.

Kennedy spent the night at his hotel room drying out so there would be no alcohol in his system, and to fabricate with his fixers the statement he gave the police. During the time Kennedy was at his hotel with his fixers, Mary Jo died from suffocation.

It was negligence to drive too fast and off the road while drunk, which is involuntary manslaughter. But it was far more criminal to leave her in the car for eight or more hours, without calling for help, which may get into voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment. Kennedy had to explain why he waited almost eight hours to report to the police and had to explain why he left Mary Jo in the car.

The substance of the statement concocted by Kennedy and his fixers is that it took him until morning to realize what happened, and he did not know that Mary Jo was in the car when he left the pond.

This is Teddy’s statement to the police:

On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11:15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dike Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile [800 m] on Dike Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the backseat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.

When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions. America, President Barack Obama told us, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran’s regional predations through sanctions and other means.

Thanks to stunning new reporting from Politico’s Josh Meyer, we can now assess these assertions and conclude that they are … well, “alternative facts.”

Meyer reports that while the U.S. and other great powers were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran’s nuclear program, top officials in Obama’s government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation Cassandra, intended to undermine Hezbollah’s global drug trafficking and money laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart. Agents were reassigned. Leads and sources dried up. Bad guys got away.

Hezbollah is many things: a Lebanese political party, a militia and a Shiite religious movement. It is also an arm of Iranian foreign policy. Hezbollah shock troops fight alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders in Syria and Iraq. Iran uses the group’s operatives for international terror attacks in Latin America. Hezbollah’s advanced arsenal is supplied by the Iranian state. Hezbollah’s drug trafficking provides the revenue it needs to spread mayhem. To curb that trafficking is to starve Iran’s primary proxy.

The Obama administration believed cracking down on Hezbollah’s trafficking would undermine nuclear negotiations. As David Asher, a former Pentagon illicit finance analyst and a key player in Operation Cassandra, told Meyer: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The details are troubling. One example involves Ali Fayad, whom DEA agents suspected was the Hezbollah operative who reported directly to Russian president Vladimir Putin as a weapons supplier in Iraq and Syria. In 2014 Fayad was arrested by Czech authorities. Meyer reports that even though Fayad was indicted by U.S. courts for planning the murder of U.S. officials, “top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.” Fayad eventually found his way back to Lebanon, and is believed today to be back at his old job, supplying Russian heavy weapons to Iranian-backed militants in Syria.

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who fueled an ongoing investigation into President Trump’s administration, was a lot more confident of his charges when he wrote his now-notorious 2016 dossier than he is today in defending it in a libel lawsuit.

While Mr. Steele stated matter-of-factly in his dossier that collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russian government took place, he called it only “possible” months later in court filings. While he confidently referred to “trusted” sources inside the Kremlin, in court he referred to the dossier’s “limited intelligence.”

In recent weeks, the dossier of opposition research has taken on added importance in the debate over the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into suspected Russia coordination and whether it is biased against Trump people. Congressional Republicans are demanding that the FBI explain how the deeply contested, Democrat-financed document took on such importance in a major government investigation.

Mr. Steele wrote 35 pages of memos in which he said Trump aides were part of a vast conspiracy with Moscow to interfere in the election against Hillary Clinton. The unverified charges were spread by Fusion GPS, the Washington-based political research firm that first commissioned the report. Mr. Steele bragged to Mother Jones magazine that he started the Mueller investigation by convincing FBI agents that summer about the credibility of his dossier.

It was later revealed that the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton helped fund the dossier, meaning that in essence her paid agent was spreading unsubstantiated charges to get to the FBI to investigate her opponent, critics say.

Now that Mr. Steele must defend those charges in a London courtroom, his confidence level has shifted down several

In the dossier, he stated without reservation that an “extensive conspiracy between Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin” existed.

Lowering taxes, as presidents Kennedy and Reagan demonstrated, boosts economic growth. What is important is not that some rich people get richer, but that the vast majority of people benefit. How many Americans who despise Trump will revel in the extra wealth he has now allowed them to retain?

In Australia, and I suspect the UK and in Western Europe more generally, Donald Trump is widely despised. I try to cajole people. OK, I say, you don’t and never will like him, but can you at least look to see whether you like any or some of his policies. It is a forlorn endeavour. I will tell you why.

The vast majority of people get their news and views from the mainstream media or, if younger, from social media. Thus, the tax-reduction Christmas present that he and the US Congress are delivering to the American people (alas we are not getting one) is portrayed as benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor. That this is complete and utter tendentious drivel is by the way. Repeated often enough, it is a factoid in the making.

In fact, all but a few American taxpayers will benefit. Some with very high deductions which have now been removed or capped might not but, in the main, this will affect only the well-heeled. But here comes the rub. Those now paying most tax will on the whole gain the most benefit in absolute dollar terms. That’s the awesome power of arithmetic which so befuddles leftist minds.

In the United States, according to the Tax Policy Centre, 45% of households pay no federal income tax and, therefore, will not benefit from rate reductions. To illustrate the picture differently, the top 20% of individual income earners pay 87 percent of federal income taxes while the next 20 percent pay the rest. The bottom 60% pay a net zero percent.

For the edification of the left, halving taxes for those who pay little gives them little. Taking just five percent off taxes for those who pay an awful lot gives them much more. Democrats being Democrats, leftists being leftists, resist this unavoidable outcome with as much sanctimony as they can muster.

The real problem, of course, is that those on the left live in a static world of haves and have-nots, within which the division of the pie is the be-all and end-all. Once you are stuck in this world; as, say, is Bill Shorten, there is no exit point and around and around in circles you go preoccupied with inequality. In the end result, forcing more equal outcomes undermines market forces. The pie never grows to its potential.

The prime purpose of lowering taxes, as presidents Kennedy and Reagan argued, is to boost economic growth. What is important is not that some rich people get a lot richer out of this, but that the vast majority of people benefit.

Business taxes fall on owners or shareholders, on employees, and on customers. The incidence of benefit for any reduction in such taxes is hard to gauge. But rich and not-so-rich owners and shareholders are likely to benefit as are customers. Importantly, workers will potentially benefit though the creation of more jobs and higher pay. This is the main game. When it comes to lowering business taxes, the only question worth asking is how much lift will it likely give to jobs and economic growth. Unless you detest Trump, of course.