RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19923/a-tale-of-two-parties

Among his opening words of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, he captures the enormous decisions, challenges, and choices that face people, institutions, and nations:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Those choices can lead either to chaos or triumph.

While much has been said about the recent Republican presidential debate, our nation’s most important focus would probably be better spent on the policies of the representatives currently running the United States of America. Many of these politicians and officials have created a tale of two profoundly different parties — in their policies, values and their vision for the country. What once was a party that might leave a voter disagreeing with certain issues, at least one could respect its core principles.

No more.

What once was the party of FDR, Truman, and Kennedy appears to be in the throes of being torn apart by those whose agenda seeks to make government — not the voters — ever more rich, more centralized, and more intrusive in our daily lives. They have increased the national debt, which now tops out at more than $32 trillion — more than the 2022 GDP of only $25 trillion. With interest on the debt of more than $1 trillion annually, it is capable of crushing America as no foreign nation ever could.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_establishments_gallipoli_campaign_against_the_american_people.html

The illegitimate Deep State’s war against Donald Trump and MAGA-supporting Americans has taken on a stench of defeat similar to that of the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War.  In that botched attempt to take control of the Ottoman straits and seize Constantinople, the Entente powers suffered roughly 300,000 casualties over a year of desperate fighting just to make it off the beach.  It is rightly considered a colossal failure of military planning and execution and a symbol of deadly Establishment hubris.  The Battle of Gallipoli began in 1915.

A century after Gallipoli, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in the atrium of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States.  Hillary Clinton and the Democrat-controlled corporate press immediately encouraged his efforts, convinced that his nomination would doom the Republican Party.  When he finally did clinch the nomination, the same corporate news media that had insincerely sung his praises for most of the previous year quickly turned all their firing power against him.  They executed one fake news story after the next in order to sink his chances in the general election and shamelessly pushed the Russia collusion hoax propaganda created out of thin air by Hillary Clinton’s campaign operatives and Barack Obama’s corrupt Intelligence Community.  

First the Establishment busybodies not so subtly supported Trump’s rise in the Republican Party, and then they set out to annihilate him — a man who had run in many of their same social circles and had been recognized for decades as an American icon and pop-culture celebrity.  Obama adviser David Plouffe wrote emphatically: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not rise again.”

His warning to fellow “insiders” was too late.  Inflated by hubris and driven by the delusion that they had created and could therefore crush Donald Trump, the Establishment Class did not understand that it had unwisely undertaken this century’s version of the Gallipoli campaign.

Of all the politicians in America, why did toads such as David Plouffe, Bill Kristol, and communist CIA chief John Brennan eventually see Donald Trump as such a threat?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-escalates-deadly-violence/

On August 9, “The FBI shot and killed a Utah man who allegedly made online threats to kill President Joe Biden and New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg.” In establishment media reports on the FBI action, “allegedly” gets a workout.

The FBI shot dead Craig Robertson, a 74-year-old woodworker who had allegedly threatened other politicians, including Gavin Newsom and just about every Democrat except Jimmy Carter. Reports on the shooting did not include original-source documentation of the alleged threats.

According to NBC, the FBI received a tip from “a social media company” pertaining to a user called @winston4eagles. The FBI believed the person with that user name to be Robertson. He allegedly told the FBI to get a warrant and they showed up at his house in force in the early hours of August 9.

Video of the engagement does not reveal whether Robertson was armed or fired shots before the FBI shot him dead. The FBI claims Robertson brandished a .357 revolver but it was “unclear if Robertson fired the weapon.” This was hardly the only unusual aspect of the killing.

Threats to the president of the United States are normally handled by the Secret Service. The Service told reporters the action against Robertson was an “FBI-led effort.” As it happens, deployment of deadly force is longstanding FBI practice.

This month marks 31 years since the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family. For choosing to live in rural Idaho, U.S. Army veteran Randy Weaver and his family were smeared as “white separatists.”

In the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, brought on by an ATF entrapment scheme, the FBI deployed some 400 heavily armed agents, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers against Weaver and his family. The rules of engagement allowed deadly force against any family member seen with a firearm, but in effect it was shoot on sight.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/silk-road-armin-rosen

Despite its chaos and dysfunction, or perhaps as a direct result of it, New York City is an infinity of different paradises. The bleacher bums at Yankee Stadium and the bird-watchers in the Central Park Ramble have each found their utopias. Bushwick, land of amoral excess, is a mile from the part of Williamsburg where everyone is a strict Satmar Hasid. And of course there are differences, mostly visible only to Hasids themselves, between the ideal of structure and meaning on display on Lee Avenue in Williamsburg and the ones evoked in the side streets off 13th Avenue in Borough Park a few miles south, where other mystically inflected Jewish notions of the good life hold sway.

One such vision is expressed through Mitchell Silk’s townhouse. It has a pantry that doubles as a Pesach kitchen, which is a less typical feature than the nearby cabinet of silver Judaica or the dining room display of photos from the old country, great-grandparents looking severe and half-dreaming under babushkas and frock coats. But Silk is among the very few Nadvorna Hasids with a shelf of books in Chinese.

The shelf is in a skylit office built atop the townhouse’s roof, separate from the impressively spotless two floors where his wife and eight children live. This cube-shaped room has an exercise bike and is at eye level with a loudspeaker on top of a nearby school that announces the arrival of Shabbat every week. When I visited him, Silk, the first Hasidic Jew ever to hold a Senate-confirmed position in the U.S. government, wore cuff links bearing the seal of the U.S. Treasury Department.

Silk, now 61, served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets in Donald Trump’s administration. Beginning in the  mid-1980s, Silk helped pioneer the highly specialized field of China-related trade law.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/27/trumps-job-for-vivek-czar-in-charge-of-swamp-drainage/

It’s only been a few days since the first GOP debate, but already the kettle of journalist-vultures have gorged themselves on the carrion, their frenzied wake having picked the corpses bare. Alas, this feeding famishes the craving it seeks to satisfy, so we are left with sticky piles of bones, gobbets of contradictory opinion, and precious little enlightenment. We all know that when it comes to the so-called “rule of law” in this country, “the process is the punishment.” When it comes to spectacles like the Fox News-sponsored GOP debate, the process seems to be the point.

It is, I am sure you will agree, rather a pointless point, but the very pointlessness of the exercise was clearly the cherished goal.  Why else would all those producers and technicians and lovingly coiffed and pressed interlocutors Bret Baier and whatever the bleached-blonde Fox mannequin who sat next to him was called: why serve up all that fatuousness just to hear them hector the candidates with a smorgasbord of silly questions followed by the admonition: “You have 30 seconds” or “You have one minute” to answer?

I happen to have Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided on my desk at the moment. It is an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Each of the seven debates lasted about three hours. One candidate would open with a 60 minute statement, to which  the other would answer with a 90-minute response. The first speaker ended with a 30-minute rejoinder. I am trying to picture what Abraham Lincoln’s response to the instruction “You have 30 seconds to reply” would be. I can’t really do it, but I suspect it would be unprintable.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that future historians will draw a line under this snazzy pseudo-debate, marking it down as the beginning of the end of the entire genre. Given the changes in how people get their news today—not from television, mostly—this terminus a quo was probably foreordained anyway. But it was confirmed by the simultaneous broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the only serious Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump.

The bean counters tell us that about 12.4 million people watched the FoxNews debated; that’s down from about 25 million back when Trump participated in 2020 and 2016. It took only a few hours before Tucker’s interview with Trump had racked up more than 220 million views.

I am not quite sure what that number means, other than many more people tuned into Tucker than digested what Asa Hutchinson or Chris Christie or Tim Scott or Doug what’s-his-name from North (or was it South?) Dakota had to say.

Opinions vary about the performances of the A-list participants in this B-list event.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/prosecution-as-persecution/

The establishment Left’s war on Trump shows no signs of letting up.

Last week, international news reported that Germany is considering a ban on the right-wing political party Alternative for Deutschland, which has made considerable electoral gains in recent years, and which has polled recently as the country’s second most popular political party. Such a ban would effectively lock the party out of democratic government. It might be hard to imagine such a thing happening in America, but in many ways, we’re already there. As left-wing internationalists tighten their grip on state power, protecting “Our Sacred Democracy” increasingly seems to require the most draconian efforts on the part of elites to limit the choices that citizens have in elections.

It wasn’t always this way. Only ten years ago, leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton felt so little threat from typical Americans that they mocked them as “deplorables” and people “bitterly clinging” to guns and religion. But after the clingers taught the Democrats a lesson in the 2016 election, the Left establishment resolved to crush them—for good.

Weeks after Biden “won” the 2020 election, Time magazine gleefully reported on the various covert operations that “fortified” the contest against Trump. Of course, by “fortification” they didn’t mean “protection against fraud and interference.” After all, the 2020 election saw fraud and interference on a scale that would have been unimaginable only five years ago. The “fortification,” then, aimed to protect the administrative state from the electoral judgment of the public.

Aside from the documented ballot manipulation, shady methods of vote tallying, Zuckerbucks, and suspension of state-level constitutional rules regarding who has the power to modify election law—all of which benefitted Biden—there were many other forms of malfeasance. We know now that Russiagate was a post hoc effort to undermine the result of the 2016 election.

Close calls: Near Misses on Airport Runways

The U.S. has not had a fatal plane crash involving a commercial airline in more than 14 years — an incredible safety achievement.

But the elaborate system that keeps planes from crashing is struggling. In recent years, air traffic controllers, who guide planes out of harm’s way, have suffered a staff shortage. Out of 313 air traffic control facilities nationwide, just three as of May met staff targets set by the Federal Aviation Administration and the union representing controllers.

Aviation officials worry the shortage is leading to close calls, in which planes nearly crash. There were at least 46 near misses involving commercial airlines last month, according to an investigation by my colleagues Sydney Ember and Emily Steel that published this morning. Those close calls are still a small fraction of the nearly 1.4 million flights in the U.S. each month, and it is not clear whether the rate is increasing.

But any close call is dangerous, potentially leading to a fatal crash that breaks America’s safety streak. As a spokesman for the F.A.A. said, “One close call is one too many.” The agency’s goal is to reduce the number of such near misses to zero. Staff shortages make that harder.

“The controllers we’ve talked to take real pride in their job, and they work really hard to make sure these planes are safe,” Emily told me. “But they’re worried that the circumstances around their jobs could make them slip up and that those mistakes could be very dangerous.”

What is behind the shortage? Part of the problem goes back decades: In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who were on strike. The F.A.A. then hired new controllers. Many retired when they became eligible to do so 20 years later. And now, another 20 years later, another wave of controllers is retiring.

Chronic disinvestment in government services is another cause. Over the past decade, the number of fully trained controllers has fallen 10 percent, while airport traffic has increased 5 percent. The F.A.A. has asked for more money to increase hiring. Even if the agency receives those funds, it will take time to hire new controllers and train them.

In the meantime, the U.S. risks more close calls. Some in aviation worry it’s only a matter of time before the overworked system fails to stop a deadly crash.

“Aviation officials will say that we have the safest system in the world,” Sydney said. “But underlying that success are risks and issues that deserve attention.”

In some near misses, airplanes have come so close to each other that officials described the encounters as “skin to skin.”

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-clans-con-is-coming-to-an-end/

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments, while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures/

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023 

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/georgias-trump-indictment-partisan-political-hit-job/

How is it a criminal enterprise to challenge the results of a razor-thin election?

How is it a criminal enterprise if the first amendment protects it?

The sweeping 98-page document charges Former President Trump and nineteen others with various felony charges for actions that occurred in the frenetic time immediately following the 2020 Presidential Election, an election Trump officially lost by the slimmest of margins: 0.23% and 11,779 votes.

For those of us who live here in Georgia, there was a palpable feeling that something was wrong. This was the first election where we had ballot drop-off boxes spread all over with nobody keeping an eye on them. There were daily reports of ballot harvesting in nursing homes. There were mysterious water leaks where the votes were being counted, poll watchers were reporting a lack of access to the count, and the counting seemed to stop and start for no apparent reason. Cynics suspected the pauses were meant to figure out how many votes Joe Bide still needed to carry Georgia.

Once Georgia was officially called for Joe Biden, President Trump, and his team immediately cried foul and began looking for ways to challenge and even overturn the election. There did not seem to be a coherent legal strategy to get into court and challenge the election. However, one lawsuit filed in Fulton County sought to challenge 147,000 absentee ballots to see if any were illegitimate. The plaintiff was not Donald Trump. This suit alleged evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper ballot counting in Fulton County. Nine Georgia voters filed it. These voters never had their day in court because the judge dismissed the case without hearing the Plaintiff’s evidence on the grounds that they “lacked standing.”

Trump appealed to Georgia’s Secretary of State by calling and imploring him to take action to correct the perceived fraud given the razor-thin margin of defeat. In addition, Trump listened to advice and counsel from a variety of lawyers, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, to name a few.

Bill Barr reportedly told Trump the election was clean, and he lost fair and square. It remains a mystery how Barr came to this conclusion without investigating Trump’s claims of fraud. Meanwhile, Eastman and others reportedly advised Trump that it was plausible to contest the election by imploring Vice President Pence to disregard the slate of electors from Georgia (and other places) in favor of an alternate slate of Trump electors when counting the electoral college votes. For this strategy to prevail, any alternate electors would need to have their names submitted by the constitutional deadline of the 4th Wednesday in December 2020. So, in Georgia and other states, Trump supporters presented themselves as alternate electors on the theory that if any of the fraud claims could be sufficiently proven, the Vice President would be able to count the Trump Electors.