RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/victimhood-mudslinging-define-politics-nikki-haley/

The 2024 campaign has hardly started, but the air is already filled with noxious fumes, most of it from desperate cable TV hosts and anonymous social-media posters. Don Lemon’s sexist comments about Nikki Haley are the latest example, but the vitriol has spread much wider. It reveals a dank corner of American politics, filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, degrading our public square.

Donald Trump specializes in these attacks.. He has already launched several, unsuccessfully, on the man he sees as his most formidable competitor. Calling Florida’s popular governor “Meatball Ron” and “DeSanctimonious” isn’t an argument. It’s an epithet. It has the intellectual heft of giving someone the middle finger.

Lemon’s sour attacks on Nikki Haley have attracted the most attention because he has long been a prominent media personality. Why was it sexist to say she was “past her prime?” Because Haley, now age fifty-one, is actually in her sweet spot as a rising politician. What Lemon undoubtedly meant, without actually saying so directly, is that she is past her sexual prime. That is not usually considered the best reason to pick a president. Nor has it been applied to men seeking the office. When people say Biden is “past his prime,” as they frequently do, they aren’t talking about his sex life. They are worried about his mental confusion and physical frailty.

Lemon’s rant was hypocritical, as well, because he didn’t apply that same standard to his preferred female leaders. He didn’t mention it when he backed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. She was fifty-one at the time. He didn’t mention it when he backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. She was born in 1947. He never used it to criticize Kamala Harris. She’s fifty-eight. The list goes on and on.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/22/biden-is-still-after-your-gas-stoves/

Shortly after a Biden administration official boasted about how the federal government might ban gas stoves for being “unsafe,” the White House reassured the public that no such ban was in the works.

We warned readers at the time not to believe such reassurances because “once this sort of train starts moving there is often no stopping it.”

That was in early January. It took less than a month for the Biden administration to prove us right.

Earlier this month, the Department of Energy released a proposed rule that, if implemented, would essentially regulate gas stoves out of existence.

The new proposed rule comes despite the fact that the same federal department had decided in the past that – aside from an existing ban on always-lit pilot lights – efficiency mandates on gas stoves didn’t make much sense, since all they do is burn natural gas.

But Biden’s regulators decided to ditch common sense, insisting that appliance makers could squeeze out more heat through new designs.

The industry, which knows a thing or two about building appliances that customers want and can afford, recognizes BS when it sees it.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/20/joe-biden-fiddles-with-world-war-in-ukraine-as-u-s-border-railways-burn/

Where is Biden as his country is in flames? Hiding from his crimes against Americans and our Constitution by urging atrocities in Ukraine.

Americans received a pristine view of Democrats’ disastrous America-Last policies this morning as Joe Biden paid a surprise visit to Ukraine while his own country literally burns with manmade disasters he continues to inflame.

Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency denied any money to help clean up a burning chemical disaster zone in the Republican state of Ohio, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that Biden will get a blank check to slosh around hundreds of billions from U.S. taxpayers to prolong the carnage of war in Ukraine — and the profits from it from insane deficit spending that also threatens U.S. national security.

Not only is key U.S. infrastructure on fire stateside, but Biden, in violation of his oath of office, also set the U.S. border figuratively on fire immediately upon assuming the presidency by lifting former President Trump’s effective enforcement of U.S. national security laws. Cities and towns across the United States are overwhelmed with mass human trafficking and the outsourcing of U.S. border control to international drug cartels allied with the top U.S. foreign adversary, Red China.

It’s no surprise that American support for expanding the U.S. proxy war with Russia is declining. They can see that their neighbors have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for health insurance even if they never see a doctor because they’re really paying off the health expenses of illegal migrants, and that their neighbors are dying from the fentanyl trafficked with the human flood of misery across the border.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/20/anatomy-of-a-cover-up-the-january-6-tapes/

Tucker Carlson now has the equivalent of nearly five years of surveillance footage captured by U.S. Capitol Police security cameras on January 6, 2021. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) turned over the tapes to the Fox News host  earlier this month, according to Axios. Carlson’s producers and researchers are already distilling the footage; the first round of clips is expected to air in a few weeks.

While some grumble that McCarthy did not fulfill his promise to publicly release the footage—arguably a valid complaint—Carlson’s team undoubtedly will give the massive trove much-needed context and maximum impact. Carlson released a three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” in November 2021 that explained how the events of January 6 helped launch a second “war on terror” against American citizens out of step with the Biden regime.

Since early 2021, Carlson has used his nightly show to expose the cruel treatment of Trump supporters suffering pretrial detention orders; raised questions about the use of undercover assets including FBI informants and the mysterious role of Ray Epps; asked why the case of the January 5 “pipe bomber” remains unsolved; and demanded the release of the surveillance video as late as last month.

Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

But both entities, with the help of D.C. District Court judges, have successfully kept the trove largely under wraps for more than two years. Even the FBI and D.C. Metropolitan Police departments signed agreements a few days after the Capitol protest to acknowledge that the tapes technically belonged to Capitol Police.

In a sworn statement filed in March 2021, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for the Capitol Police, insisted the footage constituted “security information” that required very limited access. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again,” DiBiase warned.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/20/the-toxic-racialist-obsessions-of-joe-biden/

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless. 

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that. 

 Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s rebellious daughter, is supposed to have quipped: “If you haven’t anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” Regardless of the quote’s validity, most of us were taught that “speech is silver, but silence is golden” and that “love conquers hate.” However, Vanessa Van Edwards, the behavioral scientist and author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People, says her research suggests that Alice may have been on to something. People form stronger bonds when they talk about someone they hate rather than someone with whom they have positive feelings.

Hatred, often coupled with tribalism, has been prominent throughout history and has led to millions being killed. Hatred of Native Americans, as well as desire for more land, was a motivating factor in opening North America to European settlers. Hatred for blacks in southern U.S. states led to an estimated 4,400 of them being lynched between Reconstruction and World War II.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/20/why-the-right-not-to-be-offended-is-offensive/

This is the last of our series about the worship of false idols and how these secular religions are eroding the fabric of our society. (The previous columns appeared  here, here, and here.) Climate obsession, the concept of ensuring equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity, and the unmooring of gender from biology have profound implications, but these generally do not have as pervasive effects as the imaginary “right not to be offended” and its progeny, self-censorship.

Claiming to be offended has become a weapon to exert control over others that is neither justified nor deserved. It is, itself, offensive, to say nothing of annoying.

For instance, a recent study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found, among other perceptions of a stifling environment, that more than two-thirds of students feared for their future if they said the wrong thing. This is hardly an isolated example of fear about hurting somebody’s feelings. Looking back, many of us laughed at “participation trophies” in everything from athletic competitions to spelling bees, because they made a mockery of genuine achievement. The concept was rooted in the belief that those who did not possess exceptional skills should be sheltered from disappointment – despite the near certainty that they were well aware of their skill level and limitations.   

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/21/bidens-ukraine-trip-an-inspiration-for-more-of-his-lies/

President Joe Biden made a “surprise” visit to Ukraine Monday. It doesn’t take a cynic to wonder how many tales from the trip he’ll come up with to pad his already bursting catalog of self-aggrandizing lies, which the media has mostly ignored for decades.

We can imagine Biden in the coming months telling audiences that “we were shot down twice” as the Air Force Special Air Mission jet approached the Rzeszow airport in Poland near the Ukraine border, and then while visiting the front, the Ukrainian forces “let me shoot some of their artillery,” which was particularly rewarding because “I know I killed bunch of Russkies and took out Corn Pop, too.”

“It reminded me,” he’ll say, “of when I was storming the beach at Normandy in ’44.”

All too much? Not even Biden would go that far in concocting some outlandish fables to make himself look better than the dolt he is? Of course he would. That’s what he does. Remember when:

Biden lied about how “his plane was fired upon” while he was flying in the Balkans, and below “bombed-out homes with snipers inside could be seen”?
During a speech he told the audience he knew “where Al Qaida lives” because it was “the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains,” but failed to mention the flight had to land due to snow and there were no terrorists around?
He told mine workers that “I am a hard coal miner,” and another time said his ancestors were coal miners, when of course he wasn’t and they weren’t? 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/20/did-bidens-trove-of-classified-docs-jeopardize-u-s-national-security-ii-tipp-poll/

Recent revelations that President Joe Biden kept classified government documents at his two namesake think tanks, his Delaware home and even his garage have largely been treated with a yawn by big media. But average Americans are paying attention and worry that Biden’s careless stewardship of classified documents endangers U.S. national security, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In our national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,358 adults, taken from Feb. 1-3, we asked Americans two questions, the first being: “How closely are you following the story about classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President found at his former office and home?”

As it turns out, Americans are paying pretty close attention to the story. Among those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, 60% said they were “closely” following the developments.

Among those following closely, 26% said they were following “very closely,” versus 34% who said “somewhat closely.”

Meanwhile, just 36% of Americans said they were not following the news closely, with 22% saying they were following it “not very closely” and only 13% saying “not at all closely.”

So it’s definitely a topic in the public eye.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19430/joyce-kilmer

Amidst the unrelenting stories of carnage, corruption and incompetence comes a reminder there is good news if you look long enough to find it.

And it should come as no surprise that this reminder comes from Brooklyn.

Generations ago, the New York City Department of Parks took a triangular piece of park property along Kings Highway in Midwood and renamed it “Sgt. Joyce Kilmer Square.” It lies along a historic Indian trail that became a major thoroughfare for European settlers traveling between rural communities called Flatbush, Gravesend, and New Utrecht.

In time, New York City would acquire the parcel as the arrival of the automobile required the realignment of many Brooklyn streets, resulting in this modest triangle. It was dedicated as parkland in 1934, and named “Sergeant Joyce Kilmer Square” in 1935.

Today it is lined with benches shaded by large oak trees, with a flagpole along East 12th Street. It is a respite for local neighbors seeking a moment’s relief from the challenges of the day.

It is a modest tribute to a giant of an American – and he likely would have had it no other way.

Kilmer was born in New Jersey before the start of the 20th Century and educated at Rutgers University and Columbia University, from where he earned his degree. Kilmer married and had four children. After teaching Latin for a year at Morristown High School in New Jersey, Kilmer began his career in 1909 as a dictionary editor with Funk & Wagnall’s Company. In 1912, he served as the Literary Editor of The Churchman, an Anglican newspaper, also contributing freelance articles and poems to several other publications. On the eve of World War I, he joined the staff of the New York Times and subsequently converted to Catholicism.