RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/whatever-happened-at-west-point-its-not-good/

As I see it, there are only two explanations for West Point’s having falsely informed a journalist that Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, not only didn’t get in to West Point but never “even applied there.” Those options are that West Point lied or that West Point is incompetent. Neither is good.

I find it hard to believe that West Point would deliberately lie about such a thing. I also find it hard to believe that its staff would be so lazy or inept as to screw something like this up by mistake. This was not some random inquiry; it was connected to an extremely consequential political decision, and related to the reputation of a high-profile figure who, if he is accepted by the Senate, will soon occupy one of the most important jobs in the United States. That being so, how is it possible that West Point did not make one hundred percent sure that it was correct in its denial? Frankly, I’d be somewhat surprised if at least someone at West Point hadn’t preemptively looked into this after the nomination was made public. If I worked there, I think I would have. At the very least, a higher-up ought to have instructed all staff to make absolutely sure they were correct when dealing with inquiries of this sort.

In all likelihood, we’ll never know what happened. What we can say, however, is that this incident has probably helped Hegseth’s chances of being confirmed. One of the main criticisms that Hegseth — and Donald Trump — have advanced in recent years is that the military bureaucracy is both out of control and resistant to civilian oversight. And here we have a golden example of one of those bureaucrats appearing to lie to a journalist about a critic. Whether that lie was inadvertent or not is unclear, but, either way, it does a lot to bolster Hegseth’s case for change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_cult_of_credentialism.html

I once saw a celebrated American author give a class of literature majors one of the best lessons they could learn.  He was speaking about the English language when he noticed that all of the students were busy taking notes rather than listening.  He paused and asked how many planned on being writers.  All hands went up.  He asked how many expected to be successful in their pursuit.  Most hands went up.  Then he looked them in the eye and told them that majoring in literature is not the way to do so.  The students were shocked (as were some of their professors), but the famous novelist continued.  He listed his favorite writers of the last century and noted that most had spotty educations and work experiences that had nothing to do with writing.  Prestigious college degrees and straight As, he told the students, are no substitute for creativity and life experience.  

It was interesting watching some of the reactions in that auditorium.  Surely literature majors had noticed that for every Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, or John Updike with a Harvard degree, there were ten Mark Twains, Ernest Hemingways, Hunter S. Thompsons, or William Faulkners whose academic achievements were rather modest.  Still, many of the young students had gotten it in their heads that if they attended the fanciest schools and read the great works of literature with enough enthusiasm, they would one day be recognized for their own literary genius.  

Watching this episode affixed in my mind a realization that our society has forgotten how to appraise genius.  For far too many decades, we have been steadily replacing the celebration of intellectual achievement with the celebration of academic credentials.  The more esteem we have accorded to the mere obtainment of a degree, the less willing we have become to recognize worthy contributions from people without the “right” curriculum vitae.  

https://dianebederman.com/the-dilemma-over-human-behavior/

A friend of mine suggested I read the book Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger by Waller R Newell. I was flattered he thought I was so well educated.

So many books have been written about human behavior. Dichotomy – Nature/Nurture? Combination? Something else? Add a little Marx and some Nietzsche, Hobbes and Locke, and Heidegger and Rousseau and: Voilà

Except I don’t know the Voilà, any more now than I did before I opened the book. I have to admit that I got lost within the first few pages of what seemed to me to be bafflegab: truth is – it’s way above my pay grade. But the topic is fascinating: The Philosophy of Freedom. It seems to be a push-pull through time.

For me, I believe the Philosophy of Freedom comes from the Bible. If we could just all follow the Ten commandments!

But, let’s carry on.

Try this:

“In order to rescue ourselves from the dreary commercial materialism of the modern age, we must try to recollect and re-energize those latent traces of ancients in ourselves. But one apparently insurmountable obstacle stood in the way of this attempt to recapture the nobility and harmony of the ancient polis – the seemingly irrefutable triumph of the modern physics of matter in motion over the metaphysical cosmologies of the ancients.”(page 1 and 2)

Got that? Well, I get the premise.

Why do we do what we do? Have we evolved or devolved? Or is it a continuum?

While I was trying to read this missive, I remembered something I had learned years ago. Biblical in its origin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/six-weeks-until-our-long-national-nightmare-is-over/

Americans, our long national nightmare, the Biden presidency, is almost over. First, we must endure six more weeks of damage that President Joe Biden will inflict on the American people.Biden just gave Hunter, his son who was convicted on gun and tax evasion charges, an expansive 11-year pardon, after repeatedly promising he would not engage in such familial favoritism. Biden’s lies were so egregious that at a recent White House press briefing, CNN reporter MJ Lee asked a very pertinent question, “The next time that the president says he will or won’t do something, why should the American people believe him?”

Of course, the American people should never believe Biden, for he has been lying and plagiarizing his entire political career. For example, in the 1988 presidential race, Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy after it was discovered he repeatedly plagiarized from the speeches of British political leader Neil Kinnock, among others.

Sadly, Hunter’s pardon will be just the beginning, for over the next six weeks, Biden will undoubtedly issue more controversial pardons. Some political observers speculate Biden could pardon other family members, such as his brother James.

He could also issue preemptive pardons for people who might face an investigation from the Trump Justice Department. This list includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired General Mark Milley, Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) and former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.

These pardons will only make the unpopular Biden more hated by the American people. According to a new poll by J.L. Partners, 52% of American voters believed it was “wrong” for Biden to pardon his son, while only 29% believed it was the “right” decision.

No wonder, another J.L. Partners poll, commissioned for The Daily Mail, ranked Biden as the worst American President in the last 47 years. Respondents ranked Biden worse than Jimmy Carter, a President who failed spectacularly, and Richard Nixon, a President embroiled in the Watergate scandal who was forced to resign.

https://www.jns.org/trumps-pick-for-civil-rights-can-doom-dei-racism/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20

Compared to some of the choices for posts in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration, this one isn’t likely to garner nearly the attention that some of the others have generated. Trump’s decision to name Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has already attracted some of the same kind of bitter criticism dished out to other more prominent picks as articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post have demonstrated. Still, compared to the storm of controversy surrounding his selections of people like Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense or Kash Patel to lead the FBI, Dhillon is a much smaller target.

That means she may be able to fly beneath the radar of both Democratic and Republican senators who are not Trump supporters, looking to demonstrate their unwillingness to do the incoming president’s will. Yet those who want to thwart Trump’s vows to not only “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., but roll back the woke ideological tide inside the government and throughout the country will be making a mistake if they underestimate the importance of this nomination. Having someone like Dhillon—an ardent opponent of the left and a proven legal fighter—in charge of what is arguably the DOJ’s most prominent and influential division is as much of a game-changer as any other appointment Trump will make in the next four years.

The head of the Civil Rights Division is not a member of the Cabinet. But it will allow Dhillon to fundamentally change not only how the U.S. Department of Justice operates but also to begin the process of reversing the left’s long march through American institutions. The question of whether the pervasive influence of the divisive and inherently discriminatory teachings of critical race theory and intersectionality will continue to dominate the education system—at the college level and in K-12 schools—could well hinge on Dhillon’s determination and success. The same applies to the widespread imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout society.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/13/the-lefts-assassination-lust-is-misdirected/

The hero worship for Luigi Mangione, the accused executioner of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is appalling to reasonable people. We understand, though, that on occasion Americans can have a legitimate grievance with their health insurance coverage. But the guilty parties are not corporate insurance executives. The culpable are the lawmakers and regulators in Washington who have hijacked the country’s health care industry.

Mangione, arrested Monday in Pennsylvania on fake ID and firearms charges, justified the slaying of health care insurance executives, which sent many on the left into spasms of delight.

“These parasites had it coming,” the new folk hero for elitists wrote in his manifesto. Sadly, Mangione, a son of privilege who favors the crumbling British government’s National Health Service, is not alone in his blind hatred for health insurance executives.

Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who has been publicly demonstrating her tenuous grip of reality and decency for years, has been a leader among the aggrieved. “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she posted on Bluesky only hours after Thompson was gunned down.

Then on Monday night on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” she said that, “along with so many other Americans,” she felt “joy, unfortunately,” at the news of Thompson’s death. She quickly tried to backtrack when she realized how malicious and deranged she sounded. But out of the abundance – or maybe the emptiness – of her heart, her mouth spoke.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/12/the-evaporation-of-the-obama-mystique/

Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Biden nomination—and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Joe Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Barack Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term—”If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation—hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything—the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/lipstick-on-a-political-pig/

The barnyard metaphor “lipstick on a pig” expresses the old wisdom that cosmetic changes can’t alter the essential nature of anything. Ever since the election, the Democrats, with a few exceptions, have been flailing about trying to explain how the unthinkable happened. Usually, the analysis––scapegoating is more accurate–– is accompanied by remedies that claim to make sure such a disaster never happens again. Most, however, are just variations of putting lipstick on their ideological pig.

Last week the Democrats elected a new chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, the point of the leftist spear carried by the leftist Dems that have dominated their party in the House for more than a decade. According to NBC’s Sahil Kapur, the prog’s new honcho, Greg Casar of Texas, is advising that the Democrats should finesse culture-war issues as actually economic ones, and thus create opportunities to plump for more dirigiste and redistributionist economic policies:

“The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” Casar said. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bye-bye-wray/

Christopher Wray might not be the worst director in the history of the FBI. After all, there was James Comey, and before him Robert Mueller. Wray, however, who finally resigned on Wednesday, completed the work that Mueller and Comey began: he oversaw the total politicization of the FBI, and its transformation from a respected law enforcement agency into an American Gestapo, a tool of partisan politics that the Biden-Harris regime wielded like a club against its political enemies, real and imagined. Christopher Wray will not be missed. The question that he leaves in his wake is whether the damage he has done can be undone, and the FBI restored, or if the whole agency should simply be shut down.

While Christopher Wray was director of the FBI, agents of his crooked agency stormed Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and scrutinized Melania Trump’s clothes closet for classified information. This was the first time in American history that a sitting president had weaponized the FBI against a political opponent, and Wray uttered not a public word about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was becoming the Democrat Bureau of Lawfare and Harassment.

Trump wasn’t the only victim, either. The Biden-Harris regime  sicced Wray’s feds on angry parents protesting at school board meetings, worked with Twitter and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views, and even sent spies into Catholic churches.

This is the legacy of Christopher Wray. And while all that was happening, Wray repeatedly insisted that “insurrectionists” and the “white supremacists” constituted the greatest terror threat the nation faces today. Not Islamic jihadists. Certainly not criminals crossing the open border and roaming free inside the United States. Wray’s ridiculous claims about “white supremacist terrorists,” as well as the agency’s focus on Jan. 6 “insurrectionists,” were a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize and destroy all political opposition to the Biden regime in the U.S.