RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-midge-decter-sampler?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun%3A%20Taliban%20

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:

— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:

“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”

— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:

“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”

— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:

“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/08/the-exasperated-american/

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-taps-anti-israel-activist-cnn-spouse-as-white-house-press-sec/amp/

The White House announced on Thursday that Karine Jean-Pierre, a veteran anti-Israel activist who is married to CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, will replace outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki, raising potential ethical quandaries.

The announcement drew celebratory headlines in the mainstream press: Jean-Pierre is the first black woman and openly gay person to serve in the role.

But her relationship with the CNN reporter raises ethical questions about her new role. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether Jean-Pierre would recuse herself in dealing with CNN. Malveaux’s colleagues include Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, CNN justice correspondent Laura Jarrett, and Israel ambassador Tom Nides’s wife, Virginia Moseley, who serves as CNN’s senior vice president of news gathering.

“Suzanne Malveaux will continue in her role as CNN national correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House while Karine Jean-Pierre is serving as White House press secretary,” a CNN spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon.

Jean-Pierre’s anti-Israel past—which includes a stint as senior adviser and national spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, a far-left anti-Israel group that advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state—is raising red flags in the pro-Israel community. The selection of an Israel critic is also likely to further strain ties with the pro-Israel community and Israeli government, which already is strongly opposed to the Biden administration’s efforts to ink a new nuclear deal with Iran.

Jean-Pierre has been open about her animosity toward the Jewish state. She has accused Israel of committing “war crimes” and has backed efforts to boycott the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States’ most prominent pro-Israel lobbying shop, cheering Democrats in 2019 for boycotting the group’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., for “boldly [choosing] to prioritize diplomacy and human rights over the power of a lobbying organization.” AIPAC, she claimed, helped the Trump administration “sabotage” the Iran nuclear deal and also “supported the group that’s credited with inspiring President Trump to enact the Muslim Ban and has been known to spread anti-Muslim racism.” She accused the group without evidence of trafficking in “severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/reflections-peace-poetry-and-war-michael-finch/

The specter of nuclear war has risen again, it haunts our dreams for the first time in decades.  The “end of history” was supposed to have completed that chapter, but of course that evokes our own narrow vision of the world.  For those in the shadow of North Korea and for nations and peoples that fall in range of a seemingly inevitable nuclear Iran, those halcyon peaceful days of the end of history never existed.  Indeed, for all of us, “peace” never lasts, never endures, we all live in the shadows of chaos, war and share the nightmares of human nature and none of us can escape the horrors of our worst selves.

Trying to make logical sense of it is an impossible task, to get into God’s mind, to understand His will and his plans is a temptation that we all have, but it only leads further into a never-ending depressing fall into the abyss.  I will make sense as best I can by leaning on the writers and poets, the ideas and thoughts that speak as visions, and speak to hope.  Hope is indeed a dangerous thing, but hope and faith are all that ties us, tethers us, and anchors us from that endless abyss.

We yearn for peace, but peace is allusive.  Peace in our lives, peace in the world, it has never been, and never will be the norm.  We are blessed to live in a nation that has known peace as we have.  May we continue to be so blessed, though the horizon is darkening, and night is before us. 

The yearning is strong, but again, is so allusive.  William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem “Lake Isle of Innisfree” that “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”.  Indeed.  Wendall Berry sought answers in his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” which opens “When despair grows in me”, and “I come into the peace of wild things” closing with “I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”

And peace for the world, we also yearn for it, sometimes we become blinded by its allure.  Infamously British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 proclaimed we have “Peace for our Time”, yet just a year later the world would become fully engulfed in a war that would kill tens of millions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-loyalty-machine-democrats-dgb-disinformation-sec-climate-risk-fauci-covid-lockdowns-biden-inflation-

In her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” Elizabeth Warren describes advice she received from Lawrence Summers when he was Harvard’s president: “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

Want to see this in action? In his 2021 book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” about his time as an adviser to the Trump administration on Covid-19, the Hoover Institution’s Scott Atlas describes “a functioning troika of ‘medical experts’ composed of Drs. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield.” He “noticed that there was virtually no disagreement among them. It was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity—even though some of their statements were so patently simplistic or erroneous.” Loyalty! But was that for the best? After two years of Covid restrictions, obviously not.

Loyalty is overrated. Harry S. Truman, worried about communist infiltration, instituted a Loyalty Program in 1947 via executive order, expecting “complete and unswerving loyalty” from federal employees. Seventy years later, FBI Director James Comey insisted that President Trump, at a private dinner, asked him for his loyalty. Mr. Comey declined. Mr. Trump then asked for “honest loyalty,” which Mr. Comey agreed to, knowing it didn’t mean anything.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2019 ruling: “Presidents are not kings. . . . This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.” Amen.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/09/covid-proves-it-democrats-couldnt-care-less-about-minorities-or-the-poor/

New research reveals the enormous harm that pandemic school shutdowns had on students, and that minorities and the poor suffered the most, especially in places run by Democrats.

To understand the impact of school shutdowns on learning, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research compiled testing data on 2.1 million students in 49 states to see how school closures and the use of remote “learning” affected academic achievement.

The findings are deeply troubling. Closing schools “had profound consequences for student achievement.” Worse, it widened economic and racial education gaps. The researchers found that “high-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and the consequences for student achievement were more negative when they did so.”

One of the study’s authors, Thomas Kane, told the New York Times that “this will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

The study also revealed a wide gulf between states based on how long they shuttered their schools – ranging from a handful of weeks to 20 weeks or more.

What the authors didn’t point out, but which is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn, is that states and cities run by Democrats kept their schools closed far longer than those run by Republicans.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3480825-white-house-tacitly-endorses-intimidation-of-supreme-court-justices/

It was a horrific scene at a baseball field in Alexandria, Va. five years ago. Five people were shot while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. Among the wounded was Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was in critical condition while undergoing several surgeries to stop internal bleeding. Fortunately, he would survive, as would the others who were shot. 

They were extremely fortunate that three Capitol Police officers were present because they were assigned to Scalise given his leadership position in the House of Representatives. But if Scalise hadn’t been at practice that morning, the gunman would’ve had several more minutes before police arrived and could’ve killed or seriously injured more people. 

One would think that our leaders in Washington would have learned from this terrible day and would be doing everything in their power to condemn similar acts of violence from happening again.

But the Biden White House doesn’t seem to care that angry mobs have gone to the homes of six conservative Supreme Court justices to protest the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade after a draft document stating such, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, was leaked earlier this week. A liberal firestorm followed, as the overturning of the 1973 decision would send abortion law back to the states.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/ministry-of-truthiness

The Biden administration has set up a Disinformation Governance Board, its mission to expose, intercept, and otherwise chivy any form of untruthiness that might threaten the national security of the United States, especially if it comes from Russia. I haven’t laughed so hard since Jen Psaki, one of the nation’s top sources of disinformation, said she would continue to front another top source of disinformation, the White House press office, while under contract to join a third source of disinformation, MSNBC.

The good news is that this “Ministry of Truth” will be run by the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is the DMV of federal agencies. Its multitentacled powers of snooping and scanning are matched only by the moronic incompetence of its staff. The DHS couldn’t spot disinformation if it came singing the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” and was wrapped in a $3 bill. That’s why it’s brought in an academic expert, Nina Jankowicz, to determine what is true and what is white supremacy or shilling for Russia or whichever thoughtcrime opposes the Democratic narrative of the day.

Misinformation is incomplete or mistaken. Disinformation is, as the Russians say, “active measures.” The full truth is deliberately edited and misrepresented. Carefully curated untruths are woven into fragments of fact to create a plausible atmosphere of truthiness. You can be misinformed from innocence or its cousin at the DHS, ignorance. But disinformation is intentional. It’s “information warfare,” part of a political program.

Jankowicz knows all about disinformation. As our very own Jerry Dunleavy reported, Jankowicz has obfuscated the nature of the anti-Trump “Russian collusion” dossier compiled by the ex-British spook Christopher Steele. Jankowicz was not misinformed when she reminded Sen. Lindsey Graham that the dossier “began as a Republican opposition research project,” but he was disinformed. It’s also true that Adolf Hitler began as a painter, but it would be disinformation to leave it there.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=5c87c1d8fb

The news of the past few weeks has been all aflutter over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

The main issue for discussion has been, what does this mean for the future of free speech in the American public square? That’s an important issue, to which I don’t have the answer. I think that there are reasons for both optimism and pessimism. More on this issue later.

A second issue is what Musk’s Twitter venture signals as to progressive fantasies about net zero utopia. This second issue has been little discussed, let alone recognized at all, in the recent press coverage. So let me open the door.

The most logical way to look at what Musk is up to is that he is getting money out of Tesla in advance of an almost certain huge decline in its value, while placing his next bet on something else with a much better chance for major future growth. I think that he has recognized that the net zero utopia necessary for Tesla to have continuing exponential growth is impossible and not going to happen.

According to Forbes, Musk is currently the richest man in the world, with net worth in the range of $255 billion. That puts him far ahead of the next richest, who could be either Jeff Bezos or Bernard Arnault, each at around $140 billion, depending on current stock prices for Amazon or LVMH.