RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/bidens_meeting_with_pm_boris_johnson_is_illuminating.html

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met Joe Biden at the White House. They had the usual sit-down in the room reserved for heads of state meeting the press. The substance of what they said, as best as I can tell, was pretty meaningless. What was interesting was everything other than the substance. Biden waved his ubiquitous notecards around, revealing how much he needs to be prompted; his staff ensured that no reporters could ask him questions relevant to Americans; both Biden and Boris were masked. It was a theater of the absurd.

Here’s the Daily Mail’s summary:

Joe Biden on Tuesday did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president.

Biden did attempt to answer one shouted question from a CBS reporter about the crisis on the Southern border but his answer was unclear when White House staff shouted down reporters, covering the president’s attempt to respond as they demanded journalists leave.

‘Violence is not justified,’ Biden appeared to say but the rest of his response was not decipherable.

White House staff even interrupted Johnson as they pushed to get reporters out of the room, shouting over the British prime minister as he and Biden sat in their chairs, watching the chaotic scene unfold as aides ushered journalists out of the Oval Office.

As reporters were ushered out, CBS White House reporter Ed O’Keefe shouted a question to Biden asked about the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. The administration is facing backlash and criticism following images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants or prevent them from stepping onto American soil.

But White House aides yelled ‘thank you’ and ‘let’s go’ to the press in the room, herding them out as Biden appeared to try and address the issue. Between the shouting of his aides and the president’s wearing a face mask, it was impossible to make out the majority of what Biden said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/22/wrong-way-biden-is-taking-the-nation-wildly-off-course/

“Or, perhaps more appropriately, Biden is the new “Wrongway Feldman,” the fictional “Gilligan’s Island” pilot who was described as so incompetent that he once bombed his own airfield. We’ll let history decide which one he resembles most.”

If President Joe Biden’s navigating skills were any good, the southern border would be calm, inflation under control, every American safely out of Afghanistan, and COVID defeated. Instead, we are left to wonder how it is that his sense of direction can be so fabulously wrong.

At his first-ever press conference from the White House in March, a reporter asked Biden about the surge at the border, which happened to coincide with his taking office.

“The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed,” Biden, after suggesting that he’d studied the immigration charts, said. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March.

“The reason they’re coming,” he went on, “is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert.”

At the end of April, Biden reassured the nation that he’d flown past the problem. “Well, look, it’s way down now. We’ve now gotten control.”

Right.

http://Jim%20Geraghty%20https:/www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-chinese-cdc-went-dark-on-their-u-s-counterparts/%0d%0d

You already knew that the Chinese government was spectacularly unhelpful and secretive in the pivotal early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably suspected that any book about the pandemic written by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb was going to be insightful and illuminating.

But you probably didn’t know how Gottlieb could, in a matter of paragraphs, perfectly illustrate the culpability of the Chinese government in how COVID-19 went from a virus spreading around Wuhan to a global plague that has killed, so far, more than 4.7 million people. Page 48 of Gottlieb’s new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic:

[On] January 1, CDC Director Robert Redfield emailed his Chinese counterpart, Dr. George Fu Gao, a virologist and immunologist who had served as director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017.  After receiving no response, later that day Redfield called Gao to press for more information. By January 3, the two had talked multiple times about the outbreak. The following day, on January 4, Redfield sent Gao another e-mail, again entreating for more information on the situation in Wuhan and requesting that the U.S. CDC staff be given access to the hot zone.

“I would like to offer CDC technical experts in laboratory and epidemiology of respiratory infectious diseases to assist you and China CDC in identification of this unknown and possibly novel pathogen,” Redfield wrote. Gao was emphatic that there was no person-to-person transmission and no evidence of spread within hospitals. Gao’s working theory was that the virus had been spread by contact with an animal, still unidentified, at the Huanan market. All the early cases seemed to be tied to that market. But Gao had sent Redfield a list of the first twenty-seven cases that the Chinese CDC had identified, and Redfield noticed that among them were three clusters where multiple family members were affected – a husband and wife, or a child and a parent. It seemed implausible that to Redfield that multiple members of three different families had all contracted the virus from one zoonotic exposure. Redfield told Gao he was extremely worried this was evidence of human-to-human transmission, urging Gao to look aggressively through local medical admissions for people with matching respiratory symptoms who didn’t identify the food market as a common point of contact.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/progressives-discover-fiscal-restraint-when-it-comes-israel/?utm_source=

Democrats have finally found some spending that they can oppose:

@ryanobles

 A little bit of drama with the Dem passage of the CR/ Debt ceiling in the House. A group of progressives have told leadership they will not vote for the bill if it includes $1b in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. The flap has led to the Rules Committee to go into recess.

To comprehend just how much contemporary progressives detest Israel, let’s remember that the Iron Dome is a defensive weapon. It has not only saved thousands of Jewish lives from missiles attacks emanating from Islamic terror groups but countless Palestinian lives, as well. Without it, Israel would need to retaliate for strikes with devastating force and be far more proactive in fighting Hamas — and quite likely, be compelled to reinvade Gaza. And yet a faction of Democrats are willing to sink a debt-ceiling hike over our alliance with the only liberal nation in the region.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/21/the_stain_of_afghanistan_will_stick_to_biden_146437.html

President Biden’s supporters are hewing to one message since the disastrous Afghan exit: “Voters won’t remember it.” That analysis—or hope, really—could well be wrong because the evacuation left Biden with so many problems. None are going away soon.

The most consequential is that many independent voters are deciding that Joe Biden is simply incompetent. This “buyer’s remorse” is new, and it’s growing. Although Democratic voters are still backing the president, he is now deeply underwater with independents, both on overall “favorability” and on his handling of several high-profile issues. A Quinnipiac Poll, conducted Sept. 10-13, showed only 34% of independents approved his job performance, while 52% disapproved.

Those negative views will harden unless the White House and its media allies can upend them quickly. To do that, they must turn attention away from the cumulating failures (Afghanistan, illegal immigration, the COVID pandemic, and inflation) and achieve some big legislative wins that help voters in tangible ways. Biden is counting on two mammoth stimulus bills to accomplish that, but success is far from certain. The larger one might not pass, partly because it will fuel inflation and partly because it requires Democrats to support large tax increases. Moreover, the projected benefits, if they materialize, won’t happen for a year or two. The costs will come sooner: higher taxes and perhaps higher inflation and economic sluggishness.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-the-jews

Everybody hates the Jews. That’s the refrain from the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer in “National Brotherhood Week,” a song that I had memorized by the time I was ten.

The very fact of the song’s existence, of course, is evidence of abundant American tolerance and pluralism.

But these days, the idea that “everybody hates the Jews” feels like less of a punchline and more like an accurate report of public sentiment. It seems every other day a new study or survey confirms what so many American Jews are feeling, as the old joke had it, that they are hating us more than is necessary. 

Today, came the latest study from the Brandeis Center, which released a poll of “openly Jewish” college students. Seventy percent of the students surveyed reported that they experienced antisemitism. Half of the students said they have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity at school, explaining that they felt doing so would protect them from harassment, bullying or social exclusion. This is the kind of thing we would expect to hear about the Jews of Europe. But not here.

“What is so ​​alarming about these results is that the survey focused on more than a thousand AEPi brothers and AEPhi sisters. These are kids who generally enter college with strong Jewish identities and an eagerness to be active in Jewish organizations. Instead, they are learning to hide their Judaism. And the longer they are in college, we found, the more they closet themselves,” Kenneth L. Marcus, the head of the Brandeis Center, told me. “Anyone who has been paying attention can see that what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. This should be an alarm for the entire American Jewish community.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/17/contradictions-gone-viral-n1479646

The controversy over the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines and boosters, and the validity of vaccine passports, seems only to have grown more pronounced and, indeed, more vehement with every passing week. The apologists for the vaccines—political leaders, medical “experts” (usually government-affiliated), the media and the punditocracy—have deposed that everyone must be vaccinated, unleashing an army of “fact-checkers” to torpedo any dissident argument and call the credentials and bona fides of highly accredited objectors into question, that is, when they are not being summarily censored.

The legacy press, as to be expected, is busy advancing the staple narrative of the official echelons. There are very few exceptions. I have just come across a particularly egregious and representative sample of such sanctimonious special pleading by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s National Post, worth attending to as an example of hack opportunism to be met with almost everywhere in the mainstream media. The moving finger writes, but in the case of the majority of journalists, only after it has gauged the direction of the wind.

As for our politicians and public health bureaucracies, they have put all their eggs in the mRNA vaccine basket and are now incapable of responding honestly to the bankruptcy of their policies. Their only strategy is to double down on their failure and persist in terrifying a gullible citizenry. Maintaining authority, the perks of office and reputation are powerful incentives. Notwithstanding, contradictions continue to poke holes in the consensus of what passes for official—and much public—unanimity. 

We are told that booster shots, which are coming thick and fast, are fail-safe supplements to counter the proliferation of variants. That these variants seem to have no trouble escaping the orbit of the recommended antidotes does not trouble the equanimity of our so-called “experts.” A recent report states that “An international group of vaccine experts, including officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO), said that there is no evidence to suggest that the general population needs COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.” Yet they keep coming and the variants keep humming along.

The Mayo Clinic and the CDC expediently changed their definition of vaccination from “produce immunity” to “produce protection,” essentially, from controlling the disease to reducing its symptoms. Apparently, the vaccine train and its caboose of booster shots looked as if it were beginning to run off the rails, requiring the gambit of shunting to another track. In any event, the destination is likely unattainable.