RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2021/08/09/watching-americas-crack-up/

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/16/january-6-as-distraction-from-afghanistan-other-crises/

While Taliban forces rapidly overtook territories across Afghanistan earlier this month, Joe Biden held an overdramatic ceremony at the White House to once again perpetuate phony narratives about the events of January 6. Biden, falsely claiming officers died as a result of the Capitol protest, signed legislation passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to the United States Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police for their actions that day.

“A mob of extremists and terrorists launched a violent and deadly assault on the people’s house,” Biden said on August 5. “It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy. It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic.”

Ten days later, an actual mob of extremists and terrorists launched an assault to seize the Afghan capital in the most humiliating defeat of American political and military leadership in at least half a century. Biden, reportedly stunned by the success of an actual insurrection on his watch, remained in hiding at Camp David all weekend.

The war in Afghanistan, unlike January 6, has been deadly, costly, and largely futile. Lawmakers of both parties now are asking tough questions about how our exit went so wrong, so quickly. Finger-pointing is happening in all different directions.

The juxtaposition of the two events, however, shows how preposterous the framing of January 6 has been from the start. It also underscores the dangerous consequences of the ruling class’ nonstop fixation on the Capitol protest.

Political, intelligence, law enforcement, and defense leaders have shamefully redirected resources and time from real crises to perpetuate the falsehood that white supremacist domestic terrorists attempted to overthrow “democracy”—whatever that means—and that jihadi-like cells of Trump supporters, not foreign adversaries, pose the most significant threat to the homeland.

For more than seven months, official Washington has been in meltdown mode over the four-hour January 6 disturbance on Capitol Hill. A day doesn’t go by without some uniformed apparatchik—from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an undercover narcotics cop—reminding the American people that their own countrymen are wannabe terrorists, ready to strike again. 

This unhinged obsession, bolstered on an hourly basis by the national news media, allows those in charge to ignore any number of real national emergencies including rising crime and escalating numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country, to name just a couple. Manufactured outrage about the imminent menace of “domestic terrorism” is fiddling while the country burns.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-finally-get-comfortable-saying-obama-is-a-jerk/

Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.

This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.

There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left office and when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.

And now this appears to be the moment when Democrats feel comfortable publicly ripping into Barack Obama. There were moments during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary where candidates and factions within the party grappled with their disappointment and recognized that if Obama was as terrific a president as they insisted, the American people would not have elected Donald Trump.

Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”

Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.

But what we’re seeing with criticism of Obama’s big birthday bash – particularly in Maureen Dowd’s column – is different; the focus is not merely policy disappointments, but an acknowledgement that Obama is being a narcissistic, self-absorbed, tone-deaf jerk.

“I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,” said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. “We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_breonna_taylor_story_the_left_doesnt_want_you_to_hear.html

“Whether you’re a United States senator or a cop from Louisville, the Left doesn’t want your story to be told if you stand in their way. They want you to leave them alone as they divide America with their falsehoods.I, for one, won’t sit by idly and let that happen. I plan to tell the truth, no matter the cost.”

Since helping to execute a search warrant for evidence in a drug trafficking ring and being shot by Kenneth Walker — the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor — in the process, my life has never been the same.

Three days after the tragic death of George Floyd — which left the nation in an uproar — the 911 call in which Walker says that someone had broken in and shot his girlfriend was released to the public. Though I wanted to respond and set the record straight about what had transpired that night, I couldn’t say anything about the case, because my fellow Louisville Metro Police Department officers and I were under a gag order. The media and the social justice outrage mob were out to get us, we weren’t allowed to stand up for ourselves, and our mayor and chief refused to set the record straight with the facts leaving us involved to dangle in the wind.

My side of the story is completely different from what you’ve heard from the media. They want you to believe that I and my fellow officers are evil racists who barged into that apartment and killed Breonna while she slept. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and I learned pretty quickly that the media and our local government officials want to make sure you never learn the truth about what happened that night.

Earlier this year, my friends at Post Hill Press courageously agreed to publish my book giving an account of what really happened that night. But before we could even begin, their distributor, Simon & Schuster, publicly declared their refusal to distribute my book — without even reading the manuscript.

After spending the last year-and-a-half watching the media, celebrities, sports figures, attorneys, and politicians spread blatant lies about the situation without any accountability, I know I must do whatever I can to make sure the true story is told. I am grateful to my friends at Post Hill Press for all of their support and guidance, but after much consideration, I have decided it is best that I explore other publishing options for my book.

I cannot continue to sit by and watch the media twist the narrative of what happened that night into a work of fiction that serves to support their anti-police agenda.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_embarrassment_that_is_joe_biden.html

Although the White House had intended to keep Biden under wraps for as long as possible, the demand that he say something – anything – about the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan forced him to leave Camp David for a 20-minute statement, after which he refused to take any questions. The important part of what he said boils down to one sentence: We had to leave and everything that went wrong was Trump’s or the Afghans’ fault. Biden is a craven coward, a feckless fool, a dismal dummy, and a man who will soon have more blood on his hands than a thousand Lady Macbeths.

Biden began by explaining that, after 20 years in Afghanistan, it was time to leave. Few people would argue with that. Whether they supported the war in the beginning or not, it had become clear to everyone that we had no clear mission there other than making money for the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. It was not in America’s interests to remain.

So, we can skip that part of the speech. It was a straw man because Biden was defending a point with which no one disagrees. You’re neither a brave nor principled man when you claim, “I stand with everyone else!”

What people wanted to hear was what Biden had to say about the abrupt American pullout from Afghanistan, one seemingly made without any forethought about the needs of the American civilians there or the Afghan troops who, although they fought bravely, needed to feel Americans were at their back. Instead, we just left. And that’s where Biden showed what a disgusting little weasel he is.

The first person at whom Biden pointed his finger was Trump saying, effectively, he set me up!

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.  Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/16/whos-tired-of-all-this-winning-under-biden/

n early July, President Joe Biden said the sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan wouldn’t cause a repeat of the Saigon disaster in Vietnam.

“None whatsoever. Zero,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question about the chances of a repeat. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Five weeks later, that is exactly what happened, as the Taliban took over Kabul and, as the Washington Post reported it, the “U.S. scrambled to evacuate embassy staff and accelerate the rescue and relocation of Afghans who aided the U.S. military. Helicopters began landing at the U.S. Embassy early Sunday and armored diplomatic vehicles were seen leaving the area around the compound. … Smoke rose from the embassy’s roof as diplomats destroyed documents to keep them from falling into the Taliban’s hands.”

The White House was reportedly “stunned” by the Taliban’s rapid victory, and Biden had to interrupt his vacation to send thousands of troops back into Afghanistan to help evacuate U.S. personnel.

It is a colossal blunder, the repercussions of which we will be suffering for years.

But we’ve already grown accustomed to colossal blunders since Biden came into office. On every issue he has touched, Biden’s managed to quickly transform victory into failure.

At the southern border, which President Donald Trump had finally stabilized, Biden immediately started reversing every one of the previous administration’s policies, while announcing to the world that the U.S. would welcome illegal border crossers with open arms.

For all of 2020, the border patrol reported a total of 458,000 “encounters” at the southern border. In just six months since Biden took office, there’ve been more than 1 million, with the number increasing every single month since January.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/17/the-pandemic-gave-americans-a-taste-of-government-help-and-they-didnt-like-it/

It’s fair to say Americans, especially the pre-revolution colonists, have always had a healthy skepticism of government. What’s frightening is some days we seem dangerously close to losing the unique quality that separates this country from every other.

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York posted last week in his Daily Memo some interesting data that tells us a lot about Americans’ attitudes about their government. He tracked a long-term Fox News survey in which respondents are asked which message they would send the government if they had the chance: “lend me a hand” or “leave me alone.”

Over the course of the last decade, only in August 2020 did a majority (57%) say it would ask for government help. In that same poll, 36% said “leave me alone.”

This year, however, the numbers were flipped – 47% said “leave me alone” while 44% still wanted aid.

In some years, the results showed a strong distrust of government. For instance, in 2014, 59% wanted to be free of the state while a mere 32% wished for help. In February 2016, the beginning of the last year of the Obama era, the numbers were 54-39 in favor of the “leave me alone” group.

But what is truly striking are the results from the last two surveys. After a large majority of Americans wanted the government to step in last year, no doubt due to the coronavirus pandemic, there was a fairly significant shift back this year to a yearning for independence.

Why? There can be no doubt Americans were lent a hand in 2020 and 2021, and they got it good and hard, to borrow a portion of one of American journalist Henry Louis Mencken’s more famous comments. Politicians panicked, petty tyrants exercised unearned authority, and this country suffered in ways few could have ever imagined.

Meanwhile, government “experts” lied, obfuscated, and contradicted themselves. As early as January of this year, long before the Delta variant set off another round of mask mandates and spiteful threats of more lockdowns, the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 57% of the country believed “government leaders” were “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”