RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/how-bush-ruined-everything/

It’s impossible to forget those anxious December days when cherry-picked Florida counties continued to find handfuls of new Gore votes as recount after recount marched the 2000 election result towards a reversal of the apparent Bush victory a month earlier. Eventually the Supreme Court put a stop to the selective process which counted hanging chads in Democratic counties differently than in Republican counties. 

When Bush won, he brought with him a cabal of staffers broadly known as “neoconservatives” who distinguished themselves from traditional Republicans by ignoring deficit spending and strongly supporting interventionist foreign policy with a heavy emphasis on protecting and advancing America’s petro-allies in the Middle East. Months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration diverted America’s response to terrorism by seeking a revenge war in Iraq. 

American taxpayers poured trillions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The wars represented a new golden age for the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, as Americans developed a neo-colonial relationship with the client states in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush and his allies easily brushed aside the few complaints and warnings from traditional liberals about abuses of civil liberties and the prospect of a never-ending Vietnam-like war. I can still hear the sound of Vice President Dick Cheney chuckling dismissively on the Sunday morning talk shows as he scoffed at these fears. Sure, the wars would be expensive. But “deficits don’t matter” according to the then-vice president.

Oh, what a bitter harvest we have reaped.

History acquitted those chicken-little voices that warned of never-ending wars, ballooning deficits, and the dangers of bloated and politicized intelligence agencies. I admit it. I was wrong about Bush. He was a disaster. 

We’re reminded of this point as we watch the humiliating withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Bush’s critics, who seemed so wrong at the time, have been proven right in the sweep of history. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars turned into the very quagmires that the liberals predicted. The Intelligence Agencies were allowed to pursue and harass Muslims in the United States—even setting some up in “Truman Show”-style prosecutions in which the FBI planned and financed almost every detail of terrorism plots to ensnare lonely, mentally disabled Muslim men. The civil liberties of these “terrorists” didn’t seem very important at the time. The liberals warned that these tactics set dangerous precedents that might later be applied to larger and larger swaths of the public.

So would any of this have been different had Al Gore been elected president? 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/are-we-in-a-revolution-and-dont-even-know-it/

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them. 

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. 

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic. 

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical. 

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state? 

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/a_brief_history_of_the_unrelenting_assault_on_conservatives_as_violent_extremists.html

The assault on conservative Americans began several decades ago with attacks on traditional principles and values. Belief in individual liberty and responsibility, free enterprise, and the rule of law was willfully conflated with “right-wing extremism.” Pride in America, a desire to protect our borders, and opposition to illegal immigration was branded as xenophobic. Championing the constitutional right to bear arms was decried as gun-crazed zealotry. Belief in religion, natural law, and the sanctity of human life was maligned as backward and anachronistic.

This vilification of conservatives has coincided with a deliberate shift from the real threats: radical Islamic and leftist groups. Islamic terrorist attacks have been declared as having “nothing to do with Islam” or excused by spurious claims that the perpetrators were mentally ill or misunderstood religious doctrine. When a military psychiatrist massacred 13 people in Fort Hood yelling ‘Allahu akbar’, it was dismissed as “workplace violence.” And the violence, arson, destruction of public property, and killing of citizens and police officers unleashed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the ‘Summer of Love’ are described as “mostly peaceful protests.”

Top Democrats haven’t shied away from embellishing the false narrative of a serious domestic terrorism threat from “right-wing extremists.” On his campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama demeaned working-class voters hit hard by job losses, saying, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His statement aptly served the purpose of pillorying conservatives.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/07-08/americas-great-awokening/

“What, exactly, has gone awry in the Land of Lincoln? For starters, America’s liberals-cum-progressives, including Maher himself, have discarded traditional liberal notions about the sovereignty of the individual. American-style liberalism has committed the Aggregations Fallacy of indiscriminately combining one “good” with another “good”—the rights of the individual with the rights of the group. In an earlier revolutionary era, explained Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism, the Jacobins fervently promoted liberté and égalité without appreciating the conflicting nature of the two concepts, and so ended up with Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”. Today, extrapolating from Scruton, we are witnessing a “despotism of identity”. 

Today not even the stalwarts of American liberalism-cum-progressivism are safe from what television pundit Bill Maher calls the “woke mob”. In an episode of his HBO program Real Time, for example, Maher cited the circumstances of Emmanuel Cafferty, who last year lost his job at San Diego Gas & Electric after being photographed in the vicinity of a Black Lives Matter protest “allegedly flashing a white power gesture”. Cafferty, as it turns out, had been making his way home from work in a company truck when a (white) BLM supporter, David Bentley, snapped a picture of Cafferty’s hand formulating—or seeming to formulate—the OK gesture out of the open cabin window.

Bentley, a quintessential keyboard social justice warrior, posted the offending hand gesture, construed as a sign of white power, on Twitter. He next contacted San Diego Gas & Electric with a link to the “evidence” that one of its employees was a white supremacist. Management terminated Cafferty’s employment. Cafferty, as it happens, is a person of colour and a supporter of BLM, who has a lifelong habit of extending an arm and cracking his knuckles one finger at a time. Irritating, yes, but not exactly an endorsement of white supremacism. Maher concluded his diatribe against the injustice of Emmanuel Cafferty’s sacking and an assortment of other cancel-culture incidents with this barb: “Memo to social justice warriors. When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.”

I doubt that Maher understands the root cause of cancel culture, but he at least appreciates its brutal potential. America’s self-styled Defender of Liberal Principles is aghast that a good and honourable person—that is, a person who shares his progressive feelings—should find himself the target of public shaming for not always having been so enlightened: “Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged or said in passing, or now even just witnessed. Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990—and you didn’t do anything.” The fanaticism of the woke mob, empowered by the omnipresence of social-media platforms, makes everyone a potential victim: “Andy Warhol was wrong … In the future, every­one will not experience fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of shame.” Not even the Great Emancipator himself is safe. “[Lincoln] is now cancelled in San Francisco. And they’re thinking about it in Illinois. Yes, the Land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-vanishing-legacy-of-barack-obama

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

— Leo Tolstoy

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:

It’s all about you
Girl tonight it’s about you…
Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

ps://spectatorworld.com/topic/from-9-11-january-6-capitol-hill-riot/

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation.

Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Those names and dates — and many others —  instantly conjure a larger story about who we are. But 9/11 is oddly opaque. We sense it is significant but it is like a mountain shrouded in morning mist. We know it’s there but we can’t see it.

That may be because the terrorist attacks that day were inspired by militant Islam and executed by Muslim fanatics. It is bad manners to say that aloud or to make much of it. We still say that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’, and we censure those who dissent as guilty of ‘Islamophobia’. Our national commitment, for so it appears, to multiculturalism precludes any frank assessment of the irreconcilable elements between Western liberal democracy and the Islamic Middle East.

As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.

That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.

This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/567864-still-in-the-game-will-durhams-report-throw-a-slow-curveball-at-key

Texas Rangers infielder Brock Holt went to the mound this week and threw an eephus — a high-arching, off-speed pitch — in a game against the Oakland Athletics. It is believed to be the slowest pitch recorded in MLB history, and A’s batter Josh Harrison stood in disbelief as the 31 mph pitch was called a strike. Harrison just laughed in amazement.

Pirates outfielder Maurice Van Robays coined the term in the 1946 All-Star Game, explaining, “Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” But as Holt demonstrated, sometimes a “nothing” slow pitch can amount to a great deal.

That is equally true about the occasional criminal eephus that takes everyone by surprise. For example, U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation has been slow in coming, but on Friday, a report surfaced that he is pitching evidence to a grand jury in an investigation started back in May 2019. The Durham investigation is now longer in duration than former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and many people long forgot that Durham — made a special counsel at the end of the Trump administration — was even still in the game.

The report in The Wall Street Journal said Durham is presenting evidence against FBI agents and possibly others in the use of false information or tips at the start of the Russia investigation in 2016. Those “others” could include a virtual who’s who of Washington politics, and even if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report, expected in the coming months.

Even for those of us who followed and wrote on the Russia investigation for five years, much has been revealed in the last year. It was disclosed in October, for instance, that President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on July 28, 2016, on intelligence suggesting that Hillary Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The date was significant because the Russia investigation was initiated July 31, 2016, just three days later.

Throughout the campaign, the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the so-called Steele dossier’s allegations of Trump-Russia connections. However, weeks after the election, journalists discovered that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the dossier made to a research firm, Fusion GPS, as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the campaign’s law firm. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias, with the law firm of Perkins Coie, denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

It was not just reporters who asked the Clinton campaign about its role in the Steele dossier. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, was questioned by Congress and denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the misleading information given to Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/our-ridiculous-way-of-fighting-wars/

As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars. If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward.

Believe it or not, the anti-war Left does have a strong point. No, their point was not to be found in their human barricading of military posts or yelling in congressional meetings with ridiculous costumes. It was in their demand for the third rail of military intervention everyone dismisses: Timelines. 

We are told we cannot set timelines. We are there until “mission accomplished” (or it loses funding, as we have seen). But what if we looked at our past and realized that when a war goes beyond four or five years of mobilization, beneficial results are difficult to identify? Which “victory” was more decisive: World War II or Vietnam? Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Why can we not have a five-year timeline requirement on each war declaration/force authorization? What would a five-year timeline require? Massive deployment of forces. Massive manufacturing of equipment, mobilization of forces, etc. (think of the old World War II movies of assembly lines, etc.). Few realize we fought Desert Storm with a larger Army deployed than our total Army is now. What if we had a manpower/equipment requirement (two Armies, 600 ships, 4000 planes, etc.) before we fight? Somehow, this idea would be dismissed as ludicrous (despite it being automatic in wars we cared to win), but yet having soldiers deployed in combat for half their careers is not?