RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/memorial-days-biden-and-barry-lloyd-billingsley/

The last American president with actual combat experience, in a conflict where the United States proved victorious, was George H.W. Bush. During World War II, Bush served as a pilot with Torpedo Squadron 51 (VT-51) and on his 58th mission he was shot down by the Japanese and rescued by a U.S. submarine.

Joe Biden never served in the military but from 2008-2016 he was vice president to the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The former Barry Soetoro never served, and for the Obama-Biden team, the role of the U.S. military was not to defeat America’s enemies.

“Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them,” former Secretary of State Robert Gates explained in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War. But when Gen. Stanley McChrystal announced a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon “bridled,” and blasted the U.S. military as “in revolt” and “insubordinate.”  As it happens, Donilon was an advisor to Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988, and in 2012 Donilon orchestrated the move to put Biden at the head of China policy.

The previous year, Obama ordered SEAL Team Six to take out al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden. Vice president Biden opposed the raid on bin Laden, and his boss did not always take a hard line on terrorists.

Back in 2009 in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl deserted his outpost and wound up in custody of the Taliban. In 2014, the composite character president traded Bergdahl for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. They included Mohammed Fazi, who massacred minority Shiites; Khairullah Khairkhwa, close to Taliban founder Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden; and Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister and close confidant of Mullah Omar.

Once freed, they joined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar. In effect, the Obama-Biden team traded Pvt. Slovik for the German high command. Also worth recalling is the Obama-Biden response to terrorist attacks on American soil.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/faded-flag-bruce-thornton/

When I put out my flag for Memorial Day, I noticed how faded it was. At a time when we honor those who died defending our country and its freedom, this year my faded flag seems a portent of the dangers that lie ahead for our exceptional nation.

Nations decline the way one of Hemingway’s characters went broke: slowly, then all at once. In just four months, the Biden administration’s policy proposals, executive orders, and “woke” rhetoric suggest that we will continue to draw ever closer to that moment of “all at once.”

Many signs of decline have been evident for decades, punctuated by brief moments of revival. The Sixties and Seventies were a low point in our national morale, a time when the “best lacked all conviction, and the worst were filled with passionate intensity.” The protests over the war in Vietnam, the riots and terrorist bombings, the specious Watergate scandal, the oil crisis, economic stagflation, and the general assault on traditional virtue, faith, and morality––the Nietzschean “revaluation of all values”––  culminated in the presidency of Jimmy Carter with its rhetoric of doubt and retreat evident in his inaugural address. There he mourned the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled us not “to dwell on remembered glory,” asserted our country’s “recognized limits,” and preached that it “could only do its best.” He reprised these defeatist sentiments later in the “crisis of confidence” speech.

But Carter’s one term of failures––particularly his feeble and appeasing response to the Iranian Revolution, the violent occupation of our embassy in Tehran, and the taking hostage of its staff–– was followed by Ronald Reagan and his “morning in America” confidence and optimism. Reagan revitalized the economy, and his actions signaled to the world and our Soviet rival that the “crisis of confidence” was over, and America had recovered its nerve. He brought moral clarity to the Cold War by rejecting détente and coexistence, and stated instead, “We win, they lose.” A few years after he left office, the Soviet Union was relegated to the “dustbin of history” the Soviets had predicted for the democratic West.

In the Roaring Nineties that followed, however, the anti-American left was still tramping on its “long march through the institutions.” Many of today’s toxic ideas like “cancel culture” and “systemic racism” were incubated during those years in the universities, whence they infected public schools, entertainment, and the Democrat Party. More immediately dangerous, the extravagant optimism of the “end of history,” the triumph of liberal democracy over Soviet communism, reinforced the idea of a “New World Order,” the transnational, multilateral “rules-based international order” that presumably would transcend the parochial, and dangerous, interests and passions of diverse sovereign nation-states.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/01/we-need-an-honest-kitchen-table-discussion-over-federal-spending-and-national-debt/

America is gripped with numerous problems induced by Biden and Co.: New Middle East wars; gas shortages; overrun borders, and; displaced pipeline workers, to name a few. But right up front remains the specter of government spending, out-of-control debt, and rising inflation.

Much like millions of American families who gather at their kitchen tables to consider money and budget issues, America desperately needs a national, honest, and relevant discourse of how our politicians are managing our taxpayer budget and spending, and national debt.

At the American family level, of course, spending more than you bring home is cause for grave concern. Upon the first signs of trouble, ordinary people must adjust or face ever-growing severe economic troubles. Why shouldn’t the same sober, honest economic review apply to our federal, state, and local government spending?

After all, governments don’t actually produce the revenue they spend. They take that productivity from real Americans, off real kitchen tables. And that fact has profound consequences for the American family and our economic future.

For instance, the recent Biden $1.9 trillion bailout spending bill will cost the average family of four in America almost $15,000. That’s right, the $1,400 per family “Covid Relief” check from Uncle Sam will cost you $13,600 in higher taxes and more debt. Meanwhile, we pay the unemployed more to stay home than return to vital small businesses and the productive sector.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/01/this-isnt-the-man-voters-put-in-the-white-house/

Earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency, we wondered if his wife Jill was running the White House, and in effect the country. It’s still not out of the question, but it’s beginning to look more like Chief of Staff Ron Klain, unelected and not confirmed by the Senate, is the real president. This should make all Americans uncomfortable.

Klain, who was the vice president’s chief of staff when Biden held that office, has been called “the man executing Biden’s mission” (which seems to be carrying out the Cloward-Piven model that advocates manufacturing a political and economic crisis so that politicians can accrue more power in order to fix it, and use that power to kill off capitalism). He’s also been called Biden’s “co-pilot and fixer.” 

Yes, those descriptions could be used to define the chief of staff for any president of any party. There are times, however, and this appears to be one of them, when a chief of staff wields too much authority.

Klain is no statesman. He’s a confirmed “political animal.” Anyone who thinks that’s a benign label that could be applied to any Washington operative, consider that the Democrats are doing their best to transform America from a civil society into a political society, where government intervention into private affairs is the rule rather than the rare and unwanted exception.

While the Washington press corps and much of the U.S. media are playing the role of Biden’s publicists, the London Times reports, in what has to be an accidental indictment of the White House arrangement, that Klain is “the driving force behind the actual president,” an “operator who knows the business of government inside out.” The reporter who wrote the story, one Sarah Baxter, wants readers to meet “President Klain,” who also happens to be Biden’s “brain.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-mayor-lori-lightfoot-john-perazzo/

Shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of May 24, a 17-year-old black youth named Keyshawn Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Oakley Boulevard when someone in a silver BMW opened fire and killed him in a drive-by shooting.

The night before that, a 25-year-old African American named Ladell Arnold was riding in a vehicle along West Flournoy Street in Chicago at 7:10 p.m. when he was shot and killed by a nearby gunman.

The night before that, a 46-year-old black man named Johnnie Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue at 7:30 p.m. when some people riding in two passing vehicles shot him dead while also wounding two others.

And at 11:50 p.m. the night before that, a 15-year-old black boy named Dajon Gater was on the front porch of a West Lexington Street house in Chicago, when two armed males approached and killed him with a gunshot to the head.

Like four tiny grains of sand among many thousands in an hourglass, the names of these four dead victims blend imperceptibly into the long list of African Americans whose lives in recent years have been snuffed out by other blacks in the killing field known as Chicago. During the past 12 months alone, more than 820 people have been victims of homicide in The Windy City. And most of them were blacks killed by other blacks.  

Of course, you’ve never before heard of any of the four individuals cited above – nor will you ever come across their names again – for the simple reason that none of their deaths can be traced to the actions of a white police officer – or to the actions of any white person at all, for that matter. Thus, there will be no Black Lives Matter protest marches held in their honor; no $25,000 celebrity-funded golden caskets eternally encasing their bodies in the grave; and no gaggle of reporters or “civil rights leaders” repeatedly recounting, with pained and pious countenances, the tragic stories of how these four individuals died, far too young, in America’s third largest city. No, the only words publicly memorializing these four people will be the names etched silently on their tombstones.

The chief political executive of the hell hole called Chicago is Lori Lightfoot, the latest in an unbroken, 90-year line of exclusively Democrat mayors extending all the way back to 1931. Under Lightfoot’s stewardship, homicides in Chicago increased by an astonishing 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 – a pattern that was seen in a host of Democrat-run cities after George Floyd’s death a year ago. And Chicago’s stratospheric homicide rate has continued well into 2021.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, and Distinguished Members of the Congress: April 19, 1951

I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride — humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised. Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faith of the entire human race. I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.

I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country. The issues are global and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector, oblivious to those of another, is but to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is commonly referred to as the Gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the Gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other. There are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect on both fronts, that we cannot divide our effort. I can think of no greater expression of defeatism. If a potential enemy can divide his strength on two fronts, it is for us to counter his effort. The Communist threat is a global one. Its successful advance in one sector threatens the destruction of every other sector. You can not appease or otherwise surrender to communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.

Beyond pointing out these general truisms, I shall confine my discussion to the general areas of Asia. Before one may objectively assess the situation now existing there, he must comprehend something of Asia’s past and the revolutionary changes which are — which have marked her course up to the present. Long exploited by the so-called colonial powers, with little opportunity to achieve any degree of social justice, individual dignity, or a higher standard of life such as guided our own noble administration in the Philippines, the peoples of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colonialism and now see the dawn of new opportunity, a heretofore unfelt dignity, and the self-respect of political freedom.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/duty-honor-and-kamala-harris/91527/

Not since President Obama’s speech to graduating cadets of the class of 2014 at West Point have there been remarks to a military academy as atonal as those Vice President Harris just delivered to the midshipmen at Annapolis. Ms. Harris talked to our midshipmen trained for naval warfare of the perils of climate change and the niftiness of solar panels. Not a peep about how Russia, Iran, and Red China are maneuvering for conquest.

What a wan note on which to begin the Memorial Day weekend at which we remember our fallen. It’s similar to the blunder that President Obama made when, as we were at the height of the global war on terror, he went to West Point and tried to inspire the cadets by lecturing them on how not every problem has a military solution. The New York Post headline called it “The Long Gray Whine.”

The remarks of Ms. Harris, like those of Mr. Obama, fit the strategy of retreat and appeasement that seems to have been favored by the Democratic Party in recent decades. It started, in our view, with Vietnam and since has marked the party’s policies in one theater after another — right now in the Middle East and Afghanistan. And it’s not that our liberal traditions don’t offer a prism through which to understand our military academies.

We marked this when five years ago the then-president of Harvard, war historian Drew Faust, spoke at West Point. She had brought ROTC back to Harvard. She then went up the Hudson to deliver a tribute that we called “surprisingly personal and moving.” She spoke of her great-grandfather, who went to West Point and, in the Apache War, appeared in arms against Geronimo and, in World War I, breached the Hindenburg Line.

https://dianebederman.com/revenge-racism-attacking-the-soul-of-america/

Francis Bacon “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.” 

Today, we are witnessing what I call Revenge Racism promoted by leaders of  Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory and Left Wing Ideologues. As declared by Angela Harris  in her foreword to “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”:

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

It is a full frontal attack on western morals, values and ethics that teach all people are born with equal intrinsic value: that we are defined by our character, not characteristics, also known as identity politics.

Today, sadly, we are  witnessing white hatred being promoted as an antidote to “systemic racism” despite the fact that we know racism can lead to physical as well as mental illness that lasts generations because we have witnessed it in the black community.

This is Revenge Racism.

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-destiny-of-america/

“Our country does not want war, it wants peace. It has not decreed this memorial season as an honor to war, with its terrible waste and attendant train of suffering and hardship which reaches onward into the years of peace. Yet war is not the worst of evils, and these days have been set apart to do honor to all those, now gone, who made the cause of America their supreme choice. Some fell with the word of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” almost ringing in their ears. Some heard that word across the intervening generations and were still obedient to its call. It is to the spirit of those men, exhibited in all our wars, to the spirit that places the devotion to freedom and truth above the devotion to life, that the nation pays its ever-enduring mark of reverence and respect.

It is not that principle that leads to conflict but to tranquility. It is not that principle which is the cause of war but the only foundation for an enduring peace. There can be no peace with the forces of evil. Peace comes only through the establishment of the supremacy of the forces of good. That way lies only through sacrifice. It was that the people of our country might live in a knowledge of the truth that these, our countrymen, are dead. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

This spirit is not dead, it is the most vital thing in America. It did not flow from any act of government. It is the spirit of the people themselves. It justifies faith in them and faith in their institutions. Remembering all that it has accomplished from the day of the Puritan and Cavalier to the day of the last, least immigrant, who lives by it no less than they, who shall dare to doubt it, who shall dare to challenge it, who shall venture to rouse it into action? Those who have scoffed at it from the day of the Stuarts and the Bourbons to the day of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns have seen it rise and prevail over them. Calm, peaceful, puissant, it remains, conscious of its authority, “slow to anger, plenteous in mercy,” seeking not to injure but to serve, the safeguard of the republic, still the guarantee of a broader freedom, the supreme moral power of the world. It is in that spirit that we place our trust. It is to that spirit again, with this returning year, we solemnly pledge the devotion of all that we have and are.”

https://speakola.com/ideas/oliver-wendell-holmes-memorial-day-speech-1884

EXCERPT:

“But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

Such hearts–ah me, how many! –were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year–in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life–there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apple trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier’s grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march–honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass away.

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death–of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.”