RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/trump-trial-puts-fundamental-question-to-chief-justice-roberts/

It’s a murky situation that could see none other than Vice President Harris preside.

B efore the Senate holds an impeachment trial, as many conservative and liberal writers advise, it should understand the serious constitutional issues at stake. Chief among them is whether the Senate can try a defendant who has left office. Another one, less noticed, is who would serve as the trial judge. Carefully read, the constitutional text may even allow the chief justice of the Supreme Court to scuttle the whole affair, or at the very least open up a political minefield that could cripple the new administration. The Senate would better serve the national interest simply by allowing Donald Trump to depart — which, after all, is the main objective of impeachment — rather than holding a long trial solely to disqualify him from future office.

We have written before about the constitutional challenges to impeaching Trump. He was involved in the odious attack on the Capitol during the January 6 counting of the Electoral College votes. But the current rush to impeach and try Trump may imperil multiple constitutional values.

First, the House carried out a hasty impeachment — two days — that charged Trump with the wrong crime. Convicting Donald Trump of “incitement” to insurrection will debase both the crime of incitement — which our courts have long read narrowly to protect vital free-speech values — and the meaning of insurrection. We would not give the criminals and miscreants who attacked the Capitol the higher status of insurrectionists who had ideological goals in mind.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/20/now-the-washington-post-admits-trump-did-not-incite-the-capitol-riot-n1398722

With the second bogus impeachment in the books, the Washington Post has finally seen fit to admit that President Trump did not incite the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 with his speech, acknowledging that it was, in fact, planned in advance.

The article, published Tuesday, the day before Biden’s inauguration, declares in its headline “Self-styled militia members planned on storming the U.S. Capitol days in advance of Jan. 6 attack, court documents say” and opens with the following paragraphs.

Self-styled militia members from Virginia, Ohio and other states made plans to storm the U.S. Capitol days in advance of the Jan. 6 attack, and then communicated in real time as they breached the building on opposite sides and talked about hunting for lawmakers, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

While authorities have charged more than 100 individuals in the riot, details in the new allegations against three U.S. military veterans offer a disturbing look at what they allegedly said to one another before, during and after the attack — statements that indicate a degree of preparation and determination to rush deep into the halls and tunnels of Congress to make “citizens’ arrests” of elected officials.

U.S. authorities charged an apparent leader of the Oath Keepers extremist group, Thomas Edward Caldwell, 66, of Berryville, Va., in the attack, alleging that the Navy veteran helped organize a ring of dozens who coordinated their movements as they “stormed the castle” to disrupt the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.

Several paragraphs later, here’s what the authors of the article concede:

The arrests this weekend of several people with alleged ties to far-right extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, suggest that the riot was not an entirely impulsive outburst of violence but an event instigated or exploited by organized groups. Hours of video posted on social media and pored over by investigators have focused on individuals in military-style gear moving together.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/20/the-1861-project/

Blind to age and deaf to the age we live in, Joe Biden on Wednesday spoke like a politician of a previous age. He used allusions and direct quotations to perform an illusion. But his performance was too old, his movements too obvious, his hands—his rhetorical sleight of hand—too overt to succeed. 

Biden’s inaugural performance failed because the performer failed to see that an illusion must be believable, that to play the part one must look the part, that the part is historic, not a historical reenactment. The performance failed because it was an act of procedure with bad acting; it was a repetition of words read to Mr. Biden, followed by an even worse speech by Biden.

Facts made the performance unbearable, because reality—the plain, visible reality of a multiracial assembly of former presidents and first ladies, of Barack and Michelle Obama alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton and George W. and Laura Bush—made the rhetoric unbelievable. 

The fact that Kamala Harris is not only our first female vice president but also the first Democratic vice president who is a person of color, the fact that her charge of “systemic racism” would make it impossible for her to discharge the duties of her office because she would not be eligible to vote or serve in public office if it were true, the fact that systemic racism would require the interposition and nullification of the 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution: these facts do not matter.

What matters to the faithful is the inerrancy of scripture, not contradictions in a bible with no text. How else to explain faith in a “living Constitution” and belief in the existence of eternal injustice toward nonwhites? How else to explain faith in the mastery of certain words and belief in the freedom to choose what a word means? How else to explain trespass as treason and unlawful entry in the Capitol as a capital offense?

What matters is power. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/20/the-mock-inauguration/

The conservative Catholic columnist John Zmirak ends his inauguration day column for The Stream with this expression of profound disgust:

So by all means enjoy the mock-inauguration of a corrupt, senile hack as the fruit of ballot-box stuffing and fake COVID panic. But remember that now we all live in a tinpot Bananas Republic. And a disciplined, fanatically nationalist, resurgent Red China is smiling. The virus it shipped worldwide succeeded beyond its leaders’ wildest expectations.

I quote Zmirak’s peroration because of the openness of his loathing for the administration that began its reign on Wednesday. Pat Buchanan, Roger Simon, Newt Gingrich, Roger Kimball, and Michael Walsh have all recently produced informative and eloquent columns underscoring the lies, deceit, and intimidation that they associate with the woke Left. These columnists have also documented the extent of leftist control and underlined the need to resist their odious domination.

The conservative movement has reacted to this political and existential crisis in one of two ways: either by turning viciously on the outgoing president to accommodate hoped-for talking partners on the Left, or by sounding the call for resistance, which seems the admirable position of this website.

Morally and emotionally I’m a résistant, but I think the Right must face certain problems in working out how best to resist the cultural Marxist power grab.

What we are observing is not a recent development but part of a revolutionary process that began decades ago. The Left moves incrementally, while the Right usually reacts to the most recent crisis. The Left also puts itself in a position to determine the meaning of emotive terms like “equality” and “fairness.” Leftist activists took over mass education and the culture industry without breaking a sweat. Our side allowed this power grab to go mostly unnoticed, except for a few discordant voices who failed to prevail.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/anti-trump-reprisals-matthew-vadum/

As Joe Biden, an illegitimate president, was sworn in at a funereal inauguration ceremony surrounded by thousands of U.S. troops, Democrats were busy plotting and scheming and planning reprisals against Republicans for doing nothing other than supporting his duly elected predecessor.

These anti-democratic Democrats have been driven to utter madness by the events of January 6 even though what happened that day does not compare with the months of Antifa and Black Lives Matter murdering people and burning down cities to protest the Fentanyl-caused death in police custody of George Floyd, a drug-addicted career criminal who resisted arrest.

Even the claim that five people were killed January 6 is a lie that the Left is using as propaganda against Orange Man Bad and his backers.

Three of the people –Trump supporters— who died during or after the rally died of medical emergencies.

Kevin Greeson, 55, from Alabama, who had high blood pressure, experienced a heart attack “in the midst of the excitement,” his family said. Benjamin Phillips, 50, from Pennsylvania, had a stroke. Media reports indicate Roseanne Boyland, 34, from Georgia, was trampled by the mob but it is unclear what actually happened. A purportedly authentic redacted police incident report in case #21002749 states that Boyland “was witnessed to collapse during the protest demonstrations at about 1700 hours. … Despite all lifesaving efforts, SUB-1 died and was pronounced dead by Dr. Pyle at 1809 hours.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/i-watched-bidens-inauguration-first-hand-katie-hopkins/

As I grabbed some coffee before heading to the Capitol Building to watch the 46th President of the United States of America take his title, the lovely lady behind the counter told me she had never seen anything like this in D.C. in her life.

And all I can say as I stand here now in the freezing cold with a handful of others is that I hope America never has to see anything like this again. Nothing is as it seems. It is just horrible, in every sense.

There is no one here. And I am not saying that in the weird competitive way people talk about crowd sizes as a measure of popularity. Remember the endless quarrel over the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd versus Obama’s?

What I mean is that there is literally no one here. Even pressed up to the gates within sight of the Capitol Building there is barely a handful of Biden supporters — alongside a small gaggle of media, scratching about, trying to find something to film.

Residents with the means to do so have moved out. Others stay locked in their homes. And visitors heeded the fear-mongering and stayed away. I was called ‘a moron with a death wish’ for traveling here to document this event. And even though it is perfectly safe, no one is here to bear witness to this event.

This should be an historical moment for the country. Instead it feels like an illusion, fabricated for the TV, right down to the made-for-TV flags and columns of light on the mall.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-keystone-pipeline-kill-11611184519?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden issued a blizzard of executive orders on his first day in office, including a diktat to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a slap at Canada, and it sends a message to investors that playing by U.S. rules provides no immunity from arbitrary political whim.

TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) has been stuck in the quicksand of American politics for more than a decade. A 2004 executive order requires the State Department to approve cross-border projects. In 2008 TC applied for a permit to transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude per day from the Alberta oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The Obama State Department found five separate times that the pipeline would have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude would still be extracted. Shipping bitumen by rail or tanker would result in 28% to 42% higher CO2 emissions and more leaks. No matter. President Obama in 2015 rejected the permit as an oblation to the Paris Climate accords.

President Trump gave the right of way, but legal challenges by anti-fossil fuel groups marooned the pipeline and ran out the clock on the Trump years. Now Mr. Biden is yanking Keystone’s permit and rejoining the Paris agreement. Neither action will matter to the climate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/21/trumps-top-10-triumphs-a-final-look-at-a-remarkable-presidency/

President Donald Trump became an ex-president on Wednesday, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. We wish him nothing but the best. But before we let Trump go, we thought we’d review some of his biggest accomplishments while in office. We call them “triumphs,” because they were all big achievements executed against great odds.

More than any other president of recent memory, Trump fought hard for average working Americans. And contrary to the epithets thrown at him by his far-left detractors in the Democratic Party, his policies helped low-income and minority Americans most of all.

We believe – we hope – that Trump’s post-presidential career and reputation will resemble President Ronald Reagan’s. For those old enough to remember, Reagan also was called every vile name in the book, from “senile” to “fascist” and everything between. Yet, today, in retrospect, his presidency shines as a beacon in our nation’s history.

Given the at-times unhinged nature of the criticism directed at Trump’s presidency by the left and Republican “never-Trumpers,” Trump’s performance in just four years was nothing short of remarkable. He promulgated dozens, if not hundreds, of successful policies that other presidents talked about, but never secured.

He reached so many we can’t highlight all of them. But here are 10 that we believe stand out — and that future presidents (are you listening, Joe Biden?) would be foolish to reverse or overturn:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/trumps_farewell_speech_and_the_enduring_movement_he_sparked.html

The radical left and treacherous Republicans are giddy over their success in getting rid of Donald Trump with their fraudulent overthrow of his landslide election and tarnishing his legacy with unwarranted blame for the Capitol breach.  Now they are turning their satanic wrath on the personal destruction of Trump’s nearly 74 million supporters.

Weak-kneed Republicans who rode the coattails of Trump to their own victories have now jumped ship, some saying that he created his own demise.  Highly critical, these Judases contend that Trump has been a failure as president in their attempt to undermine his many accomplishments while in office.