The Trump Impeachment Is Deeply Flawed, but He Deserves Conviction
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Congressional Democrats politicized the legitimate case for removing the president. Censure is now the best option.
In Defense of Liz Cheney
By The Editors
The Wyoming Republican undertook a stunning act of political courage last week.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/16/what-should-we-submit-to/
Ministers, “watchmen on … the wall of liberty,” according to Franklin Cole, editor of “They Preached Liberty,” were among America’s greatest revolutionary influences. The most influential was Boston Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew.
Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine called Mayhew America’s “Father of Civil and Religious Liberty.” Especially important was his Jan. 30, 1750, address, which was widely printed and read. Given for the centennial of Charles I’s execution, Mayhew argued that obedience was not due oppressive governments, because such tyranny violated the divinely-instituted purpose of government to benefit the people. And if rebellion against Charles I for eviscerating British liberty was justifiable, the same arguments applied to the American loss of liberty under George III.
As we commemorate Mayhew’s birth, reconsider his argument for our liberty, which is safe only when we recognize its fundamental importance, an argument so important John Adams called it “the spark that ignited the American Revolution.”
Such as really performed the duty of magistrates would be enemies only to the evil actions of men … But how is this an argument that we must honor and submit to … such as are not a common blessing, but a common curse, to society … If magistrates are unrighteous … the main end of civil government will be frustrated. And what reason is there for submitting to that government, which does by no means answer the design of government?
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/18/bidens-covid-rescue-plan-is-based-on-5-big-lies/
Joe Biden went on prime time this week to promote his COVID-19 plans. For a guy who promises to be honest with the public, he’s off to a terrible start. Since mainstream media fact-checkers are now on their four-year vacation, we’ll set the record straight on several key claims he made.
1) “You will see it very clearly if you examine what the twin crises of pandemic and this sinking economy have laid bare.”
Sinking economy? Where has Biden been for the past six months? As the Bureau of Economic Analysis has already reported, the economy grew at a stunning 33.4% in the third quarter of this year – well above anyone’s expectations. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow pegs growth in the fourth quarter at a very strong 7.4%. (The last time GDP grew that much in a quarter was during the Reagan boom.) Unemployment, which was supposed to be close to 10% now, according to mainstream economists, is down to 6.7%. What’s more, as of November, 17 states had unemployment levels at 5% or lower. That’s not to say we are out of the woods, but the idea that the economy is “sinking” is a figment of Biden’s imagination. Either that, or he’s purposely misleading the country to justify another $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending.
Over the weekend, a Biden aid claimed the economy was “spiraling downward.”
2) “Moody’s, an independent Wall Street firm, said my approach will create more than 18 million good-paying jobs.”
It is true that Moody’s economist Mark Zandi claimed in a report that Biden’s economic plan would create millions of jobs. But as we noted in this space earlier, Zandi is a partisan with a poor track record.
It was the same Mark Zandi who predicted that if Trump won the election in 2016, he’d cause “a lot of lost jobs, higher unemployment, higher interest rates, lower stock prices.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/everyone_talks_about_rinos_but_what_
RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). It’s a popular pejorative for those members of the Grand Old Party who govern and legislate like Democrats. But why don’t we hear about DINOs? It’s surprising, given that the designation includes just about all of them.
How do you define a “democrat”? Is it someone who believes in free and fair elections, in liberal ideals of tolerance and the free exchange of ideas, in the importance of compromise? Today’s Democrats have shown little sympathy with any of the above.
Cancel culture is totally alien to the American tradition. It comes right out of Mao’s tradition. Yet Democrats have been silent as it rips through American society. They applauded Twitter’s ban of President Trump, based on a Kafkaesque reading of two of his tweets. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) praised the ban as analogous to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Nor have we heard a peep as Big Tech shut down Twitter challenger Parler. The Democrats’ most influential and radical members, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are talking about “reining in” the media, which spread “disinformation and misinformation.” Who is to discern fact from fiction? Comrade AOC, we expect.
Neither have Democrats shown themselves to be fans of free and fair elections. Not only couldn’t they come to grips with Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, smearing it with fabulist claims of Russian collusion, they seem bent on ensuring that no Republican wins again.
They don’t want to compromise with their opponents; they want to smash them.
That one-party rule is the Democrats’ fondest wish is evidenced by House Resolution 1, a bill they introduced in 2019 dedicated to “election reform.”
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4157/Uncharted-Tyranny.aspx
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
— attributed to George Orwell–
By rights, by laws, by elections, by facts, by courts, by states, by both houses of Congress, we should on this Sunday before Inauguration Day be practically tired of winning. We should be almost past the initial waves of giddiness and relief that should have carried us through the shank of 2020 as we congratulated ourselves and our neighbors on the glorious fact that on November 3, American voted themselves “Trump country,” re-electing the president in a historic landslide.
This was not just a landslide for Donald Trump and the American people; it was an even greater landslide against the criminal gangs leading the Deep State from the depths of the Swamp; the same anti-democratic forces that waged their dirty war on Trump and the voters who sent him to Washington for the past five years. Trump’s triumph proved not only that he had forged a unique bond with supporters of his America First agenda, but that not even round-the-clock brain-washing by Big Tech & Media could break it; that not even unceasing plots and operations against Donald J. Trump could break him. On November 3, 2020, the rolling coup d’etat by globalists against the America First president was once and for all shattered into smithereens by a Deplorable Nation.
It was an epic victory. Remember that.
Then came the big steal. Five swing states suspended vote-counting in the middle of the night — unthinkable, unprecendented — and the media declared Biden-Harris the winners to the silence = complicity approval of every political, government, legal, religious, and cultural institution that should have clamored for free and fair elections for all. Two long hard months of choking, suffocating psyops by the Deep State followed to undo that landslide for Trump — “baseless claims of voter fraud” is still the mantra — and destroy all legal and political efforts to unmask the thieves and reclaim the prize. The courts of this land played deaf and dumb; none of the dismissals by judges on “standing” and the like were based on reviews of the evidence (see no evidence, hear no evidence …). By contrast, and I am grateful for this, state legislatures did not lie down and play dead but held hearings and considered hundreds of sworn affidavits and testimonies claiming widespread lawlessness and multivarious kinds of fraud in the country’s elections.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/01/16/bye-bye-miss-american-pie-2-n1389919
We live in troubling times. The American election is over but the popular belief that it was fraudulently engineered shows no sign of abating. The evidence that a vast conspiracy has occurred, particularly in several swing states, is convincing for a significant portion of the electorate, and the complicity of a censoring media apparatus is undoubted. Even reputable conservative thinkers and writers, while deploring the current state of political events, seem to take cover by speaking ill of Trump, or repeating Democratic Party talking points, or doing their best to waffle the issues. Republican congressmen and women justify their pusillanimity and backstabbing, currying favor with their nominal adversaries and, as political commentator Grant Brown says, feeding their allies on the right to the crocodiles on the left. Perfidy seems to have become fashionable. In consequence, the political Left appears to have triumphed across the board.
People have trouble grasping the enormity of what has happened. The idea is almost too big for the mind to contain: a political class that has betrayed its country; a Supreme Court that effectively accepted and thus contributed to an unprecedented catastrophe by refusing to hear a suit filed by Texas and 17 other states alleging election law tampering; an education system that bears a disquieting resemblance to the German academy of the 1930s; a “free press” that is not a free press but a state propaganda network; a dedicated and effective president who has been discredited and attacked, including through incitement of political violence against him and his family; organizations like the Trump Accountability Project and the Lincoln Project compiling a “database of all Republicans who worked for President Donald Trump with the aim of ensuring they never land jobs in the private sector,” a measure associated with Fascist and Communist dictatorships; and a nation demonstrably in the throes of destabilizing turmoil. The historical context has been described by Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture as a “growing climate of apathy, cynicism and corruption [which] might be collectively termed ‘internal barbarism.’”
https://outline.com/vfZq4s
The top Justice Department official in early 2017 overseeing the FBI‘s Russia probe testified he was briefed as many as six times on its status and was told there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion, a newly released transcript shows.
The testimony of Dana J. Boente is significant because during this time the FBI took major steps to expand the probe.
And President Trump in May ended up firing then-FBI Director James Comey, a stunning move that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and two years of a White House under constant criminal scrutiny.
“There was no ‘there’ there,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, who released Mr. Boente‘s June 22 closed testimony. “The investigation was pushed when it should have been stopped and the only logical explanation is that the investigators wanted an outcome because of their bias.”
Mr. Boente‘s unique position in the new Trump administration was this: Newly confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions recuse himself from the Russia probe, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane” by the FBI. He had spoken to the Russian ambassador while a senator from Alabama.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not win Senate confirmation until late April.
That left Mr. Boente as acting deputy and in charge of Crossfire Hurricane in February, March and April. He asked to be briefed.
“I felt that it was important to know something about it,” said Mr. Boente, according to a transcript. “I don’t know if and when I was told that. I think—I recall being told at some point, maybe not February, between February and April, because thankfully my involvement ended in April, that there was no evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign.”
During this time, the FBI was ramping up the probe.
/17/leaving_the_gop_why_im_now_politically_homeless_145049.html
Psst; Don’t let the door hit you on the way out…..rsk
It took a MAGA-draped mob storming the U.S. Capitol and five deaths for a handful of Republicans in Congress finally to have the courage to stand up to Donald Trump. Ten GOP House members joined all their Democratic colleagues to impeach Wednesday, making Trump the only president ever to be twice impeached. Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican leader in the House, explained her vote: “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
But Trump’s actions last week were just the worst in a series of actions that have defiled the office. This man is the most corrupt, dishonest, and anti-democratic politician in our history. But for much of the last four years, the Republican Party leadership remained silent. Most said nothing during the past two months as Trump spewed daily lies about how the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him. Many elected officials stood with him on rally platforms as he whipped up crowds with fabricated tales of hundreds of thousands of votes cast by dead people, illegal immigrants, felons, and out of state voters, and claimed votes for him were magically switched by machine algorithms or simply discarded or shredded by renegade poll workers. …..BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
https://www.theepochtimes.com/they-want-to-cancel-our-culture-our-history-our-liberty-goya-ceo_3659453.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-01-17-1
Robert Unanue, Goya Foods President and CEO, said on Friday the political left has weaponized the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus to take away God, culture, history, and liberty from the people of the United States.
“The problem is it’s a political year. They weaponized coronavirus. Unfortunately, they shut down this economy. The worst thing we could do is shut down our economy, kill our spirit. We need a reason to get up in the morning: God, family, work. And they are taking away our spirit, they’re taking away our ability to work,” Unanue told Fox News on Jan. 15.
“We’re one nation under God. We’re not one nation under Twitter. We’re not one nation under big media and or under central government. We’re trying to have media, Big Tech control our lives, the government control our lives,” he said.
I have decided to stop writing Thoughts of the Day. To a few that will be a relief, to others a disappointment. My reasons are myriad, but in the end, they boil down to two principal points: First, I do not want my voice to become angry, which persistent political polarization will cause, and second, I like the wisdom of George Bernard Shaw, exemplified in the rubric above. When what was once fun becomes a chore, it is time to move on. Politics, while necessary, has never been “nice.” It has always been a “blood sport,” as anyone familiar with early American history knows. On July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President, shot and killed his long-time political rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel near Weehawken, New Jersey. Thus far, despite rising levels of vitriol, none of our major politicians have resorted to killing their opponents. Nevertheless, time moves on. I turn eighty in a couple of weeks, and, while I will still read three papers a day and peruse news on the internet, I want time for writing reviews and personal essays and to read more books, and I want more time with family and friends. I would like always to be able to laugh.
Thoughts of the Day began in January 2008 and were, at first, aimed at financial markets. They followed a series of Market Notes begun in March 2000. They morphed into political commentary, as 2008 became 2009. In February 2010, at the sensible suggestion of one of my sons, titles were added. Six years later, in February 2016, rubrics were added as well. Between research, writing, re-writing and editing, each takes twenty and forty hours. In all, I have written over 1000 such essays – more than a million words. My idea, not always successful, was to emphasize reason over emotion – to view the world through a clear lens. The polarization of the electorate, and the meanness that is a consequence, has made the process more difficult and, frankly, less fun. And I have always felt that if one does not enjoy what one is doing, move on. Life is too short. In 1967, I left Eastman Kodak for the Merrill Lynch training program. Then, the future was bigger than the past. In 2015, I retired from Wall Street, with the future smaller than the past. Since, the future has shrunk further.
What I shall miss are the people I have met through these scribblings, people all around the world who care deeply about freedom and liberty, truth and tolerance, civility and equality, free markets and opportunity. At heart, I am an optimist who tends to view the glass as half full. Yet, I worry about smug politicians who spend money without regard to revenues; a media that advocates, rather than reports; schools and universities that promote a “cancel culture,” and that deny conservatives the opportunity to speak; giant, social media companies (not unlike Trusts of late 19th Century), which have become monopolists that control content and speech, while protected from liability under Section 230 of the 1996 Communication Decency Act; and big corporations that have become “woke,” as they bow to shifting political winds. Keep in mind, unless commonsense prevails, censorship, identity politics and political correctness, all enshrouded in a miasma of hypocrisy, are predictors of Orwell’s 1984.
I appreciate your many responses over the years, both positive and negative. You gave me confidence and helped me think through issues more clearly. This decision does not reflect any changes in my opinions – my heart remains with the conservative cause, but I will leave it to others to take up the pen. We all have opinions. You have yours, and I have mine. We must sort through our differences to find common ground. That calls for civil debate and deliberation. Generally, I have found that both sides want the same thing – personal liberty and responsibility, equal opportunity, accountability, rule of law and tolerance for others. Differences most often lie in the means to achieve common goals. Yet our politics – and attitudes toward discussing them – have become over-heated. And I recognize I have been both victimizer and victim. However, I have tried to avoid unfair accusations and/or confrontations. Another quote from Mr. Shaw is applicable: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
What I will continue to do is write short reviews of books I have enjoyed and personal essays. The forty or so personal essays that have been written over the past five years should be published this fall under the title of “Essays from Essex: Nature, Its Miracles and Mysteries.” An exciting aspect of this book-to-be is that my grandson Alex Williams has agreed to provide half a dozen drawings, including, I hope, the cover illustration.
None of us can predict what tomorrow may bring. It may be that the pull of political commentary will yank me back to my computer. But I don’t think so. I look forward to spending more time with my wife and, when this Coronavirus finally disappears, with our children and grandchildren, in their homes.
I pray that reason and civility will return to our national politics – that victors will be humble, and losers gracious, and that meanness and retribution will disappear. Despite our differences, we should never forget the great good luck that is ours to live in this country. And may our government in Washington never lose sight of the fact that it is the people who are sovereign.
Thank you for allowing me into your lives, and I will understand if you choose to be removed from receiving my future reviews and personal essays.
In politics, let reason replace passion; in our lives, let truth be our guiding light. Good luck and best wishes,
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