RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/20/the-loathsomeness-of-reza-aslan/

No one who was familiar with Aslan’s writings should have been terribly surprised by his Friday night tweet, which some would justifiably describe as an explicit threat of physical violence.

The tweet, sent out on the evening of September 18, only minutes after the announcement of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, was succinct and straightforward: “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f—ing thing down.” Within hours, these words had been widely retweeted and commented upon. 

Apparently, it was the author’s most attention-getting tweet since January 19, 2019, when—in the wake of the instantly famous encounter at the Lincoln Memorial involving a group of polite MAGA cap-wearing boys from Covington High School in Kentucky, a drum-banging Native American provocateur named Nathan Phillips, and a trash-talking gang of Black Hebrew Israelites—the selfsame author posted the now-iconic picture of one of the boys, Nick Sandmann, standing calmly in the face of Phillips’ provocation, and wrote: “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”

The author in question was Reza Aslan, who, when he himself was a kid, fled the Iranian Revolution with his parents for the United States, where he grew up in the Bay Area. He went on to collect a B.A. in religious studies from Santa Clara University, an M.A. in theological studies from Harvard, an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Santa Barbara. His first book, No god but God (2005), whitewashed Islam and blamed Islamic terror on Western imperialism; the predictable plaudits in such left-wing organs as the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times made it a “worldwide success” (The Guardian) and launched his career as a “multimedia force” (L.A. Review of Books). 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/dont-go-wobbly-senate-republicans-bruce-thornton/

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has occasioned the usual displays of progressive hypocrisy and flexible standards of decorum, not to mention the Dems’ scorched-earth tactics of vilification.

But the Senate Republicans can’t go wobbly at this critical moment. Donald Trump must nominate a replacement, and the Senate must confirm him or her, thus ensuring that even if Joe Biden somehow gets elected, the Supreme Court will have a 6-3 majority of youngish originalists on the court as a bulwark against the progressive project to dismantle the Constitution and “fundamentally transform” America into a technocratic “soft despotism.”

Once Donald Trump defied all predictions and defeated Hillary Clinton, the Supreme Court became the Democrats’ primary object of concern. Two vacancies filled by originalists have increased their angst. Ever since FDR threatened the Court with increasing its numbers, it has been the go-to option for progressives who stand little chance of their socialist policies and big state assaults on the Bill of Rights to pass muster with voters. Donald Trump’s improbable victory and judicial appointments have slowed that decades-long process, even though some presumably originalist justices like Chief Justice John Roberts have joined the progressives in legislating from the bench.

RBG, as she is known to progressives, became a particular worry once Trump became president. She was, as The Atlantic puts it, a “bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court,” including issues like same-sex marriage and transgender rights that, like abortion, have no basis in the Constitution. More treacly was the Independent’s Holly Baxter, who keened, “Sometimes it felt like she was America’s last hope.” Such extravagance recalls Oscar Wilde’s quip, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/breaking-judicial-norms-a-history-11600639835?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is widely reported to have told his Democratic colleagues on Saturday that “nothing is off the table for next year” if Republicans confirm a Supreme Court nominee in this Congress. He means this as a threat that Democrats will break the filibuster and pack the Court with more Justices in 2021 if they take control of the Senate in November’s election.

So what else is new? Democrats have a long history of breaking procedural norms on judges. While packing the Court would be their most radical decision to date, it would fit their escalating pattern. Let’s review the modern historical lowlights to see which party has really been the political norm-breaker:

• The Bork assault. When Ronald Reagan selected Robert Bork in 1987, the judge was among the most qualified ever nominated. No less than Joe Biden had previously said he might have to vote to confirm him. Then Ted Kennedy issued his demagogic assault from the Senate floor, complete with lies about women “forced into back-alley abortions” and blacks who would have to “sit at segregated lunch counters.” Democrats and the press then unleashed an unprecedented political assault.

Previous nominees who had failed in the Senate were suspected of corruption (Abe Fortas) or thought unqualified (Harrold Carswell). Bork was defeated because of distortions about his jurisprudence. This began the modern era of hyper-politicized judicial nominations, though for the Supreme Court it has largely been a one-way partisan street.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/20/replacing_ginsburg_could_force_a_constitutional_crisis_144252.html

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life in the law cast a long shadow. In death, she casts a long shadow, too.

Since Justice Ginsburg was both historic figure and reliable liberal vote on the United States Supreme Court, replacing her was always going to be contentious. After all, the court’s direction for years to come is at stake. Candidate Donald Trump made the “activist federal courts” a major campaign issue in 2016. As president, he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have delivered on that issue. They have confirmed over 200 new judges, almost all of them strenuously opposed by Democrats. Now, he has been given his third opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice. His first appointment replaced the late conservative icon, Antonio Scalia, with another conservative, Neil Gorsuch. His second replaced Anthony Kennedy, a moderate conservative and occasional swing vote, with Brett Kavanaugh, a more consistent conservative vote.

Replacing any Supreme Court justice is important, but substituting a conservative for a liberal giant like Ginsburg or the 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer, when he retires, would be far more consequential. That’s why the fight over the Ginsburg’s vacant seat will be so fierce, worse even than the brawl over Kavanaugh, who was smeared by multiple, last-minute allegations of sexual assault, none of which were substantiated. That fight was so toxic that several senior Democrats openly rejected the idea that Kavanaugh should be presumed “innocent until proven guilty,” a bedrock assumption of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence for over a thousand years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/systemic-racism-criminal-justice-system-make-critics-prove-charge/

Progressives say racism is everywhere in the criminal-justice system, but they don’t provide many specifics.

I  worked in the criminal-justice system for a quarter century. It is run, day-to-day, by the crème de la crème of graduates from America’s top law schools. Those institutions wear their progressive bona fides on their sleeves and proclaim it for all the world to hear.

In their offhand rhetoric — insouciant, because they know their bien pensant allies in politics and media will never call them on it — legal elites will tell you that the administration of justice in America is systemically racist. But they are the system. The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.

That’s fine. I’m a lawyer from New York City. I’ve not only lived in and around this world for decades, I have affection for lots of its denizens. Most of them are proud of being on the left. I don’t agree with them politically, but the routine handling of criminal cases is not political. It is clinical: professionals doing the best they can.

And that’s just the point: They do the best they can. That is the antithesis of racism.

These professionals strive to do justice for individual defendants. The concrete experience of routine cases in the justice system is fairness to a fault. The enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal conduct’s harsh reality. They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or reduction of jail time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/replacing-justice-ginsburg-politics-not-precedent/

The timing of Justice Ginsburg’s replacement is strictly a matter of political calculation.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lived an extraordinary American life and leaves it with glowing admiration from even those who disagreed with her. That’s all any of us can hope for.

It is an unseemly but by now commonplace sign of our times that, even though she passed away just as Rosh Hashanah had begun, the politics of a now-vacant Supreme Court seat could not be put on hold for a day, or even a few hours. On the other hand, Justice Ginsburg herself fanned the political flames. In her last days, she dictated a statement, made public after her death, expressing fervent desire that she “not be replaced until a new president is installed.”Since Supreme Court justices usually choose their words with care, we have to assume this is a wish not only that the seat remain unfilled until after January 20, but that a new president be elected in the interim. It is understandable that Democrats are already exploiting the emotional power of a liberal giant’s dying wish. Yet, while we honor Justice Ginsburg’s remarkable life, we owe her no more deference on the timing of her replacement than on the outcome of the November election.

The timing of her replacement, instead, is strictly a matter of political calculation.

On this, I will say what I always find myself saying when a vacancy on the High Court opens: It is ridiculous for leading senators, administration officials, influential partisans, and pundits to enunciate the high-minded principles and precedents that supposedly control the propriety and timing of a nomination.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ginsburg-dictated-wish-to-granddaughter-i-will-not-be-replaced-until-a-new-president-is-installed_3505898.html

Days before her death, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dictated a wish to her granddaughter related to the 2020 presidential election.

“My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” Ginsburg told her granddaughter, Clara Spera, according to NPR.

The Supreme Court said in a statement on Sept. 18 that Ginsburg, 87, passed away in the evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington from complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Ginsburg’s late wish will surely figure prominently in the debate that’s likely to ensue if President Donald Trump goes forward with appointing a new Supreme Court justice before the election on Nov. 3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said that he would move forward with approving a justice should an opening come up ahead of Election Day.

Ginsburg spent her final years on the bench as the unquestioned leader of the court’s left wing and became something of a rock star to her admirers. Young women especially seemed to embrace her, calling her the “Notorious RBG” on Twitter.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-china-class-fights-trump

Chances are that by the time you get to the end of this article, there will be news of another information operation targeting Donald Trump. There’s one a day now—each trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous. Whatever it is, it will serve the same purpose as the hundreds of similar sallies launched over the last four years—namely, to preserve and protect the position and privileges of America’s ruling elite.

Trump stories are rarely about Trump. The same stories, or versions of them, would have targeted anyone who threatened to sever the American political, corporate, and cultural elite’s economic lifeline to the Chinese Communist Party. It is largely because Trump sought to decouple the United States from the CCP that America’s China Class, which owns the platforms on which Americans communicate, has waged a relentless campaign of information warfare against him through its social media and prestige media brands.

Consider the last two anti-Trump info ops: He gratuitously denigrated the historical suffering of African Americans, and he expressed contempt for America’s war dead. These are the sort of false allegations that political operatives are tasked to manufacture and disseminate during election season. Their purpose is to reinforce a negative impression of the opposing party among whatever cohort is being addressed, and make the target spend resources—time and money and sometimes blood—on defense. That’s politics 101, since the time of the Romans.

What’s new is that this is now journalism too. Since the internet defunded the press at the end of the 20th century and social media became the dominant player in America’s information space, journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. For instance, the smear holding that Trump is contemptuous of the military was supposedly based on four anonymous sources recalling exchanges from three years ago, which have been contradicted by dozens of named sources, some of whom were physically present when the comments were supposedly made—and some of whom have been public Trump opponents. In traditional journalistic terms, that’s not a news story—that’s a failed attack line.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/uae-and-democratic-muslim-extremist-partnership-caroline-glick/

The U.S.-brokered peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which is scheduled to be finalized this week at the White House, strikes a major blow to the twin forces of Islamic imperialism and terror in the Middle East: the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and the Shi’ite regime in Iran.

The tripartite alliance between the United States, Israel and the UAE, openly supported by Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, gives an institutional structure to a pro-American regional bloc of moderate, anti-jihadist governments all with proven track records of action against the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and their surrogates.

Based as it is on shared interests, the Israel-UAE alliance is likely to persevere in the years to come. But America’s continued participation in the alliance is significantly tied to the outcome of the presidential elections.

In 2014, the UAE published a list of 82 designated terrorist groups. Nestled between al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) was the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a group with deep ties to the Democratic Party.

The UAE designation was not a slander. As former U.S. prosecutor Andrew McCarthy chronicled in his 2010 book, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,” CAIR was founded in 1994 as a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. In conjunction with other Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front groups and fundraising arms, CAIR’s job was to promote political Islam. Its operations, based in Washington, were to focus on political influence. To achieve this end, it presented itself as a civil rights organization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/party-pants-fire-accuses-trump-lying-american-don-feder/

Here’s a play on the old lawyer joke: How do you know when a Democrat is lying? The choices are: 1. During a campaign, 2. When he’s talking about Trump, 3. When his lips are moving 4. All of the above.

It was Honest Joe’s most memorable line from another week of lackluster campaigning: “Trump lied to the American people,” the old duffer said. Because the president didn’t get hysterical about the Wuhan virus initially – because he tried to reassure the public – he lied!

Admittedly, it was a mistake to tell people to come to San Francisco’s Chinatown when the virus broke out. No, wait, that was House Babbler Nancy Pelosi. At the same time, Democrats condemned Trump for stopping flights from China, interfering with the PRC’s germ-warfare project.

If POTUS had gone before the cameras at his first Coronavirus press conference and run around waving his arms and shouting: “The Black Death is coming. It’s the end of the world,” they’d now accuse him of spreading hysteria. “This is the time for calm deliberation.”