RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/attorney-general-barr-scorches-democrats-matthew-vadum/

U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave congressional Democrats a much-deserved dressing down for endlessly excusing the orgy of violence in cities across America that has followed the wrongful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25 at the hands of police.

The Democratic Party officially endorsed Black Lives Matter in 2015 and has all but endorsed Antifa, the purported anti-fascists who embrace fascistic tactics in the name of combating fascism, a term they define promiscuously. President Donald Trump has vowed to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Even the increasingly anti-American radicals at the New York Times, which gave birth to the hateful propaganda campaign known as the 1619 Project, have been forced to admit that many police have been injured in the violent nightly demonstrations that have raged for months.

In a court filing July 22, the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon disclosed that 28 federal law enforcement officers had been injured as of that date during the civil unrest in Portland. Another court filing said there are now 114 federal law enforcement officers in Portland, brought in from federal agencies such as Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service. Local police said separately that 59 officers had been injured.

The deployment of federal agents to Portland began on the Fourth of July weekend. Reportedly, the crowds of angry subversives have since swelled from the hundreds to the thousands, as the radicals viewed the federal presence aimed at protecting federal property as a kind of invasion on their home turf.

Industrial-grade mortar fireworks have reportedly been fired at police officers and federal agents, and on July 27 a bomb was detonated at the federal courthouse in Portland.

https://spectator.us/lunacy-largely-peaceful-protest-riots-orwell/

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the ‘right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better. Just so, a contributor to the Oregonian, announcing his fears of an impending ‘anti-democratic, racist police state’, wondered whether he would find ‘the courage to resist racism and fascism’, by which I suspect he means a free, open, and democratic election in which a candidate he does not favor has the indelicacy to win.

For it should go without saying that the overriding criterion for choosing which narrative to plug is this: which story will do the most damage to Donald Trump and Republican prospects in the November election?

By and large the media has opted for option one, reasoning that most people, taking note of the Democratic character of all the most serious sites of mayhem, might forget to blame Donald Trump for the rampaging fiends tearing up our cities and shooting toddlers, policemen, stray pedestrians and each other.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/democrats-make-mockery-of-barr-hearing/

Barr brings out the worst in them, which is saying something.

If it’s a “hearing,” Bill Barr asked with an irked tongue in cheek, “aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be heard?”

His frustration was more than justified. Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) and the other Democrats who control the House demanded for months that Barr come to a “hearing” and “testify.” But of course, it wasn’t anything like an actual hearing, and they didn’t want him to testify — as in actually answer questions. The session was a coveted election-year opportunity for Democrats to berate the attorney general of the United States in five-minute installments, accusing Barr of corruption, perjury, violating his oath, betraying the Constitution — at one point, even of killing thousands of COVID-19 victims (apparently, by being attorney general during a pandemic).

Especially at the beginning of the hearing, Barr easily parried the hostile questions — soliloquies with question-marks at the end. He picked apart their misstatements and disingenuous premises, and answered with aplomb. Democrats thus dropped the threadbare pretense that this was a hearing. In the main, the rest of the afternoon was devoted to raging, mock-anguished perorations about how Trump is a dictator and how Barr is helping him destroy our democracy.

These were punctuated by the occasional petulant demand that Barr answer “yes or no” a question that was either loaded or incoherent. When Barr would begin to answer, there would be foot-stomping, indignant, “I’m reclaiming my time” interruptions, claims that there was no question pending (usually after a question had just been posed), and then more Democrat filibustering about how the American people could clearly see that Barr was afraid to answer their questions . . . that they wouldn’t let him answer.

It was an embarrassing spectacle.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-william-barr-excellent-witness-hostile-hearing/

The Barr hearing wasn’t very edifying, in large part because Democrats were utterly committed to keeping him from saying anything. One of them would make a sermonettte, pause to ask Barr a hostile question, and then angrily interrupt him when he started to answer, accusing him of taking up valuable time. Then, the sermonette would start up again.

One thing was definitely established, though — Democrats fervently believe that federal officers are attacking peaceful protesters in Portland.

Here is a typical riff from Representative Pramila Jayapal complaining that federal officers weren’t called in to crack down on anti-Whitmer protesters in Michigan:

Jayapal paints a highly misleading picture of the Michigan protesters, but, whatever you think of them, they weren’t attacking federal property or federal officers — the rioters in Portland are.

In general, Barr is an excellent witness. He’s sober, usually doesn’t let his irritation show (although he will spin his pen faster), never says more than he has to, and knows more than anyone else in the room.

It’s a tribute to how good he is that Democrats were desperate never to get caught up in a genuine back-and-forth with him

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/27/brookings-institution-flush-with-qatari-cash-nevertrump-donors/

Accepting millions from a state sponsor of terrorism, foisting one of the biggest frauds in history on the American people, and acting as a laundering agent of sorts for Democratic political contributions disguised as policy grants isn’t a good look for such an esteemed institution.

One would be hard-pressed to name a more influential think tank than the Brookings Institution. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit routinely ranks at the top of the list of the best think tanks in the world; Brookings scholars produce a steady flow of reports, symposiums, and news releases that sway the conversation on any number of issues ranging from domestic and economic policy to foreign affairs.

Brookings is home to lots of Beltway power players: Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, are Brookings fellows. Top officials from both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations lend political heft to the organization.

From 2002 until 2017, the organization’s president was Strobe Talbott. He’s a longtime BFF of Bill Clinton; they met in the 1970s at Oxford University and have been tight ever since. Talbott was a top aide to both President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Talbott, who translated Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs 50 years ago, is widely considered an expert on Russia. According to a 1994 Washington Post profile, Talbott’s dream job was ambassador to Moscow. Instead, he advised Clinton on Russia policy as his deputy secretary of state.

But Talbott’s interest in all things Russian is facing new scrutiny that threatens to tarnish Brookings’ stellar reputation—its role in perpetuating the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. As I wrote last week, the Lawfare blog, a project of Brookings, was a repository of collusion propaganda for nearly three years.

Brookings-based fellows working at Lawfare were the media’s go-to legal “experts” to legitimize the concocted crime; the outlet manipulated much of the news coverage on collusion by pumping out primers and guidance on how to report collusion events from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment to his final report.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/27/chicago-mayor-orders-removal-of-christopher-columbus-statues-in-the-city/

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-Ill.) has ordered the removal of several statues of iconic explorer Christopher Columbus, after violent protests at the monuments have seen police attacked by Antifa and Black Lives Matter terrorists, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Following the outbreaks of violence, Lightfoot ordered city workers to remove the Columbus statues located in Grant Park and Arrigo Park, with both memorials coming down early Friday morning, in the dead of night.

Lightfoot attempted to justify the city-sanctioned iconoclasm with a statement, claiming that the move was made “in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police…this step is an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/sanders-campaign-co-chair-compares-endorsing-biden-to-eating-a-bowl-of-sht/

Endorsing Joe Biden for president would be like eating a “bowl of s**t,” Bernie Sanders campaign co-chairwoman Nina Turner commented in an article that appeared in the Atlantic on Monday.

The Biden campaign has attempted to reach out to Sanders supporters since the former vice president took a commanding lead in the Democratic primaries. While many Sanders supporters have backed Biden, some progressives have made clear their disappointment at having to vote for the more centrist candidate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/founding-era-antislavery-and-the-overheated-freakout-over-tom-cottons-history-of-slavery/

The Founders did have a plan to abolish slavery; it just didn’t work out the way they expected.

As John McCormack notes, Tom Cotton may have been awkward in his phrasing, but there is nothing shocking in saying of slavery, “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” Jonathan Chait writes:

Cotton seems not to be saying that slavery was necessary in order to get slave owners to accept the union, but that it was necessary to the “development of our country.” Here, oddly enough, he is recapitulating one of the most important errors in the 1619 Project itself.

There are two ways to read “necessary”: that slavery was necessary to build the country, or that tolerating the pre-existing institution was necessary because nationwide abolition was politically and perhaps economically and socially infeasible in 1776 or 1787. I agree with Chait that the 1619 Project is off-base in claiming the former; I do not read Cotton as saying that, and the people who are jumping on him over this are, it appears, just people who already hate Tom Cotton.

The formulation that slavery was tolerated as a necessary evil at the time of the Founding, and that the Founders expected (overoptimistically) that it was on an inevitable path to extinction, is a fairly standard one, and mostly an accurate way of putting the more complicated story of Founding-era slavery and anti-slavery into a nutshell. It most accurately captures the views of the Virginia Founders (such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason), who saw slavery as wrong — unlike John C. Calhoun and his followers in a later generation, who framed it as a positive good — but were unwilling or unable to face the effort to end it. It also accurately captures the view of anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who concluded that it was not worth breaking up the new nation in a vain effort to force the South to abandon slavery immediately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-protesters-injure-six-federal-agents-with-fireworks-lasers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

At least six federal agents were injured during demonstrations in Portland Friday night when protesters launched fireworks at them and shone lasers at their eyes.

Protests have been nearly constant in Oregon’s largest city since the police custody death of George Floyd in May. Local officials have called for federal law enforcement agents deployed by the Trump administration to leave as nightly violence continues to rock the city. Some protests have been peaceful, but demonstrators who remain on the streets after dark have engaged in property destruction, throwing rocks at police, marking buildings with graffiti, and setting fires.

One agent had his hearing deadened and suffered bloody lacerations and burns on both his forearms after protesters shot a firework over the fence, the Associated Press reported. Other agents helped him to strip down to his boxers and T-shirt so his injuries could be photographed for evidence. The injured agent said he was more worried about his hearing than the injuries on his arms.

Another agent was hit in the head by a commercial-grade firework and suffered a concussion, and several agents left the demonstrations with vision issues resulting from lasers that the protesters pointed at their faces. Of the six agents injured, at least one was hospitalized.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/mccloekey-saga.html

The McClosky story deserves a recapitulation.

On June 28th, When protesters marched along his private street in St. Louis on Sunday, Mark McCloskey and his wife emerged barefoot from their mansion to wave and point loaded weapons at the crowd. Video of the fiery scene instantly went viral, even being retweeted — and then deleted — by President Trump.

But in an interview with CNN’s Chris Como on Tuesday night, McCloskey said he and his wife, Patricia, were in fact the ones being threatened.

 In July the police seized the rifile held by  Mark McCloskey.

Mark and his wife, Patricia, were not charged. Joel Schwartz, the couple’s lawyer, said a search warrant was served Friday evening and that the gun Mark McCloskey was holding in the video was seized. Schwartz told The Associated Press that arrangements have been made to turn over to authorities on Saturday the gun that Patricia McCloskey had been holding, adding that her gun was inoperable at the time of the protest and still is.

The couple have  been charged, and Schwartz said charges against them would be “absolutely, positively unmerited.”

Patricia McCloskey’s pistol was removed as well, but the DA decided to render it operable and capable of shooting by having forensics diddle with the pins. This was on order by Kim Gardner, the prosecuter.

The pro-Second Amendment McCloskey couple was seemingly framed for firearms abuses to push the Democrats’ anti-gun agenda, according to reports.