RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/waiting-for-durham-may-be-over_3463703.html

Things seem to be speeding up now, which is good. I was beginning to think that John Durham was auditioning for a PoMo production of “Waiting for Godot” with himself in the title role. The public would be left like Vladimir and Estragon, disillusioned and alone.

But the recent news that a felony charge has been brought against Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who altered an email and lied to the FISA court in order to get a warrant issued to surveil Carter Page and thus gain a secret backdoor entry to the Trump campaign, provides a ray of hope that Godot-Durham will appear after all. He’ll have to be quick about it, because the Democrats are already sweating bullets about what he’ll turn up.

Like Koko in “The Mikado,” I have a little list of “society offenders.” Mr. Clinesmith is on that list, but, to be honest, rather far down. True, he doctored evidence and lied in order to bring the awesome police power of the state against an innocent U.S. citizen, but at the end of the day Mr. Clinesmith was a minnow in the pond of corruption that was the deep state “plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency” (to cite the subtitle of Andy McCarthy’s book on the subject, “Ball of Collusion”).

Yes, it was preposterous for a lawyer representing Mr. Clinesmith to say that “It was never [Clinesmith’s] intent to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information he relayed was accurate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-suburbs-issue-trump-and-carson-speak/

President Trump and Secretary Carson have co-authored a strong op-ed entitled “We’ll Protect America’s Suburbs.” This piece is the administration’s most important attempt to date to break the media blockade on substantive discussion of the suburbs issue. Up to this point, instead of exploring the implications of Biden’s housing plans — including his promise to restore the AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation, and to kill single-family zoning by withholding road repairs from suburbs — the media has cried racism instead.

As Trump and Carson point out, however, Westchester County (the Obama–Biden administration’s dry run for AFFH) was never found guilty of housing discrimination. Indeed, such discrimination was never even alleged. AFFH as used by the Obama–Biden administration was never actually about ending housing discrimination. AFFH was — and remains — a massive social-engineering plan designed to tell Americans where and how to live. It will effectively put an end to local government in this country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/black-lives-matter-antifa-crowd-beat-man-unconscious-in-portland/

A crowd of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in downtown Portland beat a white man unconscious Sunday night after dragging him from his truck, video footage of the incident shows.

The crowd surrounded the man’s white truck around 10:30 p.m. near where he crashed into a light pole at Southwest Broadway and Taylor Street. At least one individual punched him as he sat inside before he was pulled out of the vehicle.The rioters punched the man and forced him to sit in the street as he tried to answer a call from his wife. One man in the crowd wearing a “security” vest delivered a kick to his head from behind that appears to have knocked him out cold and caused his head to bleed after it hit the street.

The rioters can be heard accusing the man of attempting to run them over in his truck, but video clips on social media appear to show the moments just before the attack, when the man attempted to help a person the crowd had previously robbed and beaten. When the crowd turned on him, he attempted to drive away to escape, but ended up crashing his truck.

“He wrecked his car, and he got beat up because he tried to run people over,” said one black-clad man as he escorts a crying woman to the sidewalk.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/16/trumpism-a-look-backward-and-forward-to-november/

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

If Trump left his agenda at that, NeverTrumpers likely would be disgruntled but mostly quiet. The Left, as is its wont with Republican presidents, would have remained serially hysterical as in the Reagan and Bush years, but not completely unhinged as it has been since 2017. 

What distinguished Trump then was not just his substance, but also his style. Translated it could be envisioned as chemotherapy, toxic enough to kill the status-quo cancer, but not quite lethal enough to kill the host. Or maybe Trump derangement arose from class disdain over the orange skin, the combed over dyed hair, the mile-long ties, the Queens accent, the oddly agile bulkiness, the raucous Manhattan career—the antithesis to all that appears on the Sunday morning talk shows.

https://babylonbee.com/news/report-kamala-harris-already-vetting-vp-picks

U.S.—Supporters of Kamala Harris have been eagerly awaiting an announcement on who her VP pick will be when she takes over as president approximately 5 minutes after Joe Biden is inaugurated. According to sources close to the campaign, she is already vetting possible candidates for the job. 

“I am proud to announce I will soon be announcing my pick for Vice President of the United States,” said Harris. “We have searched all across this great land. While I cannot yet confirm who my pick will be, I can say this: my pick for VP will be even MORE of a woman and even MORE of color than I am. It will be the most colorful and womanly team ever!” She then threw her head back and cackled maniacally.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/slain-dhs-whistleblower-philip-haney-not-resting-lloyd-billingsley/

Through his work in the Middle East, Philip Haney gained deep knowledge of Islam, jihad, and terrorist networks around the world. In 2016, Philip Haney authored See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. Haney was reportedly at work on a sequel, which has yet to appear.

On February 21, 2020, Haney was found dead from a gunshot wound in Amador County, California. Haney’s friends denied he was suicidal, and some were certain he had been murdered. CNN set the tone for the way establishment media would cover the case.

“Haney’s controversial accusations that the Obama administration could have prevented terrorist attacks were polarizing among Americans,” Laura Hoy reported on February 23. Hoy had no take on whether Haney’s accusations were true, and she included no citations from Haney’s book or his Frontpage articles such as, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” and “The Terrorist Ties that Bind.”

As Hoy explained, “Haney’s death is likely to become political ammo for Republicans heading into the 2020 presidential elections.” That raises questions about another key player in the case.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/why-trump-should-win-bruce-thornton/

Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms”  that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.

But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.

First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/americas_current_suicide_attempt.html

It’s tempting to look on current events as unprecedented, with divisions as deep as at any time since the Civil War.  An antidote to this ahistorical view is to read (or re-read) historian Paul Johnson’s 1983 Modern Times — especially the chapters titled “American’s Suicide Attempt” and “The Collective Seventies.” Moreover, what we are experiencing now, as a renewed suicide attempt gains traction, can be seen as a direct result of those policies and the misconceptions that produced them.   As Johnson sees it, a good part of the suicide attempt stemmed from the Vietnam War and the attempt by another Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson, to eradicate poverty.  

As historian Johnson sees it, President Johnson believed in the boundless capacity of the American economy to deliver.  While President Kennedy found it difficult to educate congress in his social spending ideas, to honor his memory, in the wake of his assassination in 1963, Johnson was able to pass bills to fund “The Great Society.”

 Johnson writes:

The danger of the kind of welfare state Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state.   Poverty increased when families split up, either by old people living apart or by divorce.   Legislation often promoted these processes.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/13/the_fiasco_of_go_ahead_break_

After looters struck downtown Chicago on Sunday night, officials literally raised the bridges to prevent rioting hordes from roaming so easily. They also blocked road access and stopped public transit. So, we have come to this: a major American city is replicating the strategy of medieval castles: flood the moats and raise the drawbridges. All that is missing are crenelated battlements and Welsh longbowmen.

In Portland, officials aren’t even raising the drawbridges. After more than 70 nights of rioting, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s strategy seems to be, “If you insist on doing this, we might write a strong letter.” He has stopped short of repeating what Monty Python’s French knight told invaders at his castle, “Go away or I will taunt you a second time.” Mayor Wheeler hasn’t taunted them a first time.

Wheeler has plenty of company among Democratic mayors and governors. Months after George Floyd’s death and the rioting and looting that followed, stores remain boarded up, criminals unpunished. Nothing says, “We protest racial injustice” like burning down the corner grocery or smashing windows to grab boxes of expensive Nikes. Instead of condemning the vandalism and jailing those who committed it, many mayors and city councils are trying to mollify their demands, slash police funding, and wait it out. The appeasement approach will fail to mollify the vandals, but it will enrage ordinary citizens, who want their lives back and an end to all this moral hectoring.

As we suffer through this summer of discontent, we can see a split emerging among big-city Democrats. Most, like Portland’s Wheeler, Minneapolis’ Jacob Frey, Seattle’s Jenny Durkan, and New York’s Bill de Blasio, favor drastic concessions to protesters, beginning with sharp reductions in police budgets. Seattle just passed a new budget cutting up to 100 officers, slashing salaries for department leaders, and dismantling the special team that removes homeless encampments, one of the city’s worst problems. Seattle’s police chief, Carmen Best, responded by announcing her retirement. She was the first black woman to head the department. No matter to the city council, which was busy congratulating itself for taking what it called “a first step” toward upending the city’s law enforcement. Still, the vote wasn’t unanimous. One council member was angry because the cuts didn’t go far enough. This isn’t sensible policy; it’s senseless self-parody.