RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/12/coup-plotters-fear-the-quickening/

The mood on the set of MSNBC was grim.

Rachel Maddow fought back tears of rage. Brian Williams struggled to make sense of it all. A former U.S. senator flailed her arms in frustration and indignation.

Their collective panic attack, however, was not caused by the results of the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night. The electoral tie between an aged socialist and a sinister small-town mayor did not alarm the panelists assembled around the colorful set, shoulders stooped in despair, eyes ablaze.

The humiliating fifth-place finish of the former vice president who claimed he would beat Donald Trump “like a drum,” the aviator sunglasses-clad bestie of Barack Obama who allegedly would stomp the president in the Heartland, did not at all concern the network’s gobsmacked hosts.

No, Maddow and company’s hysterics centered around the news that Attorney General William Barr had intervened to reduce an egregious sentencing recommendation against Roger Stone, a former Trump confidant convicted of five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness-tampering, and one count of obstruction of justice. (Otherwise known as a day at the office for California congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.)

Federal prosecutors, continuing their work from the now-concluded Mueller investigation, told a judge that Stone, who is 67 years old with no prior criminal record, should serve seven to nine years in jail. When Barr heard the news, he appropriately intervened. (Some news outlets reported that the Stone prosecutors had misled the attorney general’s office about their intentions.) The four government lawyers, including two alums from Team Mueller, subsequently resigned from the case.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-democrats-february-blues/

All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February.

On Feb. 3, the Iowa caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting the very idea of caucusing in general.

The winner — Pete Buttigieg by two delegates over Bernie Sanders — was not known for days. The mess was ironic in a number of ways.

The Democrats are the party of the Silicon Valley. They pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of youthful computer culture. But the inability to count simple votes was a bitter reminder that they understand the cyber world no better than their Republican opponents.

Voters might remember the 2013 meltdown of the Obamacare website, the abject failure of Hillary Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated 2016 campaign analytics, and the incompetence of supposedly tech-driven 2016 polling.

Four years ago, the Democratic Party found ways to thwart socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary bid. Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile leaked CNN debate questions to Hillary Clinton, and the party used superdelegates to nullify Sanders’ grassroots surge.

Pelosi’s Biggest SOTU Mistake Wasn’t Tearing Up the Speech

This time around, the release of a pre-caucus Des Moines Register poll was canceled for the first time ever. Rumors swirled that the Democratic establishment was embarrassed over the likely strong showing of Sanders. Such conspiracy theories were only further fueled when it was not known for days who actually won the caucuses.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/5-times-barack-obama-protected-his-allies-from-justice/

EXCERPT

5. The New Black Panther Party

You may remember images and video from Election Day 2008, with members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a Philadelphia polling place wearing military garb making racial remarks and discouraging people from voting. A voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers began weeks before Obama took office. It was an open-and-shut case, and the New Black Panthers didn’t even show up in court to defend themselves, assuring the government’s victory in the case. Then in May 2009, the case was inexplicably dropped by Attorney General Eric Holder.

By the summer of 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department in the New Black Panther Party case. It was quite clear that under Obama and Holder, civil rights cases against minorities discriminating against whites were being systematically ignored. Holder still denied there was a racial motivation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in March 2011, justifying the decision not to prosecute the NBPP by bizarrely citing the roadblocks African Americans endured when trying to vote in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws.

4. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder took part in a scandalous, incompetent gun-running project known as “Fast and Furious” from 2009 to 2011, and did everything in his power to protect his boss, Barack Obama, during that investigation. In return for his steadfast loyalty, Obama protected Holder, who was aggressively stonewalling the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee investigation into Fast and Furious. Obama’s asserting of executive privilege was not only to protect himself but also to protect Holder ahead of the Oversight Committee’s vote to declare Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents from the committee. Ultimately it didn’t save Holder from being held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan vote.

3. Senator Robert Menendez

In 2012, just days before the November election, ICE agents were ready to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender, but were ordered by the Department of Homeland Security to wait until after the election. Why? The suspect was a volunteer intern for Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and there would be “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations about the arrest. Menendez was seen as vulnerable in the 2012 election, and the delay of the arrest saved him from a potentially politically damaging scandal on the eve of voting. All the while letting a sexual offender avoid justice for six weeks.

2. Sexual Predator Kevin Johnson

In 2009, Barack Obama illegally fired Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Walpin’s only crime was that he was investigating Obama’s friend and donor, Kevin Johnson. Johnson had misused federal grant money for AmeriCorps by funneling it to his personal nonprofit group, paying for political activity, and using it to pay hush money to underage girls he’d sexually abused. When Walpin recommended charges against Johnson, Obama, in violation of federal law, fired him.

An investigation by Congress into the illegal firing was met with stonewalling by the Obama White House, and the withholding of documents. The Obama White House also deliberately misled Congress about the reasons for the firing.

1. Hillary Clinton

It’s hard to think of anyone who has managed to avoid accountability more than Hillary Clinton, and her response to the Stone sentencing story was her latest example of a lack of self-awareness.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/trump-battles-progressive-fear-society-bruce-thornton/

“Fear Society” is Natan Sharansky’s term for a socio-political order that flunks the “town square” test: People are too frightened to speak their mind in public spaces because they fear retribution. A victim of Soviet tyranny before emigrating to Israel, for Sharansky the consequences of free expression could be arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death. For us, the regime of political correctness, “cancel culture,” “microaggressions,” and “woke” commissars reinforces a similar repression, a “softer” one, as Tocqueville called it, but effective nonetheless in silencing dissent and promoting an illiberal progressive ideology.

Sharansky goes on to describe the consequences of living in a fear society, which typically comprises three groups: “true believers,” those who sincerely believe in the regime’s ideology; “dissidents,” those who oppose the regime and speak out against it; and “doublethinkers,” the majority who oppose the regime yet do not publicly express their opposition, particularly to outsiders.

Donald Trump’s political success has emboldened the conservative and Republican “doublethinkers” to express their opinions in the “town square” and challenge the domination that for several decades the progressives have enjoyed over political speech.

In Europe, hate speech laws and the absence of the legally recognized natural right to free speech that we enjoy allow the state to legally sanction or punish speech the EU doesn’t like. In contrast, here in the U.S. indirect methods of enforcement are more typically used. One method is to discredit and ostracize any alternative to progressive doctrine: “The most successful tyranny,” Harold Bloom wrote, “is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-roger-stone-sentencing-fiasco/

Some Justice Department personnel handled it questionably, but Trump’s reaction was worse.

The first thing to grasp about the Roger Stone sentencing fiasco is that Stone, even accepting the worst plausible gloss on his crimes, is a 67-year-old nonviolent first offender. If the criminal-justice “reform” fad were authentic, and not a stratagem of social-justice warriors who have taken Washington’s surfeit of useful idiots for a ride, then we could all agree that the original seven-to-nine-year sentence advocated by prosecutors was too draconian — even if it was, as we shall see, a faithful application of the federal sentencing guidelines as written.

But no. Like criminal-justice “reform,” the Stone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement. It was the Mueller probe’s last gasp at pretending there might be something to the Russia-collusion narrative – notwithstanding that, when the “gee, it sure feels like there could be some collusion here” indictment was filed, over a year and a half after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it had long been manifest that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy.

So, the Left has a quandary here: Do they hate Trump more than they love sentencing “reform”? We could have predicted the decision to go with hating Trump, and thus fomenting outrage over DOJ’s retraction of its original sentencing recommendation of about nine years’ imprisonment, now slashed to a far more reasonable range of four years or less. To be fair, though, Trump critics could not have been expected to resist the combination of DOJ missteps and Trump Twitter taunts that mark Stone’s sentencing, the combination that has managed to turn Mueller’s maulers into media martyrs.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/12/ruth-bader-ginsburg-goes-from-leftist-hero-to-has-been-in-one-interview/

Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser proclaimed that ‘Justice Ginsburg’s feminist legacy teeters on a knife’s edge’ because for once she adhered to the text of the law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is about to lose her feminist card. Ironically, it’s for departing from her usual legal schtick to reinforce that what the law says matters, instead of giving authorities license to do whatever the heck they want.

On Monday, Ginsburg reinforced previous assertions that the legal deadline for passing a 1970s and 1980s constitutional amendment to ignore sex distinctions has passed.

“I would like to see a new beginning. I’d like it to start over,” Ginsburg said about the so-called Equal Rights Amendment Monday.” There’s too much controvery about latecomers — Virginia long after the deadline passed — plus a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said, ‘We’ve changed our minds’?”

When Congress went through its part of the amendment authorizing process for the ERA, its authorization included a deadline for ratification by the states. Supreme Court precedent says such deadlines for ratification are legally valid. Still, today’s left chooses to ignore the parts of the law they don’t like while using the parts of it they currently find to their liking, or making things up if they don’t like the law at all.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/here-they-go-again-pelosi-to-launch-new-investigation-into-trump/

Just when you thought America’s long impeachment drama was over and behind us, the Democrats have begun the process to do it again. While most of us believed they would try to repeat impeachment, we thought it would start in the second term and not a mere week after Trump was acquitted the first time.

But Nancy Pelosi is hot under the collar about Trump tweeting about the absurdly long sentence that Deep State prosecutors suggested for Roger Stone. The president tweeted out a storm of criticism when the news broke that prosecutors were recommending nine years in prison.

Keep in mind that child rapists get an average of three to seven years in prison. Calling the recommendation for the sentence, which was certainly politically motivated, “horrible and very unfair” (and it may not even a crime based on the way these prosecutors do business), the president then went on to question the prosecutors. These same prosecutors, who had ruined the lives of many people surrounding the president, were connected to the Mueller witch-hunt. None of the charges were related to the president or anything his administration had done but were a conglomeration of tax offenses from years ago and “lying to the FBI,” which was a crime created after the investigation began.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-gave-in-to-radicals-and-gave-up-on-common-sense-11581444825?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

George Orwell noted the nervousness of people on the left when confronted by those even further to the left. This nervousness stems from leftists’ fear that they will be taken for impure in their own leftism, that their thought and actions don’t go far enough, that they are, finally, not really on the bus. In America during the 1930s, Communists mocked liberals for their weakness, and liberals worried about not measuring up. Hence the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” someone who sympathized with the Communist Party but couldn’t bring himself to join it.

Orwell’s observation remains in play. In the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael and other young black militants pushed the American civil-rights movement leftward, and away from its goal of integration. Liberals, unable to face down this left-wing pull toward Black Power, knuckled under. A gloriously successful campaign for equal rights based on conscience and dignity devolved into an angry, incoherent movement based on guilt and victimhood. The last thing allowed was the concession of progress of any sort in racial matters. Impressive civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph were replaced by such dubious figures as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The movement never recovered.

The same phenomenon appeared in American universities. In faculty meetings everywhere, small groups of the most radical professors were able to get their way through political pressure. Liberals, generally in the majority, were worried (if not terrified) of seeming to be on the wrong side. When they didn’t give in completely, they sought compromises that invariably favored the radicals. Standards and intellectual authority in universities have given way to political correctness and identity politics.

https://jamieglazov.com/2020/02/11/glazov-gang-how-jew-hatred-infected-the-dem