RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-12-28-surely-california-has-done-a

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us. On everything from sanctuary and free health care for illegal immigrants, to requiring transgender bathrooms, to banning plastic straws, to having the highest personal income tax rates in the country, it is California that today claims the mantle of woke progressive leadership.

Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.

If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident, who somehow recently “landed on the streets” in his 50s. How could that have happened? We are given few specifics about Mr. Wynn’s life prior to homelessness. Yes, there are brief mentions (without any details) of “mental illness” and of a “criminal conviction for drug trafficking” as possibly being “part of the problem.” But overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.

To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism.

So who was it who denied Mr. Wynn the fair treatment to which he was entitled? No names are named; and indeed, it appears that actual namable people don’t have much to do with this. What we’re talking about here is not personal discriminatory misconduct, but rather something referred to as “structural” or “institutional” racism that has brought about an explosion of homelessness, now seen as the “defining crisis” of Los Angeles today.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/29/democrats-peddle-doom-but-the-middle-class-never-h/

These days when you listen to the gloom of the media and many of the presidential candidates you have to wonder what country these Debbie Downers are talking about.

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently declared “the middle class is getting crushed … and the working class has no way up.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders stews that President Trump’s policies have brought “handouts for billionaires and hunger for the poor.”

Mayor Pete Buttigieg claims that many working families are struggling so much financially they don’t have enough income to be able to “afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

The Washington Post says that Americans are awash in debt that they can’t repay.

Time out for a does of reality. If things are so bad, how is it that a new poll from CNN — hardly a network friendly to Mr. Trump, finds three of four Americans rate the economy as pretty good or really good.

We have become so rich as a nation that even most poor families can buy dolls and baseball bats and $100 Nike basketball shoes for the kids, and cellphones that have more computing power than every computer used to put a man on the moon.  

It is nonsense to say the poor and the middle class are worse off than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.

Go to any neighborhood Walmart or Target and you will see average and even low-income Americans — blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, teenagers, mothers with three kids, and seniors — filing out of the store with sometimes two or three shopping carts overflowing with toasters, and winter coats, and flowers, and games, and dog food, and stuffed animals, and potato chips, and video games, and every conceivable piece of merchandise — and all stuffed in the back of the minivan. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/29/trumps-failures/

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.

Take the wall. True, Trump certainly in the last three years has not come close to building an envisioned initial phase of 1,000 miles or so of border fencing to stop the easiest access to the United States, much less made Mexico pay for it. Yet even his critics concede he relentlessly tried—and are fearful he will soon succeed.

There are some considerations to keep in mind. In some sense, we have had no wall at all, given that previous chain-link and thrown-up steel barriers were hardly impediments, at least in critical free-passage zones. Trump is addressing this. A recent Economist article lamented the fact that Trump is, in fact, slowly building a wall and replacing previous makeshift barriers in a manner that supposedly will have negative results—as defined by proponents of open borders—and “irrevocably change America’s south-western border.”

To move toward what the Economist believes is an existential redefinition of the border, the president has gone to court to fight constant lawsuits, scraped together almost $10 billion from previous allocations, as well as siphoning and redirecting funds from various agencies, shutting down the government from December 22, 2018 through January 25, and prompted a near crisis with the Mexican government—and yet so far built only 66 miles of replacement walling and about nine miles of new barriers.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/29/we-can-no-longer-ignore-the-attacks-on-jews-in-new-york/

In Rockland County last night, during a Chanukah celebration at a synagogue a man stormed in with a machete and stabbed at least five victims, who were taken to the hospital. This is the latest in a string of antisemitic attacks in the New York City area, coming in the wake of the tragic killing of four people during an attack on a Jewish grocery store in Jersey City.

These two acts of violence this month have brought renewed attention to the sharp uptick in anti Jewish violence that has quietly held New York City in its grip over the past few years. Sadly, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who spent much of the year more concerned with his farcical run for president than protecting the citizens of his own city, and the state governments of New York and New Jersey have, been flatfooted in addressing the growing concern.

It has frankly been astounding how little attention attacks on Jews in the New York City area have received. If any other minority group were subject to such abuse, it would be a leading national story. Why have these attacks been swept under the carpet? The clearest answer seems to be that the news media and our political leadership are uncomfortable with the fact that many of these attacks, including last night’s, were perpetrated by black people.

Make no mistake, if white supremacists in MAGA hats were shooting minorities or carving them up with machetes, it wouldn’t just be news, it would be the only news. So satisfying would that narrative be to our politicians and scribes that we would scarcely be able to turn away. But alas, it’s Jews being killed and maimed. And the criminals don’t fit the bill of right-wing, Trump-supporting Nazis, so, you know, it’s complicated.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/despicable_black_attacks_on_jews_are_rooted_in_democrats_coddling_of_antisemites.html

Once-tolerant New York City is becoming a haven for anti-Semitic, Jew-hating attacks, getting to be like Paris, eventually driving Jewish flight based on the surge of unpunished violence in the leftist-run city.

It’s shocking, not only because the number of unprovoked attacks on Jewish people just minding their own business and going about their daily lives are very numerous — nine at last count within about a week — but because within the violence itself is a tissue of lies, explicit and implicit, from silky enablers to conceal and euphemize what’s really happening.  In every case, the victim was Jewish and the attacker was black. That’s a politically incorrect to the press and its leftist allies, but it’s true. It’s similar to how Islamist terror was covered up as ‘workplace violence’ in the past, again in the name of political correctness. But this time, the refusal to name the source of the violence is not related to Middle East politics so much as Democrats’ coddling of black anti-Semitism within its own ranks.

Here’s just one of such incidents:

Suspects arrested in last week’s spree of eight anti-Semitic attacks are being quickly released right back into the neighborhoods they terrorized thanks to “bail reform” legislation — which doesn’t even take effect until Jan. 1.

The most recent case of revolving-door justice came Saturday morning, with the release, with no bail, of a woman charged with punching and cursing at three Orthodox women, ages 22, 26 and 31, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at dawn the day before.

The accused assailant, Tiffany Harris, was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on 21 menacing, harassment and attempted assault charges.

Conference of Jewish Affairs 90 Washington Valley Road, Suite 1261 Bedminster, NJ 0792

– Conference of Jewish Affairs spokesman Rabbi Aryeh Spero released the following statement today:

“Virtually every recent stabbing and attack on Jews in New York City and the metropolitan area has been perpetrated by a black, Hispanic or sympathizers with jihad. It is time for leaders of those communities to admit to anti-Semitism within their midst and STOP it. Time for truth telling. Perpetrators must be punished.“New York’s extremely liberal politicians speak about anti-Semitism, but are not using anywhere near the force of law to bring these perpetrators to justice. In fact, we’re hearing that last week’s attackers against Jews, who were black or Hispanic, have already been released and are back on the streets.

“Much of the hatred against Jewish people is being fueled by jihadist talk, and yet, because of political correctness, authorities are not doing the pre-reconnaissance that common sense dictates.

“We have heard the evasive platitudes about ‘extremism’, ‘intolerance’, ‘hate’, but what we are witnessing in these attacks is raw anti-Semitism, specifically against Jews. Call it what it is!  New York’s liberal politicians want us to believe that this is coming from a climate of ‘extremism’ and ‘white supremacists’, whereas in the metro area it is a Jew-hatred being fomented within the minority communities.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/28/the-standing-committee-on-impeachment/

Start talking about impeaching a president 19 minutes after he is inaugurated, go on talking about it at every opportunity, regardless of whether there are any grounds to deploy this most serious of political rebukes. Could a Standing Committee on Impeachment do any better?

You might think that what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the “sad” and “solemn” pre-Christmas impeachment special was a one-off. The Democrats owed it to the country, you see—they had (are you sitting down?) a “duty to the Constitution” to impeach Donald Trump, otherwise (as Representative Al Green of Texas put it) he might well be re-elected. We certainly can’t have that! Hence the show of those “sad, very sad” faces Pelosi described and the memo from headquarters with the instructions, “Don’t cheer. Keep it solemn.”

The Washington Post didn’t get that bulletin right away, so some of their staff posted an image with the words, “Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!” amidst smiling faces at an impending feast. Someone must have thought that impugned the paper’s sterling reputation for impartiality. The image was deleted, but not before some enterprising souls saved and posted it for posterity.

I do not claim any special insight into the collective mind of the Democratic Party. I freely confess that their decision to follow through with their threat to impeach Donald Trump seemed to me bizarre. I wondered, in fact, whether it was at least partly inadvertent. The boy keeps crying “Wolf!” when there is no wolf. What happens when a real wolf shows up?

Remember, the Democrats had been talking about impeaching President Trump—when they weren’t fantasizing about assassinating him—since before he took office. The Washington Post—always a good barometer of the prevailing pressure in the fruitier districts of the Democratic fiefdom—waited a full 19 minutes after Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 before announcing that “the campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”

Don’t cheer. Keep it solemn.