RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/18/for-whom-the-new-rules/

So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 9 report did not challenge the claim by the FBI (and the CIA) that its surveillance and investigation of all things Trump were properly “premised”; when it failed to address the illegality of officials’ trafficking to the media information from said surveillance; when it downgraded the FBI’s misdeeds to “performance failures,” that report offered the deep state the opportunity to claim that its interference in American politics is a good thing.

William Webster, the only person ever to have headed both FBI and CIA, seized that opportunity with an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he claims both agencies acted to protect “the rule of law,” and that they should continue to do so. That claim abstracts from the undeniable—and undenied—clash between the FBI and CIA’s anti-Trump campaign and current law.

Nevertheless, given the power of precedent, as well as the unpunished permanence of the officials who established the precedent, yes: America’s national security apparatchiks  effectively have changed the meaning of current law. They have established the propriety—maybe even the necessity—of adulterating or manufacturing allegations as premises for investigations the purpose of which is to hurt candidates or officials of whom they disapprove.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wheres-the-liberal-outrage-11576714083?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Some readers objected—went ballistic—when it was suggested in this space recently (“The Democrats’ Fractured Fairy Tales”) that absent the now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative, “we would have had a ‘normal’ presidential term.”

To be precise: Yes, the Trump personality still would have maddened millions daily, but the mad, mad world of Donald Trump would have been about immigration, climate change or other issues inside the orbit of real, workaday politics, national court injunctions and all.

Instead, Wednesday saw official Washington light the equivalent of a rubber-tire bonfire—House Democrats voting to impeach President Trump. The vote climaxed the Beltway’s three-year delirium over Donald J. Trump. To judge by the coverage, there’s been nothing like it since the feds nailed John Dillinger.

Well, it’s not too soon to survey the ruins. Driven by the collusion narrative, the past three years have done significant damage to America’s institutions—especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On Tuesday, in one of the most astounding public documents in years, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington announced that its relationship with the FBI is broken.  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-impeachment-folly-11576715094?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

House Democrats voted Wednesday evening to impeach Donald Trump but, media high-fives aside, what have they accomplished? They have failed to persuade the country; they have set a new, low standard for impeaching a President; Mr. Trump will be acquitted in the Senate; and Democrats may have helped Mr. Trump win re-election. Congratulations to The Resistance.

Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Jerrold Nadler have said in the past that impeachment must be bipartisan to be credible, and they have achieved their goal—against impeachment. In the actual vote, two Democrats voted against both articles and a third voted with them against one. New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew voted no and may switch to the GOP. All Republicans voted against impeachment.

The impeachment press will deride the GOP as either afraid of Donald Trump or moral sellouts. But note that even the 20 GOP Members who are retiring from the House and not running for another office voted against impeachment. GOP Members like Peter King (N.Y.), Jim Sensenbrenner (Wis.) and Will Hurd (Texas) have been unafraid to break with party leaders or Presidents in the past.

***

The problem isn’t GOP consciences, it’s the weak and dishonest Democratic case for impeachment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/facing_a_2020_drubbing_the_left_begins_lining_up_its_excuses.html

The left and its Democrats in power are in bad shape.

They face a blowout election from voters in 2020, probably comparable to what Britain got, based on their crazed effort to impeach and remove President Trump over some totally non–national security issue like arms to Ukraine.

They’re sinking in the polls.  Their favorite networks are seeing collapsing ratings.  They have a string of bad candidates, each more socialist than the next.  Voters hate socialism, along with guys who are too old to run.  The Horowitz report exposed the dishonesty and absence of integrity of their Deep State allies.

The object of their ire, by contrast, is rising in the polls, with sharp drops in his high-negative numbers and strong gains in traditional Democratic bulwarks such as black and Latino votes and more.  A recent poll showed that Trump would smash any Democrat in a head-to-head lineup.  There’s no arguing with a stellar economy and promises kept.

They know it’s coming, so now they’re pre-emptively lining up their excuses.  Here’s one from Mother Jones:

Republicans are intensifying efforts to aggressively purge the voter rolls in Wisconsin and Georgia before the 2020 elections, potentially giving their party a crucial advantage by shrinking the electorate in two key swing states.

On Friday, a state judge in Wisconsin ruled that the state could begin canceling the registrations of 234,000 voters — 7 percent of the electorate — who did not respond to a mailing from election officials. The Wisconsin Elections Commission, a bipartisan group overseeing state elections, had planned to wait until 2021 to remove voters it believes have moved to a new address. But in response to a lawsuit from a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, Judge Paul Malloy, a Republican appointee, said those voters could be purged 30 days after failing to respond to a mailing seeking to confirm their address.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/former-intelligence-chiefs-fit-perfectly-into-media-advocacy-culture/

Former FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lots of things in common.

One, they ran the nation’s key intelligence and investigatory agencies under former President Barack Obama. They were deeply involved in the “Russian collusion” hoax. And they participated in the surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition.

Comey and McCabe both signed applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants requesting surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. A report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized Comey and McCabe’s FBI for falsehoods and misrepresentations during its investigation of the Donald Trump campaign.

Clapper, Brennan and the FBI helped to disseminate the fallacious Steele dossier to the press and among government agencies.

Two, Comey, McCabe, Brennan and Clapper have all lied either under oath or in the public sphere.

Horowitz has said that he referred Comey for criminal prosecution for leaking classified memos he wrote about his confidential conversations with the president, but the Justice Department did not pursue charges. He signed FISA warrant applications that the inspector general has determined were misleading at best and at worst simply flat-out wrong.

President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 6 percentage points since the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry began, according to a new survey.

The Gallup poll released early Wednesday found Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the inquiry was launched in the fall. The new findings mark the third-consecutive increase in Trump’s approval rating, Gallup noted.

DPS Note: I don’t understand why the newspapers have to refer to people filmed committing violent crimes as “suspects” when they could say “perpetrators.” The guy in the film referred to in this article really can’t be “suspected” of punching the 21 year old lady in the face when you can actually see him do it. 
Weird, huh? But not as weird as the fact that not a single person in the article is identified by race. I wonder if police reports are written this way. Also, keep in mind that under the new NYS law to go into effect on January 1st, 2020, this “suspect” will be required to be released without putting up any bail to assure that he’ll return for his next required appearance but might well be given Mets tickets to encourage him to do so because the system is being nice to him. Brave new world. The market for bodyguards is getting tight.

****************************************December 18, 2019 | 12:10am | 

https://nypost.com/metro/

Cops are looking for a maniac who launched a string of violent outbursts Monday on the Upper East Side — including a random slugging of a woman looking at her cellphone.

The suspect can be seen on surveillance video gingerly walking on East 85th Street near Park Avenue around 11 a.m. when he suddenly strikes the 21-year-old woman in the face without notice, according to police.

The victim suffered bruising and swelling to the face but refused medical attention. The suspect simply walked away.

Minutes earlier, the suspect approached a man sitting in his car in front of 960 Park Ave., cops said.

“I know you are talking about me!” the suspect said before brandishing a knife and chasing the man around his car.

The suspect in the Upper East Side attacks

After the assault captured on video, the suspect approached his next victims at East 87th Street and Third Avenue around 11:13 a.m., when he deliberately walked into a man and woman, cops said.

He then brandished a knife and threatened the couple.

Cops were looking for the individual, who was described as about 25 years old and around 5 feet 6 inches tall.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/schumer-presses-senate-testimony-bolton-mulvaney-joseph-klein/

Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer has proposed that the Senate hear from four current or former high-level Trump administration officials he considers to be vital witnesses in the trial that will follow the House of Representatives’ impeachment of President Trump. These witnesses include Mick Mulvaney, the Acting White House Chief of Staff, and John R. Bolton, the former National Security Adviser. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wisely rejected the Schumer proposal. He argued that it was incumbent upon the House, in their role as prosecutors, to bring the strongest case they can to the Senate for trial.

“It is not the Senate’s job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to ‘guilty,’” Senator McConnell said. “That would hardly be impartial justice. If House Democrats’ case is this deficient, this thin, the answer is not for the judge and jury to cure it here in the Senate.The answer is that the House should not impeach on this basis in the first place.” Senator McConnell emphasized that it is the House’s “duty to investigate. It’s their duty to meet the very high bar for undoing a national election. As Speaker Pelosi herself once said, it is the House’s obligation to, quote, ‘build an ironclad case to act.’” What the House Democrats have produced falls far short of that standard.

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

It’s too soon to predict that the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs, but the oldest political party in the world is tripping over its own doctrines; making a public spectacle of its inability to coherently sponsor debates; riven by ideological fissures that seem to be widening; driving away two bedrock constituencies, the white working class and black voters; and hitching itself to a doomed impeachment effort that could cost it dearly next November.

It’s a great time to be alive if you are a Republican!

Consider the forthcoming presidential debates.

Next Thursday’s scheduled debate is being boycotted by all its candidates because the food service provider at the host institution, Loyola Marymount University — itself a second choice venue after UCLA was chosen and rejected because of a strike there — is experiencing a strike, and the candidates refuse to cross a picket line.  DNC chair Tom Perez, a former secretary of labor, is leaning hard on the parties to the strike to settle their differences (do you suspect there may be some quid pro quo promises?), so the squabble between the two constituencies of the Democrats, higher education and left wing labor unions, can end.

But solving that issue is child’s play compared to the “diversity” issue facing the debate scheduled for next February:

Nine Democratic presidential candidates have called on the Democratic National Committee to relax its debate standards next year, allowing some lower-polling rivals onto the stage.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/474887-democrats-repeat-failed-history-with-mad-dash-to-impeach-donald-trump

“Let them impeach and be damned.” Those words could have easily come from Donald Trump, as the House moves this week to impeach him. They were, however, the words of another president who not only shares some striking similarities to Trump but who went through an impeachment with chilling parallels to the current proceedings. The impeachment of Trump is not just history repeating itself but repeating itself with a vengeance.

The closest of the three prior presidential impeachment cases to the House effort today is the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson. This is certainly not a comparison that Democrats should relish. The Johnson case has long been widely regarded as the very prototype of an abusive impeachment. As in the case of Trump, calls to impeach Johnson began almost as soon as he took office. A southerner who ascended to power after the Civil War as a result of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson was called the “accidental president” and his legitimacy was never accepted by critics. Representative John Farnsworth of Illinois called Johnson an “ungrateful, despicable, besotted, traitorous man.”

Johnson opposed much of the reconstruction plan Lincoln had for the defeated south and was criticized for fueling racial divisions. He was widely viewed as an alcoholic and racist liar who opposed full citizenship for freed slaves. Ridiculed for not being able to spell, Johnson responded, “It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” Sound familiar? The “Radical Republicans” in Congress started to lay a trap a year before impeachment. They were aware that Johnson wanted their ally, War Secretary Edwin Stanton, out of his cabinet, so they then decided to pass an unconstitutional law that made his firing a crime.