RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-left-is-one-huge-internet-troll/

As conservative writers for online magazines are all too well aware, their leftist adversaries are not interested in serious debate or mannerly conversation. Civility is not the left’s strong suit. Tactics vary along a spectrum of readily predictable talking points, false assertions, vituperation and obscenity, the stock in trade of those who have come to be known as trolls. Who and what is a troll?

Originally, trolls were unsightly folklore creatures dwelling in caves, forests, and, as in the famous folk tale, under bridges. Unlike their doppelgängers in the Disney film, they were not sweet and innocent powder-blue creatures resembling the Smurfs and the Na’vi, but gnarled and revolting specimens of indiscriminate voracity. Distinctly hostile and governed by an appetite for human flesh, they became the source of the contemporary internet troll.

The modern troll is the digital form of the contract killer. He lives in the shadows; is prone to using an alias behind which he hides; has no known street address or postal code; is often paid for his services by some powerful figure whose public presence may be known—say, a bloviating multi-billionaire with a highly dubious personal history who manages to evade the law; has no conscience and is not very intelligent but is as cunning as he is unscrupulous—in short, the internet troll is a coward who “kills” in the dark. He is motivated by envy and resentment and has neither self-respect nor moral fiber. He is devoid of productive talents and lacks the ability to make a success of his life. He is, in the current idiom, a loser.

Or course, not every troll is a hired gun. Some like to devour their prey as self-elected vigilantes who need not bother with the labor of constructing a convincing counter-argument—that, after all, takes real work. But in either case, they are the gremlins of the internet world, sniping away at the legitimate participants in the cultural debate or infesting the Twittersphere, often under the cloak of anonymity and the camouflage of fake accounts. They are not part of the conversation but the dregs of the hermeneutic exchange.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/donald_trumps_america_a_vast_improvement.html

“We are making America stronger, prouder, and greater than ever before.”

—President Donald J. Trump

No president in the history of the United States has achieved as much in his first three years in his first term in office as has President Donald Trump.  Meanwhile, no president in the history of America has been subjected to such incessant vile and unjustified attacks as has President Trump.  Why?  Because he believes in American exceptionalism, not globalism.

“Make America Great Again.”  Just a slogan, the people of failure shout back.  The Obama/Biden team had failed us for eight years in every aspect of our lives. To the leftists, failure is not only normal; it is expected.

The list of failures for the previous administration is so long and glaring that I hardly need to repeat all of them here.  Under the previous administration, once well paid manufacturing jobs had disappeared and were relocated to other countries.  President Trump managed to reverse this trend and brought back many manufacturing jobs.  Before President Trump at the helm, huge swaths of this nation from northern New York to the great states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and many others, previously vibrant manufacturing regions, looked like ghost towns, but now they have come back, and people are optimistic about the future of this country.

During a PBS town hall, Obama referenced Trump’s promise to bring back jobs to the United States when talking about manufacturing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_tape_of_trump_seeking_to_dismiss_amb_yovanovitch_is_a_nothing_burger.html

Democrats are excited that a tape has emerged in which Trump can be heard saying that he wants to have Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired, for they see it as more impeachment fodder. The tape, however, as is the case with so many things that excite Democrats, is actually nothing special.

It’s not clear how someone recorded a tape of a private dinner party on April 30, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. That itself ought to be a scandal. It’s also not clear how ABC got a copy of the tape, another scandal.

Among the attendees were Trump, Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman. Trump has disclaimed knowing Parnas, describing him as a groupie. Assuming that Trump is speaking the truth about Parnas (who now accuses Trump of all sorts of heinous behavior), he means that he was aware of Parnas, but that Parnas was such a meaningless, peripheral individual he made no impression on a man who routinely sees, speaks with, and even dines with thousands of people a year.

At the dinner, Trump apparently learned for the first time that Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover, had been bad-mouthing him to the Ukrainians:

Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-20-how-a-bumbling-fool-marches-from-triumph-to-triumph

I’m old enough to remember the press coverage of Ronald Reagan as President. It was not as uniformly and aggressively hostile as the current coverage of President Trump, but close. The gist was that this guy was a bumbling fool who didn’t understand anything about either foreign or domestic policy. He had gone to a nothing college that no one had ever heard of. All the smart people knew that the right foreign policy was to reach accommodations with the Soviet Union, but instead he put us at risk of World War III by calling it an “Evil Empire” and vowing to out-compete it. The smart people also knew that the right domestic policy was massively increasing government spending, but instead he fought to restrain the government’s domestic footprint.

The Soviet Union collapsed, and the economy soared.

I thought that Reagan was quite intelligent; but another possibility is that you don’t need to be all that intelligent to do a good job as President. All you need to do is to replace the progressive program of utopian fantasies and wishful thinking with a small dose of reality and common sense.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-jerry-nadler-audience-left-wing-democrats/

Impeachment’s target audience isn’t moderate Republicans. It’s left-wing Democrats.

Jerry Nadler must have missed the day in law school where they teach you about persuasion. The House Democrat made a critical error early in the trial of President Trump. He didn’t just say that Republican senators, who voted to begin the proceedings without calling witnesses, were part of a cover-up. He said they had committed treason: “So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a cover-up. Voting to deny witnesses and obviously a treacherous vote. A vote against honest consideration of the evidence against the president. A vote against an honest trial. A vote against the United States.”

Easy, tiger. All Republicans did was follow the precedent of the Clinton trial. They also admitted the House evidence into the record. The vote on witnesses will arrive next week. Hysterical accusations of national betrayal won’t win the Democrats any converts. When Trump counsel Pat Cipollone said Nadler should feel embarrassed after insulting 53 U.S. senators, Chief Justice Roberts intervened to “admonish the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Roberts played it safe. He rebuked both sides. Nadler, though, was the reason he intervened.

Roberts had company. Nadler’s comments also bothered Lisa Murkowski, who said his accusation was “offensive.” Susan Collins put out a similar statement. Murkowski went further, saying she was puzzled the House didn’t go to court to force testimony from administration officials. “The House made the decision that they didn’t want to slow things down by having to go through the courts,” she said. “And yet now they’re basically saying you guys gotta go through the courts. We didn’t, but we need you to.” Why, it’s almost as if the Democrats are out for political gain rather than justice.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/22/the-untalented-mr-schiff-and-his-unwatchable-vanity/

Senators will silently endure Schiff’s prancing and twirling in his new special make-up that suppresses those rosy apple cheeks.

After a lifetime of being insulated from criticism, the Lemony Snicket character Carmelita Spats acts with unshakable confidence in her talent as a performing artist. Vicious and cruel, she subjects her victims to a twirling dance that ends with her signature sign off, “And my name is Carmelita!” Fans of A Series of Unfortunate Events—or anyone who recognizes the archetype of the “stage” child—might feel a twinge of déjà vu as Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) demands the rigging of the Senate trial with rules that allowed his hippity-hoppity kangaroo proceeding in the House to reach its predetermined result—the impeachment of President Trump.

Ugh! “Do we have to watch this?” everyone seems to be asking. 

Like a family held hostage by an untalented stage child’s living room performance, there’s no escaping Adam “Carmelita” Schiff’s vanity. The House managers will get to perform their show to a captive and paralyzed Senate audience. It must be agony to watch untalented congressmen deliver nauseating speeches about supposed commands of our Constitution. 

Schiff brayed that Trump’s actions were, “the trifecta of constitutional misconduct justifying our impeachment.” 

To what section of the Constitution does he refer? The part he made up, of course. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiff-hamilton-and-impeachment-11579813089?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Senate jurors are responding in different ways to the impeachment case being made by House Democrats. “Gum-chewing, snacking, yawning and alleged napping could be seen throughout the cramped chamber,” reports Laurie Kellman of the Associated Press. But just because a prosecution’s case is boring doesn’t mean it can’t also be misleading. Senators should take care to examine the historical record on impeachments.

As for the napping allegations being leveled against multiple lawmakers, Lee Moran writes at HuffPost:

Sleepy and absent senators attracted the wrath of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday night as the “All In” host chastised them for not focusing 100% on the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
“These peoples’ jobs is to do this,” Hayes said during a panel discussion on reports that at least one GOP lawmaker had fallen asleep during proceedings and others had left the chamber for extended periods.
“I mean, this is literally the job,” Hayes continued. “If you find it too annoying or frustrating or uncomfortable to sit for eight hours and listen, you can resign tomorrow and go get another job. Like, this is your job.”

Of course many voters would disagree with Mr. Hayes and insist that the trial is a partisan detour from the job of representing the interests of constituents. Such voters might also point out that among the lawmakers charged with napping offenses, not all are Republicans.

The A.P.’s Ms. Kellman reports:

Almost immediately after Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled in Wednesday’s session of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, bored and weary senators started openly flouting some basic guidelines in a chamber that prizes decorum…
A Democrat in the back row leaned on his right arm, covered his eyes and stayed that way for nearly a half-hour. Some openly snickered when lead prosecutor Adam Schiff said he’d only speak for 10 minutes. And when one of the freshman House prosecutors stood to speak, many of the senator-jurors bolted for the cloak rooms, where their phones are stored.
… Well into Schiff’s second hour of opening arguments, he moved on from discussing the first of two charges against Trump.
“Now let me turn to the second article,” Schiff said. That prompted several senators to shift in their seats and smile at each other in apparent bemusement.

If Mr. Schiff fibbed about the length of his oration, the transgression hardly compares to the years he spent making a bogus claim of “more than circumstantial” evidence of Russian collusion. Nor does it compare to his false claim regarding contacts with the so-called “whistleblower” he used to trigger impeachment, nor his false claim that the “whistleblower” has a “statutory right” to remain anonymous.   CONTINUE AT SITE

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/479422-trump-draws-battle-lines-against-democrats-and-prophets-of-doom-at?rnd=1579723727

It is not hard to see why Democrats are desperate to use any means to prevent President Trump from standing for reelection. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump defined the battle lines between himself and the eventual Democratic nominee. The president has a compelling story to tell on what he calls America’s blue-collar boom: 7 million jobs gained; record-low 3.5 percent unemployment; more women in employment than men; record low unemployment of African Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and veterans; the return of U.S. manufacturing jobs; accelerating wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of wage-earners and for millennials.

It’s not only the numbers that should turn Democrats’ blood cold. Trump is going after the core voting blocs that make up the Democratic coalition — middle-class Americans, African-Americans and Hispanics. His priority is their priority: The wellbeing of the American worker. Democrats can’t say the same. Trump talks about living standards, while Democrats are obsessed with climate emergencies and saving the planet.

Cutting taxes and deregulation might sound like standard Republican fare. But no previous Republican president has tackled America’s perverse, uncompetitive corporate tax rates. After eight years of Barack Obama, the Trump administration’s record of one new regulation enacted for every eight rescinded marks a major reversal in the growth of the administrative state. 

https://www.dailywire.com/news/dangerous-historical-precedent-

The attorneys general of 21 states — predictably all Republicans — have sent a letter to the Senate opposing the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Fox News exclusively reported on the letter, which was submitted to the Senate on Wednesday morning and called the impeachment “a dangerous historical precedent.”

“If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent that is entirely contrary to the Framers’ design and ruinous to the most important governmental structure protections contained in our Constitution: the separation of powers,” the attorneys general wrote.

“Impeachment should never be a partisan response to one party losing a presidential election. If successful, an impeachment proceeding nullifies the votes of millions of citizens. The Democrat-controlled House passing of these constitutionally-deficient articles of impeachment amounts, at bottom, to a partisan political effort that undermines the democratic process itself. Even an unsuccessful effort to impeach the President undermines the integrity of the 2020 presidential election because it weaponizes a process that should only be initiated in exceedingly rare circumstances and should never be used for partisan purposes,” they continued.

The attorneys general added: “This body should never permit impeachment proceedings to proceed where they are permeated with the clearly partisan objective of energizing a political party’s base to, ultimately, influence a presidential election. Such a raw political and unconstitutional use of the impeachment power should not be countenanced by the Senate.”