RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/08/the-legacy-of-low-bar-impeachment/

From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success. It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances. That’s the Democratic Party’s legacy and Democrats will live to rue it.

Since the embarrassing impeachment and failed conviction of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, Americans more or less had avoided that ultimate constitutional method of removing a chief executive from power. The Johnson impeachment had been so steeped in personal hatred, political rivalry, and post-war agendas that the failure by one vote in the Senate to remove the impeached Johnson more or less discredited the process for a century.

The 1974 Watergate impeachment inquiry saga was framed in opposition to the way Johnson had been impeached, inasmuch as anyone still remembered the particulars of that long-ago fiasco. That is, a special prosecutor, first Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski, was appointed to investigate the break-in and the so-called Watergate cover-up.

Democratic moderates like Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) and Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) gave the impeachment inquiries a patina of bipartisanship, both giving time for the targeted president’s defenders to produce witnesses and conduct cross-examinations. Neither released the phone records of their political counterparts on their respective committees. By the time a now-unpopular Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974 to avoid impeachment by an impending overwhelming vote, he had lost public support and gained bipartisan congressional opposition.

Bill Clinton, unlike Nixon, but like Johnson, was both impeached and acquitted in the Senate. Like Nixon, he had easily won a prior reelection (1996). But, unlike Nixon, Clinton was still reigning over a booming economy and enjoyed relatively high popularity—at least on poll questions other than character and morality. Independent counsel Ken Starr, like Leon Jaworski, found Clinton likely to have committed felonious acts. Indeed, he was impeached on grounds of obstructing justice and perjury by the full House on a mostly partisan vote, which nonetheless saw a handful of both Democrats and Republicans respectively cross party lines.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-insanity-of-progressivism-comes-right-out-of-gullivers-travels/

Our intellectual classes today are utterly disconnected from reality. As Milo Yiannopoulos writes in a review of the film Joker, “We are reeling from a disaster still unfolding, the unmaking of reality at the hands of millennial progressivism.” Indeed, when it comes to unmaking reality, our cognitive elite may as well inhabit the parody world of Gulliver’s Travels. Proposing blueprints for radical social change and meddling in the complexities of domestic and economic policy, they have come to resemble Jonathan Swift’s pixilated “projectors” in the Academy of Lagado (Book 3, Chapter 5), a conclave of intellectuals and academics “full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region” of vacuous irrationality.

In its effort to save the nation, Swift’s Academy put forward various endeavors to advance the economy, improve education, and become energy-self-sufficient. For example, it proposed “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.” This new technology “should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate.” There was an astronomical plan “to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind.” Another project to improve land cultivation led to a Lysenko-like result, namely not a single ear of corn or blade of grass was to be seen. An ingenious “artist” set about employing spiders as weavers of silk, requiring an exhaustive effort grooming colored flies to feed the spiders, all to no purpose.

Nor should we forget the New Math of Swift’s imagining, in which “[t]he proposition, and demonstration, were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following, eat nothing but bread and water.” The project was a failure since students regularly upchucked their educational diet. Another professor was “employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge,” so that “the most ignorant person,” by arbitrarily operating an “engine” made of bits of wood inscribed with letters, “might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” A prominent landowner was tasked with using “wind and air” to run a mill, a work which miscarried miserably. As for architecture, the Academicians set about building houses by “beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundations.” These new theories and practices had the predictable effect, leaving the country in a state of ruin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-snooping-standard-11575841853?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Kudos to Margaret Brennan of CBS for asking Adam Schiff on Sunday about his release of phone logs of his political opponents. Mr. Schiff dismissed any criticism, and his reason is revealing about the balance of power in Washington.

“The blowback has only come from the far right,” Mr. Schiff said. “But look, every investigator seeks phone records to corroborate, sometimes to contradict, a witness’s testimony.”

Yes, but executive-branch investigators who want to get data from private telecom companies typically must obtain some kind of judicial order. Mr. Schiff did it himself. Prosecutors are also supposed to limit the release of data on innocent bystanders like journalists for privacy reasons. The intelligence term of art is “minimization.” Mr. Schiff released the phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Rep. Devin Nunes —information irrelevant to his impeachment case against President Trump. The narrative of his report suggests he did it gratuitously to imply that Mr. Nunes is part of the Ukraine conspiracy, though the Republican has a right to call anyone he wants.

Mr. Schiff is right that he’s getting no criticism from the rest of the press corps. The same media that howled when the Bush Administration gathered metadata to hunt for terrorists is silent when Democrats gather and release it against a conservative journalist and Republicans. Keep this double standard in mind when you next hear media lectures about violating democratic and institutional “norms.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/473594-linda-ronstadt-tells-pompeo-at-dinner-that-hell-be-loved-when

Singer Linda Ronstadt took a swipe at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a State Department dinner honoring her and other Kennedy Center honorees on Saturday night, Variety reports.

At the start of the reception, where honorees are typically presented with their Kennedy Center Honors medallions, Pompeo reportedly referenced the singer’s 1975 track, “When I Be Loved.” 

“As I travel the world, I wonder when will I be loved,” he reportedly said during his welcome address.

Ronstadt revisited those comments by Pompeo later during the reception after she was given the opportunity to say a few words upon receiving her honor, according to Variety.

When the time came for her to take the microphone, Ronstadt reportedly said, “I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump.”

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

There is a large and growing strain of anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party.  It is rife with incredibly bad ideas– economic, social and otherwise. It now makes no bones about appealing to erstwhile fringe elements. It courts and embraces Antifa members, anarchists, America-haters, gender deniers, extreme hedonists, aspiring Marxist-Leninists, and assorted other radicals. Yet, on the other hand, it similarly appeals to those who would elevate Sharia Law over constitutional rights. The only things it doesn’t tolerate are traditional mores and America’s founding values of limited government of, by, and for the people and their attendant natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as granted by the Creator.

Late-term and after-birth abortion, aiding and abetting young children in their tragically misguided attempts to “change sexes,” taxation without proper representation, violation of religious freedoms, suppression of free speech and the right to defend oneself and other core Democratic beliefs explicitly fly in the face of our founding principles and are simply evil.

If politics is indeed downstream from culture, when the culture is polluted, politics will be as well. The Founders would not have put up with the wide-scale poisoning of our culture and the internal annexation of the country they begat us. They would not have tolerated an attempted coup. Deep down, progressives know this. It is largely why they are bashing the Founders now.

Progressives try to skirt these facts by equivocating and asserting that everything is relative. There is no objective truth, they aver, only “my truth” and “your truth.”

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/12/07/why-moderates-are-holding-back-on-impeachment/23876261/

BY JONATHAN ALLEN AND LEIGH ANN CALDWELL

Like many of the 31 Democrats from districts President Donald Trump won in 2016, freshman Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., is feeling the squeeze of impeachment.

A former CIA, Pentagon and National Security Council before winning election to the House last year, Slotkin helped launch the House inquiry into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal by co-writing an opinion column calling for a probe after an intelligence community whistleblower accused the president of abusing his office.

But now, as the House Judiciary Committee drafts articles of impeachment and Democrats from politically competitive districts wait to see how they are written, Slotkin is being lobbied by Republican colleagues who argue that Trump’s actions — even if imperfect — don’t amount to impeachable offenses and that she should accept, given her background, that the president needs room to use leverage in foreign policy.

“I feel very strongly that in my prior life we often went to other countries and foreign governments when I was at the Pentagon and said, ‘We want you to do X in exchange for Y,’ but that exchange was exclusively for the national security interests of the country, not for Elissa Slotkin’s personal or political gain,” said Slotkin, who hasn’t committed one way or the other on impeachment. “And that’s a pretty fundamental difference and that was the conversation I had with one of my peers.”

While the GOP push hasn’t been persuasive, moderate Democrats are worried that liberals in their own party are going to put forward articles of impeachment that are hard to vote for and even harder to explain voting for.