RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-16-the-trump-impeachment-what-is-the-crime-2

It was right around the time that I was writing my last post (“The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?”) that House Democrats started using the word “bribery” to describe what they are looking into. OK, that’s a start. Shall we consider it further?

Bribery is a real crime, and it’s even mentioned in the Constitution as a basis for impeachment. But there are two major problems with trying to fit the square peg of the Trump/Ukraine fact pattern into the round hole of the impeachable crime of “bribery.” The first is that if providing to a politician some intangible political advantage can be characterized as a “bribe,” then most of what politicians do all day would become “bribery.” The second is that calling President Trump’s conduct as to Ukraine “bribery” invites comparison with the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden in the same country, and calls for testing the conduct of each against the words of the applicable statute to see which is the better fit.

As discussed in the previous post, it’s only a “crime” if you can fit within the exact words of some criminal statute passed by Congress. In the case of the crime of bribery of a federal official, the main statute is 18 U.S.C. Section 201(b). Here are the words of the relevant portion:

(b) Whoever . . . (2) being a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act . . . shall be fined under this title . . . or imprisoned for not more than fifteen years, or both.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-granted-clemency-to-terrorists-and-traitors-but-were-supposed-to-be-angry-at-trumps/

Last week, President Trump granted full pardons for Army First Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who’d been accused of war crimes. Lorance had served six years of a 19-year sentence, and Golsteyn was facing trial for killing an alleged Taliban bombmaker. Navy SEAL Edward R. Gallagher, who was found not guilty of war crimes, but still had his rank reduced, was granted clemency and restoration of rank.

Lawmakers had been pushing for pardons for Lorance and Golsteyn because they’d taken actions to defend themselves on the battlefield and were charged with war crimes for it.  Yet, when President Trump pardoned them, it immediately sparked controversy and outrage. Pete Buttigieg joined in the outrage chorus, claiming Trump “dishonored our armed services.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/18/drive by_media_cash_in_on_impeachment_hysteria_141751.html

An unhappy coincidence Thursday morning was, for me, the perfect metaphor for the mass (media) hysteria engendered by the televised impeachment hearings the nation was burdened with last week.

Although Chairman Adam Schiff had only scheduled hearings before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday and Friday, the programming department at CNN apparently decided to maximize their ratings by touting “Special Coverage” of the impeachment on Thursday as well. At least, that was the message that had been sent to YouTube TV, whose channel guide promoted “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage” on CNN from early morning till mid-afternoon on Thursday.

No doubt, the hosts at CNN (under the tutelage of Never Trump boss Jeff Zucker) were prepared to give their last full measure of devotion to a cause that was conceived in hatred, and dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is unworthy of the presidency and must be impeached, so help us God.

But on that Thursday morning, a true tragedy intervened in the form of a mass shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif. Therefore, for YouTube TV viewers at least, we were treated to the spectacle of CNN circling the shooting scene like carrion-hunting vultures under the banner of “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage.”

The shooting, and more particularly CNN’s fascination with it, reminded us (if we needed reminding) that cable news is built on a business plan of sensationalism, shock and outrage. It also resulted in a palimpsest of comments by CNN host Anderson Cooper and others that were equally applicable to the shooting and to the impeachment coverage that it had replaced.

“There is a numbness to this, I think, in some orders” — quarters? — “as well,” Cooper intoned solemnly. “It’s a horrific numbness of people looking up at a TV screen, seeing this yet again, and it just seems like it goes on and on and on.”

He was talking about the school shooting, and yet his words could just as easily have been about the reaction that many voters have to the latest incarnation of a Democratic impeachment push that has been underway literally since the day after the 2016 election.

Now, we must be careful not to compare the actual tragedy of an act of violence such as a school shooting with the potential destruction of the civil order through an act of political sabotage. They have nothing in common except that both are fodder for our rubber-necking news media, and that is the warning I want to impart.

We already know from the Project Veritas undercover investigation of CNN that the news channel’s president, Jeff Zucker, has a blatant anti-Trump bias, which he has passed on to his employees.

In recordings of daily phone calls captured by the Project Veritas whistleblower, Zucker directed staffers to push the impeachment narrative above all else.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/17/the-wages-of-trump-fixation/

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/schiffs-hail-marie-hearing-comes-empty-lloyd-billingsley/

“I’m glad that on Wednesday, after the Democrats staged six weeks of secret depositions in the basement of the Capitol—like some kind of cult—the American people finally got to see this farce for themselves.” That was California Republican Devin Nunes on Friday, at the outset of Adam Schiff’s second impeachment episode.

“These hearings should not be occurring at all,” Nunes said, “until we get answers to three crucial questions the Democrats refuse to ask: First, what is the full extent of the Democrats’ prior coordination with the Whistleblower and who else did the Whistleblower coordinate this effort with? Second, what is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign. And third, why did Burisma hire Hunter Biden, what did he do for them, and did his position affect any U.S. government actions under the Obama administration?”

Former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch failed to answers those questions. On the other hand, the day’s only witness did prove enlightening.

“Do you have any information regarding the president of the United States accepting any bribes?” Rep. Chris Stewart wanted to know.  “No,” Yovanovitch said.  “Do you have any information regarding any criminal activity that the president of the United States has been involved with at all?” wondered Stewart. “No,” answered Yovanovitch, thus dashing Democrat hopes for a high crime and misdemeanor. As Nunes noted, Yovanovitch was not a material fact witness at all, but she did put on something of a one-woman show.

“We are people who repeatedly uproot our lives, who risk and sometimes give our lives for this country,” Yovanovitch testified. “We are Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Patrick Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty. People rightly called heroes for their ultimate sacrifice to this nation’s foreign policy interests in Libya eight years ago.”

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/misleading-advice-from-henry-kissinger-again/

Oddly, Dr. Henry Kissinger was the star speaker at the Nov. 9 “Jews and Conservatism” conference in New York. Kissinger, who made his bones by melding game theory with balance-of-power theory, insisted that the United States couldn’t win the Cold War. The Reagan wing of the Republican Party rejected Kissinger’s version of conventional wisdom. Reagan told his team that our policy was we win, they lose, and proceeded to win the Cold War without firing a shot. Kissinger surely deserves credit for America’s 1972 opening to China–which contributed to our victory over the Soviet Union–but it is implausible to put him forward as an exemplar of conservative thinking.

Kissinger remains as brilliant and as misleading as ever, propounding a pessimistic, even defeatist view of America’s position in the world. On Nov. 14 he told a business group that promotes China trade that a strategic conflict “will be worse than the world wars that ruined European civilization,” adding, “It’s no longer possible to think that one side can dominate the other. They have to get used to the fact that they have that kind of a rivalry.” That’s the same Kissinger who told us we couldn’t win the Cold War.

His warning is correct but misleading. Some of my conservative friends, for example Steve Bannon, appear to think that we can destabilize China, help the good Chinese people overthrow the wicked Chinese Communist Party, and dispense with the greatest challenge to American world leadership with a few deft maneuvers. They are frothing-at-the-mouth mad, and I have had to dissociate myself from their madness. China’s GDP per person has multiplied 48 times (that’s 4,800%) since Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 reforms. The grandparents of today’s Chinese faced starvation during the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961. This is the first time in China’s history where no-one is hungry.

https://nypost.com/2019/11/16/its-democracy-not-trump-thats-on-trial-on-capitol-hill/

Public impeachment hearings have begun in Washington, but nothing has changed. The Ukraine “rebound” scandal simply follows from the Russia collusion probe as the latest front in a smoothly operating, taxpayer-funded, propaganda war of political intimidation: an attempt not only to undermine President Trump, but also to demoralize and break the will of those who voted for him.

Democrats, trying to “move on” from the disastrous testimony of Robert Mueller, offer us a new cadre of government-insider witnesses, most of whose evidence would be laughed out of any courtroom in America.

For his part, Acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor provided the House Intelligence Committee a textbook version of multiple hearsay. Taylor testified to what a member of his staff said to him about what the president said to the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland: “Following the call with President Trump, the member of my staff asked Ambassador Sondland what President Trump thought about Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden which [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani was pressing for [in Ukraine].”

And what of Ambassador Sondland? This is a person who suddenly altered his testimony on the apparent, central point of the whole inquiry. While Sondland previously denied knowledge of a link between military aid to Ukraine and demands for anti-corruption investigations, now he conveniently recalls speaking to a Ukrainian official about just such a quid pro quo.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/11/16/barr-rips-war-of-resistance-against-trump-in-partisan-rant/23862462/

In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.

“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”

Barr went on to invoke the ideologies of Fisher Ames, a Federalist Party politician who served as a congressman representing Massachusetts in the 1790s. Paraphrasing Ames, Barr suggested that progressives are behaving like zealots, treating “politics as their religion:”

Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/14/impeachment-inquiry-is-bad-for-biden/

Amid the consensus that Wednesday’s congressional testimony by the Beltway version of the Duke brothers (that’s a “Trading Places” reference, millennials) fell flat without any “pizazz,” Democrats undoubtedly are scrambling to create some fireworks next week.

House Intelligence Committee chairman and Hollywood wannabe-screenwriter Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) must be channeling his inner creative genius to fabricate a dramatic role for what Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) called “the low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the boarded-up Trump-Russia collusion theater. One can only guess who will grab the spotlight; performances from eight more impeachment accomplices begin Tuesday.

Unfortunately for the tightly scripted Schiff, one name continues to make an unwanted cameo appearance: Hunter Biden.

As former Vice President Joe Biden’s partisan bodyguards in the press bury any criticism of Hunter’s lucrative overseas business deals—the Democratic presidential candidate has declared “war” on negative coverage of his son—Schiff arguably  is staging Biden’s biggest political liability for the American people to see, unfiltered.

The Press Can’t Ignore This for Long

Testimony from George Kent, a Ukraine expert in the State Department, must have Team Biden in a tizzy. On several occasions, Kent described Ukraine’s legacy of endemic corruption and the U.S. government’s attempts to curb fraud and political malfeasance in that country. Both Kent and Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, confirmed that Ukraine has received $1.5 billion in U.S. aid over the past several years.