RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mattis-says-hed-wouldnt-have-been-so-critical-of-biden-in-memoir-if-he-knew-hed-run-for-president/

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, former Defense Secretary James Mattis said he regrets being so critical of Joe Biden in his memoir since he didn’t know at the time he was writing that Biden would run for president.

In an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Margaret Brennan read him an excerpt from his new book “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” in which he harshly criticizes the former vice president.

“You wrote, ‘He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly,’” Ms. Brennan said.

“Well, I was writing a history book at that point, Margaret, because I started writing this book in 2013,” Mr. Mattis replied. “Had I known the former vice president was going to run for office, I assure you I would not have probably been that forthcoming.”

“Are you raising questions about his judgment?” Ms. Brennan asked.

“I think the Obama administration, President Obama’s administration had made the decision to leave Iraq despite what the intelligence community was telling us what would happen,” Mr. Mattis said. “They were very clear that an al Qaeda-associated group would rise, that the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, the Iraqi nation was in a post-combat, pre-reconciliation phase. We needed to keep our influence there a little longer.”

While many in the media were hoping for a scandalous tell-all about his time in the Trump administration, Mattis’s memoir has instead proven to be very unflattering to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The biggest bombshell so far has been Mattis’s revelation that Obama chose not to respond to an Iranian bomb plot on American soil in order to protect his terrible nuclear deal.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/08/biden-or-bust/

For better or worse, the Democratic establishment apparently has decided it has no choice but to embrace the former vice president. Can he be propped up and pampered for the next 14 months?

Pundits and politicos play the current parlor game of counting Joe Biden’s daily bloopers, signs of debility, or embarrassments.

Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough presidential tone, and unconventional political tactics. Trump is a renegade. Biden remains what he always was—a deep state fixture. And his brand is mainstream Democrat left-liberal orthodoxy, which supposedly does not include weird and wild La La Land pronouncements.

Also, Trump is hated by a media that is 90 percent negative in its coverage of his every word, deed, and sneeze. In contrast, the media is in the Biden tank.

So the reaction to the respective boilerplate gaffes and untruths of each is quite different: when Trump is caught mythologizing, his supporters blame the “fake news” media for taking things out of context—confusing his jest with seriousness, or conflating normal exaggeration and bombast with mortal-sin lying.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/tulsi-gabbard-disagrees-with-other-democrats-on-impeachment/

Although her fellow Democrats over in the House of Representatives are finally yielding to the fringe mob on the subject of impeaching President Trump, Sen. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) isn’t on board with the idea.

The Hill:

Rep.  Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) said in a new interview that she opposes an effort by dozens of House Democrats for an impeachment inquiry into the president, saying it would cause further divisions within the U.S.

In an interview on “Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren,” the 2020 candidate for president took a firm stance against impeachment, putting her at odds with other Democratic candidates for president including Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“I don’t [support impeachment,]” Gabbard said. “You know, I think it’s important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further to tear our country apart.”

Gabbard has been one of the more sensible Democratic presidential candidates thus far so, naturally, she’s not getting much traction and didn’t qualify for the next debate.

https://spectator.us/democrats-find-religion/

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community. This may be the first time that the Democratic party, or any official organ of the American left, has forthrightly declared the true objective of its modern politics: the promotion and enshrinement of a new religion.

With this declaration, Democrats are taking seriously their current, favorite term, ‘wokeness’ – the religious resonance of which is unavoidable. For them, to be woke is to be awakened to new knowledge, to be freed from one’s old, ignorant ways and to share in life-changing revelation. Thus, the Democrats’ woke resolution – a concise, one-page distillation of the modern, American left worldview – reads as a confessional, creedal document. It speaks of ‘values’: ‘religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic party’s values.’ It speaks of ostracism and suffering for beliefs: ‘the nonreligious have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society.’ And, it articulates the essential, core aims of the creed by praising the religiously unaffiliated as ‘advocates for rational public policy based on sound social science and universal humanistic values.’

The resolution embodies what Charles Taylor, a scholar of secularism, terms ‘the independent ethic.’ According to Taylor, in establishing an independent ethic, a group will ‘deduce certain exceptionless norms’ and ‘abstract from…deeper or higher beliefs altogether for purposes of a political morality.’ And, as Taylor explains, when there ‘are real live atheists in the society…they will live an independent ethic not as some thought experiment, but as the basis of their moral lives.’ In this way, an apparently nonreligious or even overtly anti-religious creed can assume the character of what is actually religious fundamentalism.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-4-the-competition-over-how-to

It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvatio n, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa’s (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .”

With the Australian election won by pro-development forces, the giant ($16.5 billion) Carmichael/Adani coal mine project in Queensland resumed its march toward final regulatory approval.

In late August former President Barack Obama plunked down just under $15 million for a beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, maybe 10 feet above mean high tide, revealing just what the ex-Pres really thinks of his own rhetoric about impending climate-induced sea-level rise.