RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Being accountable for one’s actions and taking responsibility are fading qualities in our “woke” age. In the mid 1960s, on a snowy street in New Hampshire after a day’s skiing, my father, driving home, knocked a woman down, sending her to the hospital. The police told him it was not his fault. Nevertheless, he assumed responsibility, visiting her regularly until she recovered and was released. Such chivalry no longer exists. Like merit, hard work and objective truth, gallantry and graciousness are now, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in the December issue of The Spectator, “manifestations of heredity and ‘whiteness,’” – therefore to be condemned.

“Victory has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan,” is an old quote used by President Kennedy. Today’s politicians no longer take blame for policies gone wrong. Instead, they follow advice Napoleon is alleged to have given: “Never retreat, never retract, never admit a mistake.” When the January 6 march on the Capitol turned disastrous, Donald Trump never admitted that his words that afternoon helped provoke it. But neither has Hillary Clinton accepted blame for the Steel dossier, which was at the heart of the $40 million (taxpayer money) discredited Mueller investigation. Governor Andrew Cuomo placed COVID-19 infected patients in nursing homes, leading to a plethora of unnecessary deaths. Has he expressed remorse or assumed responsibility? No. Has he expressed sorrow for abusing women who worked in his office? No. “Oh yes, the past can hurt,” says the shaman Rafiki in The Lion King, “but you can either run from it or learn from it.” Politicians choose to run from their past, not learn from it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci belittles those who disagree with him by claiming an attack on him is an attack on science. Yet the science about COVID-19 has changed as more has been learned. But his arrogance forbids any display of humility, or admission of personal responsibility regarding helping to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Dr. Fauci’s denial gained two Pinocchio’s from left-leaning The Washington Post.) The recent rise in energy prices, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, is due to oil and gas producers “putting their massive profits, share prices and dividends…ahead of Americans.” Apparently higher prices have nothing to do with restrictions on drilling and cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline extension, policies which the Massachusetts Senator supports. In a recent article in The Epoch Times, Victor Davis Hanson wrote, regarding the disastrous flight from Afghanistan: “Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco in the past half century.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/11/civilizational-suicide-not-omicron-is-killing-us/

Last week in this space, I included a few words about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s remarkable new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. I also included a link to Kennedy’s appearance on “Tucker Carlson Today.” 

It was a remarkable exchange and I commend both the book and the interview to your attention. I disagree with Kennedy about various things, including the efficacy of vaccines in general, but his assessment of the highest-paid employee of the federal government, Anthony Fauci, is worth the price of admission. 

As I remarked a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had done writing about COVID. Surely, I thought, the hysteria is on the wane. Most people are rational. They know that the flimsy porous masks you see everywhere are useless tokens of conformity. They understand that the disease is serious for only a tiny part of the population. They also know staying home and practicing “social distancing” has its own liabilities, not least of which is a diminution in the potency of one’s immune response.

Unfortunately, the people making the rules are not “most people.” They are bureaucrats being advised by public health “experts” like Anthony Fauci who has demonstrated ostentatious incompetence at least since the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. When news of the so-called Omicron variant first surfaced a few weeks back, I assumed the fact that doctors first described it as very contagious but also with symptoms that were “very mild,” meant the “experts” would let us get on with our lives.

Fat chance. It’s not just the old Rahm Emanuel wheeze of never letting a crisis go to waste. It’s also a matter of fabricating crises where none exist because emergencies justify emergency powers, and emergency powers mean that you can push ahead with your agenda on all fronts using the fake crisis as justification for bending or discarding the rules. 

So, even as Fauci warns that it is a matter of “when not if” the definition of “fully vaccinated” will change to include at least one who-knows-how-many booster shots, the CEO of Pfizer, dollar signs in his eyes, has already said that a fourth jab may be needed “sooner than expected” because of the Omicron variant.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/09/morning-greatness-twelve-cities-set-murder-records-for-2021/

Welcome to Murderville, USA. Twelve cities have already set records for the number of murders in 2021 and the year isn’t even over yet. What is going on here?

“Nobody’s getting arrested anymore,” Robert Boyce, retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department said. “People are getting picked up for gun possession and they’re just let out over and over again.” Note: the most vicious anti-gun cities are not prosecuting gun violence. Chew on that.

ABC News reports: “The FBI crime data shows that the number of arrests nationwide plummeted 24% in 2020, from the more than 10 million arrests made in 2019. The number of 2020 arrests — 7.63 million — is the lowest in 25 years, according to the data. FBI crime data is not yet available for 2021.”

Social justice racketeers have pressured cities to cut their police forces. Soros prosecutors are declining to charge criminals for their crimes. Bail has been abolished in some places and violent criminals go free before their trial to continue their crime sprees. Police are retiring and getting out of the business and the ones who remain are terrified to the point that they do not engage with perpetrators lest they become the next internet video star. Many of these SJW politicians have historically complained there there are too many criminals in jail and advocated accordingly. Now we have fewer criminals in jail and more criminals walking the streets. Victory?

Get away from these cities and go live somewhere that has not abolished law and order.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/expert_troll_desantis_budgets_8_million_to_transport_illegal_aliens_sent_to_florida_to_places_like_delaware_and_marthas_vineyard.html

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has added a bit of clever trolling to his impressively well-thought-out five-part plan to make up for the default of the Biden regime on border control. Monica Showalter cogently explained the guts of the plan laid out in the state budget yesterday on these pages, but DeSantis noted a bit of frosting on the plan in an address in Jacksonville. (35 minute video)

YouTube screengrab (cropped)

Via The Daily Wire:

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis released his new budget for the state this week, and in it he requests millions of dollars to begin removing illegal aliens from his state.

“In yesterday’s budget, I put in $8 million for us to be able to transport people here illegally out of the state of Florida,” DeSantis said on Friday. “It’s somewhat tongue in cheek, but it is true, if you sent them to Delaware or Martha’s Vineyard or some of these places, that border would be secure the next day.”

This is brilliant on multiple grounds:

Any protest against, say, a planeload of illegals landing at Martha’s Vineyard Airport, would only highlight the point that illegals are being flown at taxpayer expense to states far from the border – in the dead of night, often.
If one wishes to call the DeSantis plan “illegal” or “improper,” then the same terms must also apply to the Biden plan currently underway.
It would mobilize public opinion in blue states against the influx.
The expense is easily justifiable because of the social welfare and education costs attendant to illegal immigrants. Again, objections would just emphasize the costs of the Biden plan.

It’s always dangerous to get too enthusiastic about any politician. But I have to say that Ron DeSantis right now looks to me like the kind of leader the nation needs. He’s got the guts and vision of a Donald Trump, but with fewer rough edges that needlessly alienate some voters.

Now, let’s just lay in a supply of popcorn and wait for the reaction when the illegals arrive in Wilmington and Martha’s Vineyard.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/is-durhams-case-on-clinton-tied-lawyer-michael-sussmann-collapsing/

To put it mildly, this is going to be a very tough case for Durham.

D efense counsel for Michael Sussmann, the former Perkins-Coie lawyer indicted by Russiagate special counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI, now claim that information they have received in pretrial discovery substantially undermines the prosecution’s case.

In the one-count indictment, filed in mid September, Durham alleges that Sussmann misleadingly concealed the identities of his clients when he brought the FBI information that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was secretly communicating with the Kremlin.

According to the indictment, Sussmann told the bureau’s then-general counsel, James Baker, that he was not representing any client. This is now said to have been false because Sussmann was representing both the campaign of Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and a cyber expert who was hoping to land a top tech job in the anticipated Clinton administration. At the meeting, Sussmann told Baker that Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, was the conduit for Trump-Kremlin communications, with its servers transmitting messages to and from a server at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The FBI looked into the Alfa Bank allegation and ultimately rejected it.

According to the New York Times, Sussmann’s attorneys claim that prior statements by Baker indicate that he knew Sussmann was representing clients. At a minimum, he has said different things at different times. The critical September 19, 2016, meeting between Baker and Sussmann was short – less than 20 minutes in all – and they were the only two people in the room. The false-statement charge thus hinges on Baker’s memory; because it appears faulty, Sussmann’s lawyers contend that the prosecution will not be able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/where-john-durhams-investigation-is-heading/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

Reading the tea leaves, it appears the special counsel’s end game is something other than a sweeping indictment.

L ast week’s indictment of Igor Danchenko has the commentariat buzzing. If special counsel John Durham has cracked the core of the Russiagate case, if he has established that the Steele dossier on which the FBI substantially based its spy warrants was fraudulent, does that mean he is nearing a sweeping conspiracy indictment? Will there be criminal charges that target the real 2016 collusion — not between the Trump campaign and Russia, but between the Clinton campaign and U.S. officials who abused government investigative powers for political purposes?

Almost certainly not.

All signs are that Durham will end his investigation with a narrative report. It has looked that way for a long time. There are reasons why then-attorney general Bill Barr appointed then-Connecticut U.S. attorney Durham as a special counsel shortly before the Trump administration ended.

Unlike ordinary federal prosecutors, who either file charges or close investigations without comment, special counsels are required by regulation to write a report for the attorney general. As we saw with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019, there is typically great outside pressure on the AG to make such reports public (though doing so is not required). Barr obviously knew enough about Durham’s investigation to grasp that there was unlikely to be a grand, overarching criminal-conspiracy case; there had, however, been rampant malfeasance and abuse of power that might never come to light absent a comprehensive investigative report.