RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/russia-hoax-whitewash-era-begins-2.php

The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t even break a sweat.

We were never meant to be clued in. As the veil of the fraud was pierced by Rep. Devin Nunes and others including, most recently, John Durham, we now have a good handle on the con. It is almost unbelievable. It is also an inexhaustibly rich subject.

Matt Taibbi took up the role of the mainstream media at his TK News site in “The Russiagate Whitewash Era Begins” (mostly behind his subscription paywall, but also available in the form of a YouTube video and podcast).

To Taibbi’s assessment we can now add Aaron Maté’s RCP column “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From the Media Now — Just for Starters.” In addition to citing a few of the egregiously ludicrous stories that we paused over at the time, the column takes a look back at some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russia hoax journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post:

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/to-deny-the-lab-leak-covid-theory?token=e

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

https://www.aol.com/news/colorado-supermarket-shooting-suspect-incompetent-204105432-094803629.html

DENVER (AP) — A judge ruled Friday that a man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket earlier this year is mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him to be treated at the state mental hospital to see if he can be made well enough to face prosecution.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, is accused of opening fire at a busy King Soopers in the college town of Boulder in March, killing a police officer, shoppers and several store employees. 

Four doctors have now determined that Alissa is not mentally competent to participate in court proceedings, and he has “deteriorated” over the past couple of months while in jail, District Attorney Michael Dougherty said. Given the consensus, Dougherty requested that Judge Ingrid Bakke send Alissa to the state mental hospital in hopes that medication and treatment will enable him to become competent under the law — able to understand legal proceedings and work with his lawyers to defend himself.

Dougherty did not disclose why the experts determined Alissa is not competent, and the report explaining the evaluation’s finding is not available to the public, only to the lawyers and judge. Alissa’s attorney, Kathryn Herold, said Friday her client has a “serious” mental illness but did not provide details. She also agreed he should be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/2021-was-the-year-of-vindication-for-trump/

The year could not have started any worse for former President Trump. Thousands of his supporters from all over the country, of all different races and religions gathered at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to show their support for a president who for four years fought for the forgotten men and women of this country.

They were proud of his many accomplishments.

Even with four years of lies and conspiracy theories about Russian collusion, and a bogus quid pro quo charge involving the president of Ukraine that led to an embarrassing impeachment, Trump still managed to cut taxes, reduce regulations, and preside over the highest labor force participation rate ever recorded in U.S. history, with 157 million Americans working—until the Chinese coronavirus decimated our economy.

Although the Left painted Trump as a sexist and a racist, he started a $50 million initiative to help create employment opportunities for women, offered new mothers the first ever paid family leave plan, and signed a bill that would permanently provide more than $250 million annually to historically black colleges and universities.

Trump rebuilt our military, increased national defense spending, eliminated the ISIS caliphate, negotiated peace treaties in the Middle East, secured our southern border by beginning construction of a wall and through robust law enforcement. He renegotiated unfair trade agreements, stood up to China, and delivered three vaccines and therapeutics during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

He fought for the factory workers in Indiana, the farmers in Michigan, the ranchers in Texas, the truckers in Pennsylvania, the military who kept the peace, and the police officers who kept us safe.

But in the blink of an eye, the real estate magnate-turned-politician was shunted back to Mar-a-Lago after supposedly losing the first ever mail-in ballot election to a 77-year-old feeble and often confused man who campaigned almost exclusively from his basement on the lie that he would restore our national unity. 

The ruling class told us we weren’t allowed to question the outcome of the most bizarre and corrupt election in history, one in which​ tens of millions of ballots were mailed out, without proper safeguards in place to ensure that the identity of the voter could be verified, and where several Democratic secretaries of state illegally changed election laws in defiance of state legislators.

Trump’s 75 million supporters were rightfully outraged, as they saw his election night lead slip away in the wee hours of the morning, while being labeled rubes and conspiracy theorists by the ruling class.

Before Trump had even finished speaking on January 6, and told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, hundreds of people had already stormed the Capitol building as a riot ensued.

No one who illegally trespassed should be excused from breaking the law. But contrary to false media reports, the only two people who were killed on that day were two unarmed female Trump supporters, Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland. Most consumers of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are probably unaware of that fact, and probably still believe that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed at the rally by deranged QAnon followers.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/oh-oh-omicron/

Last week, I dusted off my Chinese-flu soapbox and said a word or two about (cue the scary music) the Omicron variant. It sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, doesn’t it? A friend told me about a parlor game that the journalist Christopher Hitchens and his pals used to play in which the object was to contrive names for Shakespeare’s plays that sounded like the title of a Ludlum novel. Hamlet was “The Elsinore Conundrum.” I am sorry that Hitch is not still with us to try his hand at the Omicron variant. 

So far, I have to say, it’s been pretty much of a dud—unless, that is, you’re the stock market, which has taken a beating this last week or so, in part because of this new kid on the medical block (there is also that much more toxic financial emergency, the Biden Administration, but that’s for another day). The new variant has also been a godsend for scolds, nags, bureaucrats, and meddlesome so-called public health officials nannies who are just itching for another excuse to lock down your world, introduce new travel restrictions, and impose new testing protocols. 

How will it all play out? TSTS—Too Soon to Say, but I suspect this sequel is going to be a flop at the box office. For one thing, although only recently named, there is abundant evidence that Omicron has been around for months. If it had been previously unnamed, that is perhaps because it is no big deal. The South African doctor who first identified the strain noted that while the virus was possibly more contagious than versions named for letters earlier in the Greek alphabet, symptoms tended to be mild, indeed “very mild.” A typical news report notes that “patients mostly suffered from mild muscle aches, scratchy throat and dry cough.” (Remember colds? Remember the flu?) 

So why the panic? Partly, it is because panic is an antidote to boredom. People are heavily bored. Panic also licenses the people who want to run your life to, well, run your life. “Most Omicron cases so far have been mild,” runs one headline, “but experts say it will take weeks to understand how severe the variant can be.” Ah, “experts”! What would we do without them?