RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/10/four-pillars-of-america/

At my alma mater, I was privileged to study The Three Pillars of Zen with Huston Smith, a friend of the author, Roshi Philip Kapleau. Kapleau made it clear in his timeless classic that Zen Buddhism has three pillars. 

Using the idea of pillars as an analytical tool worked wonders for Kapleau. What if we were to follow his example, and ask what are the pillars of the American idea?

Two pillars come instantly to mind: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Even American Progressives would be hard pressed to deny these two are central to the American idea. After all, Progressives have spent more than a century attacking them. They began their project of fundamentally transforming America—that is, putting an end to the founders’ America and replacing it with an all-new Progressive country occupying that part of North America once occupied by the United States—by attacking the principles of the Declaration and setting to work dismantling the Constitution. 

If those two founding documents weren’t at the core of the American idea, why would the Progressives bother expending such an enormous effort to get rid of them? Progressives have been willing to pay an astonishing price of destroying American higher education—and much else—in an attempt to reduce these two founding documents to no more than mere curiosities of America’s early history.

Because of what the Progressives have accomplished, a few remarks about the Constitution and the Declaration are in order. 

They are not what they once were to us. The words are still there, but the nation that once embodied them has been changed away from them. The federal government we have today in America is not the government limited by the Constitution the founders envisioned. Instead, it is precisely the ever-expanding centralized government the founders tried to prevent. We call it “the federal government” though it is no longer “federal” in the founders’ meaning of the term. The 10th Amendment promised Americans the federal government would be a limited government; the great 10th Amendment is a dead letter today. 

To say the government in Washington, D.C. is no longer the government envisioned by Washington and the other founders is to say America no longer uses the Declaration of Independence as its guiding star. After all, the Constitution, great as it is, is properly understood as the founders’ brilliant attempt to design a new form of government according to the principles of the Declaration. To discard the founders’ design is to abandon the founders’ principles.

The Progressives have rejected those principles from the beginning of their effort to transform America. Here is what Woodrow Wilson, the very model of a modern Progressive, thought of the Declaration’s claim that we have unalienable rights:

No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle . . .

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/is_jill_biden_staging_a_little_coup.html

Kamala Harris’s short tenure in the Veep’s office, in its own way, has been even more disastrous than Biden’s equally short tenure in the Oval office. We all knew Biden would be a bumbling fool, but thanks to the power of the pen and the executive orders the radicals on his staff have been writing, he’s been incredibly effective. In six months, he’s dismantled America’s security, economy, and sanity. Meanwhile, Kamala has failed at the one thing for which she was responsible: Bringing control to the border. Now, some are wondering if that failure was orchestrated in the White House and if Mrs. Jill Biden was responsible.

We know that Kamala’s failed: Not only hasn’t she been near the border but she’s also done nothing to change the border status quo. Now, on her first trip out of the country, she’s been insulted and humiliated wherever she’s gone. She’s appeared unprepared, confused, and stupid. It’s embarrassing for America but equally embarrassing for Kamala. Meanwhile, Joe and Jill are basking in the love of European leaders delighted to deal once again with someone who will send American money their way and ask nothing of them.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty thinks that the White House might be forcing failure on Kamala (who’s an easy mark):

On the latest Editors podcast, I floated the somewhat-tongue-in-cheek theory that Joe Biden has set Kamala Harris up to fail, a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.

Back in March, Biden announced Harris would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” He said Harris was “the most qualified person to do it.” She’s actually probably among the least qualified people in the White House to do it, considering almost everyone on the National Security Council has more hands-on experience in international diplomacy and security, and Biden’s domestic team includes Susan Rice. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/why_did_george_w_betray_team_gop.html

“In 2020 I boldly declared that Trump was the only thing standing between our country, the American people, and socialism.  I turned out to be correct,” said George P. Bush in announcing his candidacy for Texas attorney general.

Nearly 75 million Americans agreed, but his uncle, George W. Bush, was not among them.  It is likely that if George W. had said what George P. did, the Democrats could not have “harvested” enough votes to put their man over the top.  But he didn’t.  The result, as George P. pointed out, “was over 30 trillion dollars in total spending and 6 trillion in next year’s annual budget.”  And that is just the fiscal damage.

In the year 2000, some 50 million people elected George W. Bush president.  Despite his failings, almost all hung with him and re-elected him in 2004.  They understood that politics is a team sport.  They may not have loved their captain, but they understood he was better for the country than the other guy.   The sports enthusiast Bush is, one would think he’d get the concept of teamwork.

He did not.  At least, he did not seem to.  In his bestselling campaign book, Battle for the Soul, Edward-Isaac Dovere gives us a glimpse into what Bush was doing and saying to sabotage Trump and betray the millions of Americans who had backed both men during their presidencies.

“The two presidents hadn’t talked much in the months since Obama left office,” writes Dovere of Bush and Barack Obama, “though their staffs, along with Clinton’s and George H.W. Bush’s, were on email chains that featured rapid-fire Trump mocking and consoling one another over the state of the republic.”  As someone who voted for both Bushes, reading this made me cringe.

Dovere cited some choice lines from a speech Bush made in October 2017, hosted by the George W. Bush Institute in New York City.  For those who need a refresher, here is the passage that warmed the hearts of Democrats everywhere:

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2021/06/11/how-we-came-to-celebrate-racism-once-again-n1453820

While in past centuries, Americans and Canadians held negative and thus racist views of blacks, and discriminated against them, today the official government policy in both countries is that whites should be viewed negatively, and be discriminated against. Rules have been put in place in government offices, in industry, education, media, and throughout to indoctrinate against whites and in favor of “people of color,” as well as to benefit “people of color” and marginalize whites.

To illustrate, here is a brief excerpt from a recent article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association: “Whiteness is … a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. … Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples.” 

Governments, universities, and corporations have mandated that “people of color” get priority in hiring and promotion. Merit, encompassing achievement and potential, is now rejected as a criterion for personnel selection. Skin color is now the primary criterion of worth. 

Minorities are caught up in this racism. The tiny minority of Jewish citizens, who were never considered white until it became a bad thing, are now regarded as hyper-white, having all of the bad qualities of whites (such as Nobel prizes?) and deserving of nouveaux pogroms, in America! Anti-Semitic hate crimes have skyrocketed since the Democrat Party has made street politics popular. Asian Americans, a good-sized minority, made the mistake of being the most successful category economically and professionally. For this, they have been designated “white-adjacent” and condemned to be criticized and excluded for achieving more than their “fair share.”