RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/03/the-anesthetic-effect-of-ukrainegate/

There’s a good chance the manufactured scandal already has softened Barr’s expected body blow to the Russiagate culprits by setting up a false equivalence. Justice might finally be served, but a weary American public might not care.

Wary political commentators on the Right have noted that the ginned up outrage over President Trump’s call with the Ukranian president serves two political purposes: One, to supply the impeachment goods that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not deliver and two, to obfuscate the ongoing investigations led by Attorney General William Barr into how the Obama White House unleashed the country’s most powerful government agencies against the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.

There is, however, a third motive behind the nonstop cacophony over Trump’s call and subsequent “whistleblower” report: To anesthetize the American public when the verdicts of Barr’s inquiries, currently underway by multiple authorities at the Justice Department, are rendered.

“Ukrainegate” is another way to numb the collective shock when Americans finally learn the details of the international sting operation concocted to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign and later, derail his presidency. The reaction from the Left and NeverTrump Right will be, “So what if President Obama’s CIA, FBI and State Department prodded foreign governments to investigate his political foe and influence an election? Trump did the same thing! Who cares if Obama wanted to damage the Trump campaign? Trump is doing the same thing to the Biden campaign!”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-streets-of-san-francisco-11570143083

The city made a choice to tolerate vagrancy and encourage drug use, with dire consequences.

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

“Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-convict named Shaku explains from an encampment of tents, trash and bicycles across from Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district. A formerly homeless woman living in a city-subsidized hotel, asked if she does drugs, replies: “Is that a trick question?” Jeff, 50, slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 a.m. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. “I use drugs, alcohol, all of it,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “The whole Tenderloin is for drugs.”

The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one’s arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle-disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

Only 60% of the city’s free needles are returned; the rest end up on the sidewalks or in the sewers. Users dig for veins in plain view. At the corner of Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue, steps away from the UC Hastings College of the Law, I was easily able to purchase a 2-gram pellet of fentanyl for $16, a new-customer discount.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-shifty-timeline-11570143046

If the latest impeachment push continues to backfire, Democrats can thank their duplicitous House Intelligence chairman, Adam Schiff.

The New York Times reported this week that the “whistleblower” who set off the latest inquisition provided an “early warning” to Mr. Schiff’s committee that he or she was filing a complaint over Donald Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s president. The media is now at pains to stress that whistleblowers do sometimes reach out to Congress, that all “procedures” were followed, and that what really matters is the accusation that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Actually, it matters a great deal that Mr. Schiff knew about this early and withheld it deliberately from both the public and his House colleagues. He used his advance information to lay the groundwork steadily for later exploitation of the issue. He went so far as to charge the White House with a coverup—of a complaint he already knew about. The timeline of this orchestrated campaign is another knock to the legitimacy of the so-called impeachment inquiry. If the public can’t trust Mr. Schiff to be honest about the origins of his information, why should they trust his claim that the information itself is serious?

Mr. Schiff on Sept. 13, a Friday night, issued the explosive news that he had been alerted a few days earlier by the intelligence community’s inspector general of an “urgent” yet unspecified whistleblower complaint. But the complaint is dated Aug. 12, and news reports now say the whistleblower interacted with Mr. Schiff’s staff prior to then. So Mr. Schiff knew about the topic of the complaint for more than a month—while the public did not. It is now clear why the intelligence chairman in that month suddenly developed an interest in all things Ukrainian, and began aggressively previewing his impeachment mantra.

On Aug. 23, for instance, Mr. Schiff tweeted that Mr. Trump tried to “get dirt on a political opponent” via personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s interaction with the office of the Ukrainian president. On Aug. 28, the chairman tweeted his newfound concern that Mr. Trump was “withholding vital military aid to Ukraine.” And on Sept. 9, Mr. Schiff suddenly announced his committee would launch a full-fledged investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to “pressure Ukraine to help the President’s re-election campaign.” All this was priming the public and the media for what was to come—the better to take full advantage of the whistleblower “news.”

Yet even after news broke of the complaint, Mr. Schiff played dumb. On Sept. 17, he flatly (and falsely) stated on MSNBC: “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.” Two days later, he thanked the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, without whom “we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint.” Really? Mr. Schiff wanted to make it sound as if the Trump administration was muzzling the complainant, when in fact the process was working and Mr. Schiff knew all about it. CONTINUE AT SITE