RUTHFULLY YOURS

An open letter to the scribes who organized last Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner:

Given your recent public relations wreck, these words are a little late. There may still be time to save next year’s dinner, however, and preserve a venerable institution that serves a valuable purpose. Your annual dinner helps deflate overblown egos, an area of Washington life where leaks are desperately needed. So, in hopes of helping you pick up the pieces, here’s some free advice about roasts, based on my 30 years in the speechwriting business.

First, your keynote roaster was not the problem. The problem was your clueless dinner committee. Somehow they persuaded themselves that unleashing Michelle Wolf on the fold would be a good idea. Maybe the committee was hoping to punish the president for leaving his correspondents at the altar. If so, they should have known that stand-up comics with modest abilities and no personal links to the complex culture of Washington do not speak “truth to power.” Instead, they invariably take the low road to laughs by speaking insults to invited guests.

Second, you forgot that political roasts are mock combat, not the real thing. They are gladiator games in which swords should never touch flesh. At a political roast, punchlines should only sting momentarily. Scars that are still visible in the morning are marks of abused power.

The primary bond between roaster and roastee should be affection, not contempt. Comedian Jeff Ross only roasts people he loves. Yes, the Hollywood/show business version of the roast format allows for obscene humor and the joys of going too far. But the political version does not. Political roasts may be a blood sport, but that red stuff around the podium is special effects. If real blood hits the walls, the roast will turn into a horror show.

One of the stranger moments of Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe is Michael Flynn’s Dec. 1, 2017 guilty plea for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The former White House national security adviser pleaded guilty to a single count of making false statements, even though then FBI director James Comey had told Congress in March that the two FBI agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn believed he hadn’t lied.

These columns reported this Comey testimony based on sources at the time of Mr. Flynn’s plea (“The Flynn Information,” Dec. 1, 2017). Now comes confirmation from a less redacted version of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report released late Friday.

On pages 53-54, the report notes that in March 2017 “Director Comey testified to the Committee that ‘the agents . . . discerned no physical indications of deception. They didn’t see any change in posture, in tone, in inflection, in eye contact. They saw nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.’” The quotes are from the committee transcript of Mr. Comey’s remarks.

The report goes on to say that then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe “confirmed the interviewing agent’s initial impression and stated that the ‘conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that he made in the interview . . . the statements were inconsistent with our understanding of the conversation that he had actually had with the ambassador.’”

Equity investors loved Friday morning’s jobs report for April, lifting share prices sharply across the board. Job growth for the month fell below expectations, but maybe Mr. Market looked at the details and saw the broader reality of an increasingly tight labor market that suggests business confidence in continuing economic growth. A couple of key figures that haven’t received much attention are worth noting.

Republican politicians pointed to the decline in the overall jobless rate to 3.9% after six months of 4.1%. But this was achieved thanks to a 236,000 decline in the U.S. labor force. That decline balances what happened in February when the rate stayed at 4.1% despite more than 800,000 new entrants to the labor force. A better way to look at the health of the jobs market is the long-term trend, and over the last year there is some notable good news.

The black jobless rate has fallen a remarkable 1.3-percentage points to 6.6% since April 2017. That’s still high compared to the 3.6% rate for whites, but it’s lower than the 6.8% recorded in December, which was the previous low since the government began tracking the data in 1972. The black jobless rate has been below 7% for four of the last five months, which has never previously happened.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Ikhwan, Arabic for Muslim Brotherhood (MB), is an organizational humanitarian hoax being perpetrated on the American people to bring Islam to America. Islam in America would not be problematic if it was a religion like Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism – it isn’t. Islam is a comprehensive socio-political, military, religious way of life with its own governing supremacist religious sharia laws that are antithetical to Western cultural norms and America’s governing secular Constitutional laws.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an enemy of the United States.

The goal of Islam is to convert the world to Islam. The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood in America is SETTLEMENT not assimilation. Settlement is the incremental process of making Islam familiar, acceptable, normative, and ultimately replacing secular American laws with supremacist religious Islamic sharia law.

The treasonous conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots is fully documented in its 1991 Explanatory Memorandum that details the strategic goal for the group in North America and the necessity for organizational acceptance. The Muslim Brotherhood understood that America is structured by organizations so the parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has spawned hundreds of offspring organizations with the same subversive settlement goal and the same deceitful operating principles.

The Robert Mueller “investigation” is a disgrace to the Constitution, to our tradition of ordered liberty, and to the American Way. Tell me: did you ever expect to read a passage like this in an American newspaper?

Though Mr. Mueller doesn’t face any specific legal deadline… [he]has a lot still to do—prepare several reports, bring expected charges against alleged Russian hackers behind the breach of the Democratic National Committee and make decisions on whether to prosecute other cases. Perhaps the most politically sensitive issue he has yet to resolve is whether the special counsel’s office will demand an interview with Mr. Trump. If he can’t get all those things done in the next few months, his probe is likely to stretch into 2019.

Or longer — to infinity and beyond. Should he wish, Mueller can be at this for the rest of his life, with an unlimited budget, and at taxpayer expense.

But this is not justice in any meaningful sense of the term. Rather, it’s the sore-loser Left’s latest attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election by orchestrating, via deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and St. James Comey, a quasi-legal proceeding to demonstrate that Donald Trump is unfit to sit in the Oval Office, and that therefore his presidency must be ended by any means necessary. As Ed Koch, the late former mayor of New York City, famously said: “The people have spoken and now they must be punished.”

The point of the Wall Street Journal story quoted above is that with the election season fast approaching, Mueller may have to lie doggo for a while so as not to — stop laughing! — influence the fall congressional vote.

Mr. Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign will soon run into a dead zone of sorts, in which former prosecutors say they expect him either to wrap up, or lie low and take no visible steps until after the November vote…. He will reach a point this summer when Justice Department habits dictate he would have to go dark so he doesn’t appear to be trying to sway voters’ decisions, which would be at odds with Justice Department guidelines for prosecutors.

Any action by Mr. Mueller that implicates or exonerates Mr. Trump or his associates in working with Russia or obstructing justice could go a long way to determining whether Democrats take control of one or both houses of Congress. Democrats have promised extra scrutiny of the Trump administration if voters pull the lever for their party in November, while Republican candidates have largely sided with Mr Trump, and some have echoed the president’s message that the prosecution is a witch hunt.

This is ludicrously disingenuous — the very continuance of the Mueller investigation into non-existent Russian “collusion” has already swayed, and will continue to sway, voters, as the Democrats and the never-Trumpers knew it would. Even if they can’t get a do-over on 2016, the Left has made it clear that this fall’s elections should be a referendum on Trump — both his fitness for, and his performance in, office. Indeed, at this point there’s nothing Mueller can do not to influence the election. If he fails to bring any charges against the president, or issue an impeachment referral, the Left will scream bloody murder; if he does, the Right will howl. And if he just keeps on keepin’ on… well, where there’s smoke there must be fire, right? CONTINUE AT SITE