RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-food-insecurity-lie/

President Joe Biden says 24 million Americans “suffer from food insecurity!”

News anchors were shocked that there is “food insecurity in the richest country in the world!” ABC hosts turned “insecurity” into “hunger.”

But in my new video, Rachel Sheffield, who researches welfare policy at the Heritage Foundation, explains, “Food insecurity is not the same thing as hunger. It just means that they had to rely on cheaper foods, store-brand alternatives … or reduce variety.”

Really? The alarm about “food insecurity” is based on that? Well, yes. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its fine print, admits that “for most food-insecure households, the inadequacies were in the form of reduced quality and variety of food rather than insufficient quantity.”

“They always want to create a crisis,” I say to Sheffield.

“Government programs want to keep themselves going,” she replies.

She’s talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; the Women, Infants and Children program; the National School Lunch Program and the other constantly growing handouts that make up America’s welfare system.

The biggest effect of these handouts is to harm the people they want to help. They harm people by making them dependent on government.

Before government’s War on Poverty began, Americans were steadily lifting themselves out of poverty. Year after year, the number of people living below the poverty line dropped.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tell-the-truth-about-law-enforcement-and-crime

Public safety has been destroyed in many American cities because of an idea. That idea holds that any law-enforcement activity that has a disparate impact on black criminals is racist. Disparate impact is why many police departments have dismantled gang databases and antigun task forces, why they have given up on public-order enforcement, and why they have all but eliminated car stops. It is why “progressive” district attorneys have stopped prosecuting trespassing, shoplifting, fare evasion, and resisting arrest, why bail is being eliminated, and why judges let repeat offenders back on the street. Disparate impact is the reason that chain stores like Starbucks and Walgreens would rather close high-loss outlets than accost thieves.

Until the disparate-impact conceit is demolished, permanently restoring law and order will be impossible. Any short-term gains from renewed enforcement will remain vulnerable to the charge that they have come at the expense of racial equity. Conservatives can call for re-policing all they want. Unless they explicitly discredit the idea that incarcerating black criminals is racist, however, Democratic politicians and policymakers will be able to use disparate rates of stops and arrests to roll back constitutional crime control whenever they have the power to do so.

Only a president has the national reach to engage this most difficult of all “conversations about race.” If the next president does not have the fortitude to do so personally, his attorney general should assume the responsibility. The next AG should lay out in a national speech the dilemma facing law enforcement: in order to save black lives, police officers will have to stop and arrest black criminals in numbers greatly disproportionate to the black share of the population. He should give the victimization facts: black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles since the George Floyd race riots; blacks between the ages of ten and 24 were killed in gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that age cohort. Those black victims are not being gunned down by America’s alleged white supremacists or by the police; they are being gunned down by other blacks, at rates equally disproportionate to the black population share. Providing justice to those black victims will require putting more black criminals in prison.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Critics of “moral clarity” claim the world cannot be divided into good and evil, that there are too many nuances. As well, these critics tell us that the words “moral clarity” suggest exclusionary views, such as that expressed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

In my opinion they misunderstand the words, as they assign a moral equivalence based on claimed beliefs. The fact that Nazis justified the extermination of the Jewish people as a means to achieve a pure, Aryan race was an act of pure evil, as was their concept of lebensraum. It was evil that drove Hamas terrorists to parachute in and slaughter Jewish civilians, including children, in the most horrific manner. None of what they did could be compared to Israelis giving Palestinians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before sending in armed forces to ferret out terrorists in tunnels beneath Gaza City’s civilian population. Moral clarity is the ability to think clearly about good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. There are times when wars are fought for good causes. Moral clarity implies the existence and ubiquity of evil.

However, among the extreme Left, the words have become pejorative, as they associate them with American conservatives. They link them to Ronald Reagan, whose popularity has never sat well with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, and they were popularized by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, a book that highlighted the tension between good and evil. Moral clarity demands the United States has a strong defense, the ability to confront enemies and support allies. 

As Natan Sharansky wrote in the rubric above, the challenge for western democracies is to acknowledge that evil exists. Those living under dictatorships, victims of Ku Klux Klan marauders in the early part of the 20th Century, and Jews subject to anti-Semitism today understand how evil infests individuals. In his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through the human heart.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-lesson-for-rashida-tlaib-hamas-israel-moral-equivalence-778f2cbb?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

“When Rashida Tlaib makes the case for moral equivalence, she is outrageous and extreme. But when Barack Obama does, his argument is smooth and sophisticated. That’s what makes it all the more pernicious.”

Poor Rashida Tlaib. If only she had Barack Obama’s ability to couch the argument for moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas in terms acceptable to polite society.

Because she doesn’t, the Michigan Democrat was censured last Tuesday by the House for her comments following the Hamas barbarities of Oct. 7. In the end, 22 of her fellow Democrats voted alongside most Republicans for censure. But in her statement in response, Ms. Tlaib—the sole Palestinian-American in Congress—remained unapologetic.

“Many of them,” she said of her colleagues, “have shown me that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them, but I still do not police their rhetoric or actions.” This from a congresswoman who posted a video on social media accusing Joe Biden of supporting the “genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Then there’s the Obama approach. At about the same time Ms. Tlaib was drawing condemnation even from Democrats, the “Pod Save America” podcast released a clip from an interview. In it Mr. Obama also made a case for moral equivalence. But he went about it in an underhanded manner that is more damaging to Democratic unity and support for Mr. Biden’s policy than anything Ms. Tlaib could do.

It’s all wrapped in his call for an admission of “complexity.” The 44th president did declare that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was “horrific” and unjustified. But complexity means it’s also true the “occupation” was “unbearable” for Palestinians and that “nobody’s hands are clean.”