RUTHFULLY YOURS

In March 1993, Janet Reno began her tenure as President Bill Clinton’s attorney general by summarily firing United States attorneys for 93 of the 94 federal districts (one, Michael Chertoff, was retained in New Jersey, at the request of Democratic Senator Bill Bradley). That is more than twice as many as Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions fired on Friday.

Indeed, there were only 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys left for Sessions to relieve because Obama appointees fully understood that this is the way things work. Many of them had already moved on, in the expectation that the president elected in November would replace them — an expectation that became a virtual certainty once it was clear that this change of administrations would be a change of parties, and visions.

It is frequently observed that, to be legitimate, law enforcement must operate independently of politics. It is an oversimplification, coupled with a misunderstanding of politics in its non-pejorative sense.

Of course the conduct of investigations, prosecutions, and their consequent judicial proceedings must be immune from partisanship. It would be intolerable for people to be targeted for, or insulated from, criminal law enforcement based on their political connections. Law enforcement, however, is about more than handling individual cases. It is about making overarching policy choices.

Resources are finite. Administrations must choose how many assets to dedicate to counterterrorism, immigration enforcement, health-care fraud, organized crime, and so on. Should the feds focus on the importation of illegal narcotics and their distribution by interstate criminal syndicates? Or should prosecutors and agents team up with state agencies to tackle street-level trafficking? Are the civil-rights laws an enforcement measure to protect fundamental liberties? Or are they a social-justice tool for transforming nationwide policing practices?

These policy choices are the stuff of politics. They often weigh heavily in presidential campaigns and elections. Law-and-order issues intimately affect people’s lives. When presidents make promises about them, they must expect to be held accountable.

U.S. attorneys are the instruments through which the president exercises his policy discretion. That is why they are political appointees. They do not have power of their own. Under our Constitution, all executive power is reposed in the president alone. Every officer of the executive branch is thus a delegate. The U.S. attorney exercises the president’s power and can be removed at the president’s will.

If you’re not an American millennial or university professor, you might be confused by the concept of “intersectionality.” First coined in 1989 by race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, it has become a left-wing buzzword to define the lumping together of all self-described “oppressed” groups under a single umbrella.

According to proponents of this radical fad — which amounts to an elimination of independent critical thought — not only must a person toe a particular ideological line, but he may never slip, even accidentally, into the realm of nuance or distinction. Someone who supports gay marriage, for example, has to oppose Israeli policy, advocate for government-funded abortions and believe that the free market is evil and climate change is man-made.

Though intersectionality has been around since long before anyone other than a handful of academics had heard of it, it has gradually been infecting political discourse in the United States for decades. Given a huge boost during the Obama years, it moved from obscurity to fame — particularly on campus — to such an extent that it is bandied around by students who would be hard put to spell it. Spending more time on the quad waving placards than in the classroom will do that. And it gives new meaning to the adage, taken from Thomas Gray’s 1742 “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” that ignorance is bliss.

On Wednesday this week, both intersectionality and blissful ignorance were on full display ahead of and during the International Women’s Strike. Ostensibly a cross-country happening for females to show the men who share their bedrooms and boardrooms what a day would be like in the absence of their (our) enormous contributions, the event was actually a mass whine-fest, organized by a Palestinian terrorist and a handful of other extremist feminists whose real goal was to attack the new U.S. president and the State of Israel.

Judging by the lack of aerial photographs illustrating the kind of crowds that had gathered after inauguration day, the public statement fell flat. Most women were too busy earning an honest living and tending to their children to waste a day on a demonstration that has no meaning in a country like America, where women are at liberty to do as they choose and please.

The truly oppressed women of the world would have been raped, stoned, tortured or executed for daring to whisper what their counterparts in the United States shout from the rooftops of Washington and New York. Indeed, had convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh or Palestinian-American, pro-Shariah and polygamy apologist Linda Sarsour — organizers of this week’s event — genuinely cared about their sisters, they would have been calling out the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, for its human rights violations and abuse of women.

But facts are of little interest to the intersectionalists; what matters to them is ideology — the kind they are able to express, promote and legislate in the land of the free and the brave that they love to denounce.

This is not to say that intersectionality enables smooth sailing for its adherents who — as my son says — long ago saw political correctness in their rear-view mirrors. On the contrary, they regularly run into snags when two or more of the ingredients in their witches’ cauldron clash.

Chelsea Clinton is not fascinating. But the repeated insistence that Chelsea Clinton is fascinating . . . is actually rather fascinating. It’s like a giant social experiment, in which everyone who has spent decades building connections to the Clinton political dynasty attempts to make the world see the president’s daughter as someone she isn’t.

Witness the recent insistence that we’re seeing a new side of Chelsea Clinton . . . because she’s tweeting a lot of critical things about President Trump. This is not particularly unusual behavior for a Democrat with a Twitter account. Yet Politico declares that she “lets loose on Twitter” with “a spicy, sarcastic online personality.” CNN concurs that “Chelsea Clinton embraces her Twitter sass.”

Almost every time the younger Clinton opens her mouth, it is treated as inherently newsworthy. Neontaster notices that The Hill has tweeted about her 70 times since the beginning of the year.

Why is Chelsea Clinton news? She’s the scion of America’s most famous Democratic dynasty, sure, but her own accomplishments in public life are meager. When can we stop pretending that hers is a voice worth listening to?

In fact, she’s pretty much the worst possible person to be speaking on behalf of Democrats right now. At a time when one of the preeminent problems in American life is a sense of declining economic opportunity and social mobility, she’s the living embodiment of inherited privilege.

After a few years of attempting to work in consulting and at hedge funds, she concluded she “couldn’t care about money on a fundamental level.” Then, with no experience in television journalism, she had her people call up the networks and set up a bidding war for her services as a correspondent. She made $600,000 per year for part-time work at NBC, generating what the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik called “a handful of reports that no self-respecting affiliate in a top 20 market would air.”

She was named an “assistant vice provost” at NYU at age 30. She was picked to give the keynote address at South by Southwest, and honored as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Now she makes $1,083 per minute speaking to public universities. And almost everything she does is decreed to be extraordinary by a pliant, pro-Clinton media. The New York Times even interviewed her about her favorite books.

American infrastructure has barely maintained a below-standard grade of “D+” over the last four years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In its “Infrastructure Report Card” issued every four years, the engineering group forecast that it would cost about $4.590 trillion over the next decade to bring the country’s roads, bridges, public schools and ports up to a safe, functioning level, about $2.064 trillion more than what governments and the private sector are ready to spend.

The association, based in Reston, Va., called for infrastructure investment to increase from the current level of about 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product to 3.5% by 2025.
“When it comes to your infrastructure you should be worried,” said Norma Jean Mattei, 2017 president of ASCE. “President Trump is onto something as he calls for a new program of national rebuilding.”
President Donald Trump has promised to increase infrastructure investment partly as a way to spur job growth. In his recent address to Congress, Mr. Trump said he would propose legislation aimed at generating a $1 trillion investment in U.S. infrastructure, financed through both public and private capital.

Aging infrastructure continues to create problems for communities around the country, from lead pipes contaminating the water supply in Flint, Mich., to U.S. ports struggling to handle larger volumes and a recent crisis at the Oroville Dam in northern California, where heavy rains almost caused a spillway to give way and about 200,000 people had to be evacuated.

The association’s infrastructure team looked at 16 infrastructure categories and found some areas grew worse in the last four years while other areas improved slightly. CONTINUE AT SITE

We cannot have faster approval for new drugs unless we have serious tort reform….pharma companies have to contend with litigations, which, in some cases have no statute of limitations ….rsk
President Donald Trump plans to nominate Scott Gottlieb, a conservative thinker and medical doctor with previous government experience, to run the Food and Drug Administration, the White House said Friday.

Dr. Gottlieb, who has ties to the drug industry, previously served as deputy FDA commissioner under President George W. Bush.

Dr. Gottlieb also is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal opinion pages and a prolific writer on FDA topics. He has promoted provocative views that in some cases would mean less regulation from the nation’s leading medical-products and food-supervisory agency.
His views appear aligned with those of the Trump administration, especially since Dr. Gottlieb generally favors faster product approvals. Mr. Trump has described the FDA product-approval process as “slow and burdensome.”

Dr. Gottlieb supports the core mission of the FDA, and he has long experience with the medical and legal principles he would deal with in the job, which likely would ease his path to Senate confirmation. He is a cancer survivor who is a 1994 graduate of Wesleyan University and holds a 1999 M.D. degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Dr. Gottlieb wins plaudits from people of different political backgrounds. Kavita Patel, a doctor and former Obama administration official now with the Brookings Institution, said, “I found that even when I would occasionally disagree with him on policy, I appreciated that he would take the time to listen.”

Dr. Gottlieb could bring significant changes to the FDA. He wrote in a recent piece in National Affairs that decisions on new drugs should ultimately be made not by the current group of drug reviewers but by a “central committee that is comprised of the agency’s most senior scientists.” CONTINUE AT SITE

CNN has done something no other media have done. They actually found a connection between American Betrayal and Steve Bannon.

Not that this is hard to do. There is a massive queue of stories about American Betrayal at Breitbart under Bannon’s helmsmanship.

These include:

1) A “breaking history” series in five parts that I wrote for Bannon/Breitbart, drawing from American Betrayal’s discoveries.

2) Numerous pieces covering American Betrayal, the controversy (i.e., the disinformation campaign spearheaded by Horowitz and Radosh), as a continuous news beat amid a total news blackout at other conservative media.

3) Op-eds about American Betrayal by David “she should not have written this book” Horowitz, Frank Gaffney, myself, etc.

4) Two lengthy essays co-authored by Vladimir Bukovsky about the book and the controversy — “Why Academics Hate Diana West” and “West’s `American Betrayal’ Will Make History.”

5) My replies to hit pieces at National Review, American Thinker, which I published at Breitbart after these same conservative websites refused to run what I had written.

6) Breitbart also published Chapter 9 of American Betrayal in its entirety!

7) There were so many lies told by Radosh and Horowitz about my book and me, personally, that, on the advice of counsel, I wrote 20,000+ words rebutting all — and Breitbart ran every word in a three-part series, which I later brought out as a book, The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal Against the Book-Burners.

There are some related bonuses as well. As a follow-on to his second essay about American Betrayal, Bukovsky would publish the opening chapter of his book, Judgement in Moscow, for the first time in English at Breitbart.

The late M. Stanton Evans, a strong supporter of American Betrayal, would also publish an original essay at Breitbart. It was a project he conceived of during the attacks against my book, so many of which hinged on the continuing slander and belittlement of Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the subject of Stan Evans’ unrivaled expertise. (For instance, I was called “McCarthy on Steroids,” “McCarthy’s heiress” and other terms not meant as endearments.) Indeed, the exciting new kind of research I was able to do in American Betrayal was predicated on my first having read Evans’ trailblazing McCarthy book.

As noted here, CNN recently “reported” the following:

“Steve Bannon in 2013: Joseph McCarthy was right in crusade against Communist infiltration.”

… Bannon made his comments in July 2013 while interviewing conservative pundit Diane [sic] West about her book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.”

These statements of facts engender hisses, screams, fainting — but only among media and other fact-proof ideologues. Informed readers will just shake their heads over the hermetically-sealed mindset that kills curiosity and engenders such Pavlovian-prompt reporting.

As in — excerpted from American Betrayal, p. 72

McCarthy, bad.

Communists, good and/or nonexistent.

Anti-Communism, terrible.

Who cares what Venona says, outside of a few academics? Have you left no

sense of decency?

Or, to take a longer excerpt, from pp 229-230.

Left, Good; Right, Bad.

“The people,” good; We, the People, “imperialist.”

Individuals (especially businessmen), greedy.

Hollywood Blacklist, bad.

Hollywood Ten, martyrs (except “squealer” Dmytryk).

Elia Kazan, Judas.

Communists: persecuted freethinkers. Have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthyism: repression.

Mao, expensive decorative art.

Che Guevara, fashion statement.

Ho Chi Minh, agrarian.

Mommy, who’s Ho Chi Minh, and what’s an agrarian?