RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/27/voters-give-biden-team-of-advisers-failing-grades-ii-tipp-poll/

Presidents matter, but so do the people they surround themselves with. A strong team of experienced advisers can have a major impact on a presidency. President Joe Biden’s advisers are a case in point, and perhaps go a long way toward explaining his current low favorability among American voters.

As part of our July I&I/TIPP Poll, we asked the following question about Biden’s various teams of advisers and Cabinet members: “In general, based on what you read, see, or hear, how would you rate the quality of advice President Biden receives from the following teams of senior policy advisers?”

Respondents to the online national poll of 1,643 adults, taken July 6-9, were asked to assign a grade of A (excellent), B (good), C (average), D (poor) or F (unacceptable). The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points.

If Biden’s advisers were students, they’d all be grounded by their parents for earning failing grades.

Biden’s economic team, for instance, received “A” or “B” grades from 31% of poll respondents, while getting “D” or “F” grades from 42%. 20% handed out “C” grades, barely passing.

But 25% gave Biden’s economic team an “F,” perhaps not surprising given the difficulties arising from the forced national COVID lockdown, including a looming recession, the implosion of the small-business sector, the national supply-chain nightmare, a meltdown of our air-transportation and trucking systems, and current inflation over 9%, the highest in 41 years.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/25/wokeism-is-collapsing-on-itself/

The evidence of cognitive dissonance is mounting. The left’s house of cards will inevitably collapse.

If there’s a light at the end of the dark tunnel our nation is in right now, it’s because of Horace’s ancient dictum, “You can chase out nature with a pitchfork, but she will keep running back.” Arguably, wokeism is defined by its gnostic rejection of nature on gender, sexuality, the laws of economics, energy, race, speech, and rationality itself. 

Yet, nature has the final say, and we’re seeing it in the slow retreat of leftists from wokeism. Nary a day goes by on which a new Substack writer confesses some variation of, “I’m not a right-winger; I’m a proud progressive, but these new leftists are crazy, and I’m done with the Democrats.” They’ve reached a terminus in their minds where they can no longer bear the cognitive dissonance created by the suspension of reality. They’re done drinking the Kool-Aid.

The Liar’s Paradox

Consider the left’s cognitive dissonance on race. They have a Liar’s Paradox problem. The Liar’s Paradox goes, “A Cretan says all Cretans are liars. Is he to be believed?” 

https://www.city-journal.org/marilyn-mosby-just-the-latest-progressive-prosecutor-to-go

Last week, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby lost in the Democratic primary contest to retain her position. Around the country, other de-prosecuting prosecutors are being removed one by one, as their failing policies and ethical problems culminate in disorder and public distrust. Is the progressive prosecutor movement on the decline?

Mosby’s original campaign platform was to ignore entire categories of crimes and to reduce sentences even for violent criminals. The criminals got the message: Baltimore was a free-fire zone. Homicides exceeded 300 per year in the Charm City every year that Mosby was in office, making Baltimore one of the nation’s most dangerous municipalities. People and businesses fled the city, with over 35,000 residents exiting, even as the rest of Maryland grew in population. Just a few weeks before the primary, a report from the Maryland Public Policy Institute detailed how many of the homicides in Baltimore were committed by criminals who would have been in jail under a normal prosecution regime. Mosby did not help her position by ending up under federal indictment for perjury charges alleging that she made false statements while applying for pandemic-related loans to buy a vacation home in Florida. Mosby’s victorious opponent, Ivan Bates, is something of an unknown quantity, but he campaigned explicitly on a public-safety platform, as his campaign materials make clear: “To build a safer Baltimore, we must have a functional and efficient prosecutor’s office led by a State’s Attorney who prioritizes public safety.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-john-durham-has-proved/

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all.

The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him. As Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Politico: “The Durham roadshow has expended far too much of the taxpayers’ money with precious little to show for it and needs to be wound down in an orderly fashion. Enough already!”

Tribe’s view of Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann is ironic. Only a few years earlier, the very same resistance denounced anyone who attacked the integrity of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who examined the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And yet when Mueller’s team found no evidence of conspiracy, the resistance did not complain that the hunt to prove Trump’s collusion was wasteful.