RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-disinformation-board-gift-republicans-opinion-1704256

If you worked really hard, you might be able to come up with an idea as unappealing as a government disinformation board. Voters already distrust the government and are especially concerned about its excessive intrusion and unchecked regulatory power.

If you worked even harder, you might find as bad a person to lead it as Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled “disinformation expert” whose real specialty seems to be spreading disinformation to support her left-wing views.

If you tried hard to justify this mess, you might come up with a defender as ineffective as Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The secretary, already in deep trouble because of the porous southern border, faced a hostile Senate hearing and admitted he knew nothing about Ms. Jankowicz’s dismal history of ideological fulminations and partisan statements. He refused to say whose bright idea it was to hire her—only that he was clueless about her background. Still, Mayorkas refused to apologize, refused to replace her and refused to back down from creating this ill-conceived (and ill-defined) board.

If you did all these things, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has, you would be committing political malpractice. You would be mocking the Constitution’s fundamental protection of free speech, encoded in the First Amendment. Although a few ideologues might applaud you, you would hear only groans from moderate Democrats running for reelection. This ill-conceived board would lash them, at their peril, to a high-profile effort to monitor private speech, conducted by a very unpopular administration. That’s dangerous constitutionally and incompetent politically.

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-midge-decter-sampler?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun%3A%20Taliban%20

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:

— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:

“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”

— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:

“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”

— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:

“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/08/the-exasperated-american/

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?