RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/bill-de-blasio-joker-in-new-york-city-hall/

What Bill de Blasio is doing to the residents of New York is hardly funny.

What happens when the Democratic party gets to realize all its deepest fantasies, with gushers of money to fund them, judges to rubber-stamp them, and the political opposition having melted away? Affix your gaze to the city of New York. In Joker, Arthur Fleck inquires, “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” Arthur was referring to bedlam in the streets. Today the people of Gotham are well-behaved, but it’s the Joker in City Hall who is firing nutty schemes at those of us who live here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s many press conferences trumpeting his hideous new plans would make more sense if they were punctuated with long, sustained episodes of harsh and deranged laughter. Consider the city’s stance toward illegal immigrants. De Blasio has for years been issuing official government ID cards to them. Lately de Blasio decided that this wasn’t enough, and he announced that he, or rather we, would be footing the bill for housing for illegal immigrants. Because de Blasio instructed New York’s public-housing system to ditch the requirement that applicants for subsidized housing present their Social Security numbers, an illegal immigrant who arrived yesterday, a legal immigrant who did everything by the book, and a native-born New Yorker all have an equal shot at one of the coveted cheap apartments, which are awarded by lottery. The New York City Housing Authority cannot even house all New Yorkers, as anyone who has ever stepped over a sleeping wino on the way to the ATM has noticed, but now it is in the business of trying to house the world.

Or even to heal it. “You will hear some critics who say we can’t afford to give everyone health care,” de Blasio said at a noteworthy press conference announcing the city would start funding health care for illegal immigrants. He added there’s “plenty of money in this world; there’s plenty of money in this country; it’s just in the wrong hands.” Cue deranged giggling. The taxpayer is also funding the undocumented when it comes time to try to deport him for, say, committing an egregious crime. Sneak into the country illegally, make your way to New York City, and you’ll be treated better than anybody except maybe the mayor’s son, whom he ordered police to drive to Yale when young Dante de Blasio was a student there.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/linking-incompatibles-is-the-lefts-stock-in-trade/

Any clear-sighted observer can see that America is now undergoing its most severe crisis of legitimacy since the Civil War of 1861-1865. The Democrat Party has gone hard left, the education system is indoctrinating the young with a socialist syllabus as extensive and invariant as the Nazi curriculum of the 1930s, the media are irremediably corrupt, the pervasive ideology of “social justice” ensures multiple miscarriages of basic justice, an activist judiciary defies constitutional legality, and violence both rhetorical and actual has become the standard operating procedure of the New Totalitarians. The nation’s public institutions and government agencies are in full sedition mode, and the lawful tenure and authority of the President is under sustained attack. As David Goldman writes, correctly, President Trump is “fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic.”

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, much lament and detailed analysis among conservative thinkers and writers over the current state of affairs. The problem is that pragmatic and meaningful proposals to rectify a deteriorating social, cultural and political situation are hard to come by.

Normality tends to flinch in the face of reality. It is, after all, a natural inclination to dismiss or underestimate the premonition of catastrophe until, one day, it actually happens. Volcanoes do erupt. Occasionally an asteroid will plow into the earth. A revolution will destroy a nation from one year to the next. Foresight and preparation can avoid or at least mitigate disaster. Better to bite the bullet before the bullet strikes, and to act with courage and determination to avert a looming catastrophe.

Any effort at pushback is regularly met by the tactic of the false analogy, in this case by comparing justified anti-Marxist resistance with fascist bigotry, government oppression, or anti-liberal intimidation. The tactic is highly effective since decent people—and most conservatives I know are decent people—tend to recoil from being associated with repressive regimes, ideologies of hatred, and anti-democratic attitudes. The taint of the disreputable, no matter how apocryphal, is an extremely powerful deterrent. Clarity and fortitude must prevail against the miasma of spurious imputation deployed by the left.

Of course, the left will use the false analogy not only to denigrate its opponents but to justify its chosen paladins. The monstrous fanatic and genocidal terrorist Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS and torturer and killer of thousands, becomes for The Washington Post an “austere religious scholar.” Similarly, Antifa, a violent ideologically-driven fascist cult and the most recent incarnation of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Germany’s Baader Meinhoff, and Italy’s Red Brigades, can pass itself off as anti-fascist.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/468483-a-partisan-impeachment-vote-is-exactly-what-the-framers-feared

The House vote to establish procedures for a possible impeachment of President Trump, along party lines with two Democrats opposing and no Republicans favoring, was exactly was Alexander Hamilton feared in discussing the impeachment provisions laid out in the Constitution.

Hamilton warned of the “greatest danger” that the decision to move forward with impeachment will “be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He worried that the tools of impeachment would be wielded by the “most cunning or most numerous factions” and lack the “requisite neutrality toward those whose conduct would be the subject of scrutiny.”

It is almost as if this founding father were looking down at the House vote from heaven and describing what transpired this week. Impeachment is an extraordinary tool to be used only when the constitutional criteria are met. These criteria are limited and include only “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Hamilton described these as being “of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

His use of the term “political” has been widely misunderstood in history. It does not mean that the process of impeachment and removal should be political in the partisan sense. Hamilton distinctly distinguished between the nature of the constitutional crimes, denoting them as political, while insisting that the process for impeachment and removal must remain scrupulously neutral and nonpartisan among members of Congress.

Thus, no impeachment should ever move forward without bipartisan support. That is a tall order in our age of hyperpartisan politics in which party loyalty leaves little room for neutrality. Proponents of the House vote argue it is only about procedures and not about innocence or guilt, and that further investigation may well persuade some Republicans to place principle over party and to vote for impeachment, or some Democrats to vote against impeachment. While that is entirely possible, the House vote would seem to make such nonpartisan neutrality extremely unlikely.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/latest-impeachment-witness-contradicts-vindmans-claim-that-key-details-were-left-out-of-ukraine-call-transcript/

A senior White House official who listened to President Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky testified Thursday in a closed-door impeachment hearing that the White House did not omit any key details of the conversation from the publicly-released transcript.

The official, Tim Morrison, also told House lawmakers he did not think Trump discussed anything illegal on the call.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said in remarks to Congress.

Morrison’s testimony contradicts that of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, who testified on Tuesday that he believes the White House omitted from the transcript Trump’s claim that recordings of vice president Joe Biden existed that implicated him in corrupt dealings.

During a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to help the U.S. investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings avoid a corruption probe soon after his son, Hunter Biden, was appointed to its board of directors. That phone conversation has become the crux of House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry against Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-vote-11572561408

The nation focused on the House this week, where Democrats voted Thursday to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Less noticed, but equally important, was the prebuttal on the Senate floor.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered Wednesday a speech devoted to the glaring deficiencies in the House impeachment proceedings. The Kentuckian excoriated it for its lack of fairness and transparency, and listed the affronts to due process: secret hearings, the refusal to let Republicans call witnesses or obtain answers, the exclusion of Mr. Trump’s legal counsel from the proceedings. And he noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s resolution would include no guarantee of a remedy. The Democratic approach, Mr. McConnell said, amounts to: “No due process now, maybe some later, but only if we feel like it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

After preparing a failed bill of particulars against the president—Russian election collusion, porn star payoffs, income tax evasion, obstruction of justice, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the Charlottesville rally, the two Michaels (Avenatti and Cohen), Deutsche Bank, Alfa-Bank, and Orange Man Bad—Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) finally has Trump dead-to-rights: A quid pro quo without the quid, the pro, or the quo.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday largely along party lines, with only two Democratic defectors, to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will manage the initial stage of the sham inquiry; hearings are expected to begin in a few weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), departing from tradition, handed off the impeachment grunt work to her most dependable grunt rather than to the House Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi pleaded the Democrats’ case on the morning of Hallowe’en, titillating her caucus of ghouls, witches, tramps, and thieves with tales about the scary monster in the White House.

“Sadly, this is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Pelosi assured her gleeful Democratic colleagues. “This is something very solemn, something prayerful.”

But ringing in the ears of every Democrat and NeverTrumper across the land were the iconic words of #TheResistance hero Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.): “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” You will recall that the freshman Democratic congresswoman from Michigan didn’t waste any time before uttering that profundity. She shouted it on January 4, 2019, just hours after she was sworn in.