RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-does-this-impeachment-not-feel-like-a-defeat-for-trump/

On paper, the speaker of the House and chairmen of the relevant committees announcing they will impeach the president should feel like a historic moment and a rarely equaled disgrace for the presidency. This day should feel momentous, grim, and solemn. In this presidency, it feels like “Tuesday.”

On paper, the impeachment hearings did everything House Democrats wanted them to do. While some of the key testimony was second-hand, the witnesses painted an ugly picture of the administration and president, focused on farfetched tales of a lost server and obsessed with the Bidens and not seeming to give a fig about what the military aid meant to Ukraine. The major television networks covered the hearings live. The objections of House Republicans were largely ridiculed by the media. The GOP was unable to introduce witnesses to interrupt the Democrats’ narrative or divert attention to the Bidens or other topics.

And yet the polling is about where it was at the start of October. As of this writing, in the FiveThirtyEight aggregation, 47.1 percent support removing the president, and 44 percent don’t support removal. That’s not good for the White House, but that’s nowhere near where Democrats wanted it to be. There’s nothing resembling the bipartisan consensus that Democrats had previously called a prerequisite for moving forward with the removal of a president. In fact, impeachment could well be hurting Democrats’ chances in key swing states. A recent survey found removal is opposed by 50.8 percent of voters in Michigan, 52.2 percent of voters in Pennsylvania, and 57.9 percent of voters in Wisconsin. Whether or not you think the hearings were persuasive, the evidence suggests they didn’t persuade many people who didn’t already support impeachment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/democrats-cannibalistic-ideology/

By their own logic, they are racist, sexist, elitist … and convicted of counterrevolutionary crimes.

O nce liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism — and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia — no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism. Yesterday’s true believer is today’s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow’s enemy of the people.

We saw something like that during both the Trump impeachment frenzy and the current trajectory of the Democratic debates and looming primaries.

The fury over Trump’s election led to a graduated and escalating series of efforts to remove him by suing three states for supposedly fraudulent voting machines. Then articles of impeachment were introduced. Suits followed citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Logan Act was raised, as was the 25th Amendment. At each juncture, the zeal to remove the president accelerated in direct proportion to the failure of the previous effort. A lack of success was always explained as a result of insufficient revolutionary zeal, not an absence of evidence.

The escalation culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan anti-Trump attorneys. After their failure to find actionable obstruction and any evidence of collusion, Mueller confirmed in congressional testimony that he was largely a tired administrative-state figurehead, a shill for the anti-Trump zealotry of progressive prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

After the collapse of each of these agendas, all that was left was impeachment itself. The criminal was still Trump; but what was needed was a new and better “crime” — and far more passion and hate. And both were found with Ukraine, as first defined as quid pro quo, later replaced by “bribery,” and finally recalibrated as “abuse of power.”

The weekly Jacobin rhetoric made the prior progressive talk seem counterrevolutionary — until we finally reached the crux of the matter with admissions by various Democrats such as Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, and Nancy Pelosi that impeachment was likely the only means to stop Trump in 2020.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dems-resurrect-russia-collusion-in-announcing-articles-of-impeachment/

On Tuesday, House Democrats announced two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. They accused him of abuse of power and of “obstruction of Congress.” The poll-tested “bribery” charge was nowhere to be found. Yet they also resurrected the skeleton of the Russia collusion narrative, despite Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s finding of no collusion and an Inspector General report revealing the many errors in the FBI investigation. The announcement was a clear political attack on Trump, more calculated to undermine his chances in 2020 than to actually hold him accountable for any alleged crimes.

“The first article is for abuse of power,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) began. “It is an impeachable offense for the president to exercise the powers of his public office to obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest. That is exactly what President Trump did when he solicited and pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election, thus damaging our national security, undermining the integrity of the next election, and violating his oath to the American people.”

This claim twists the facts of Trump’s engagement with Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted, over and over again, that he felt “no pressure” on the July 25 call at the center of the impeachment inquiry. In that call, Trump asked him to investigate Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and potential corruption regarding the notoriously corrupt energy company Burisma, which had given Joe Biden’s son Hunter a sweetheart job on the board — despite his lack of experience in the industry.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/10/ig-report-confirms-schiff-fisa-memo-media-praised-was-riddled-with-lies/#.Xe-auL_JUUM.twitter

The new inspector general report on FISA abuse settles the debate between Republicans and Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Both groups put out memos about the Department of Justice’s efforts to secure a warrant to wiretap Carter Page.

At the time of their release, the media praised Democrat Adam Schiff and his memo and vilified Republican Devin Nunes and his memo. Nearly two years later, the inspector general’s report vindicates the Nunes memo while showing that the Schiff memo was riddled with lies and false statements.

The memo from the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee reported:

A salacious and unverified dossier formed an essential part of the application to secure a warrant against a Trump campaign affiliate named Carter Page. This application failed to reveal that the dossier was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
The application cited a Yahoo News article extensively. The story did not corroborate the dossier, and the FBI wrongly claimed Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, was not a source for the story.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of a high-ranking Justice Department official, also worked on behalf of the Clinton campaign effort. Her husband Bruce Ohr funneled her research into the Department of Justice. Although he admitted that Steele “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,” this and the Ohrs’ relationship with the Clinton campaign was concealed from the secret court that grants surveillance warrants.
The dossier was “only minimally corroborated” and unverified, according to FBI officials.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/473769-controversy-on-phone-records-intensifies-amid-impeachment

House Republicans are escalating their feud with Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, accusing the California Democrat of carrying out a “smear campaign” against his GOP counterpart, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), by publishing his phone records in the panel’s sweeping impeachment report.

Collecting the phone data has been strongly defended by Democrats while Republicans have seized on the new controversy as unfair and a bad precedent.

President Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill have sought to shine the spotlight back on Schiff as Democrats build their case against the president and continue marching toward an impeachment vote as soon as next week.

During Monday’s impeachment hearing, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Doug Collins (Ga.), spent several minutes ripping into the Democrats for including the Nunes records — something Collins argued added no value to the report and was only done as a “political vendetta” against one of Trump’s key defenders.

“It was a drive by. It was a gratuitous drive by that you wanted to smear the ranking member,” Collins told Schiff’s Democratic counsel, Daniel Goldman.

Schiff’s report detailed that Nunes had multiple communications with key figures in the House impeachment inquiry: Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, as well as with Giuliani’s Soviet-born associate Lev Parnas, who has been indicted on campaign finance charges. The records also show Giuliani was in communication with conservative opinion columnist John Solomon, who previously worked for The Hill.

Before we really begin, please allow me to suggest that the reader take the enclosed links seriously. For the sake of limiting the length, I’ve included many important details that are key to understanding this subject matter within those linked articles.

There is currently renewed debate regarding the Salvation Army. Some of this came to light after a popular Christian restaurant chain cut its donations to it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/prager-left-hates-salvation-army-thats-all-you-dennis-prager/

Dennis Prager, whom I most often agree with, claims that since the Left hates the Salvation Army, nothing else really matters in any conversation about it.  David Horowitz’ (another gentleman with whom I most often concur) FrontPage Magazine first published the piece. Horowitz has published several of my own analyses over the years as well. As a footnote of sorts, I’ve done extensive doctoral studies and am widely published in many of the same subject areas that both of these men frequently comment on themselves…so, I’m not just shooting from the hip.

I first took a liking to the Salvation Army like most other folks did—seeing volunteers ringing bells and collecting charity for the needy during the Christmas season….What’s not to like?