RUTHFULLY YOURS

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On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to help consecrate a portion of that battlefield as a new cemetery. He spoke of the government, conceived in liberty, that had been formed eighty-seven years prior, a government in which people are the ultimate power – a government comprised of the people’s elected representatives and the appointees those representatives make; he spoke of the laws and regulations that are made by those elected representatives, and he emphasized that this government is for the people, to ensure the protection of their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Such a government, Lincoln understood, is rare. It relies on trust that those who labor within it work for the people, not for a party, a cabal or an individual. Once that trust is gone, the fragile edifice that comprises democracy crumbles. The Michael Flynn story is one of government servants subverting their role. No matter one’s political affiliation, the story of what happened to General Michael Flynn should frighten any lover of freedom and democracy.

This story has been ably told by Andrew McCarthy in National Review, Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and others, but its consequences are worth considering again, as it unravels. On May 1, Ms. Strassel wrote: “…evidence of law enforcement’s abuse keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know.” Establishment Washington could not believe that the people had elected Mr. Trump – this allegedly insensitive deal maker, a man who speaks frankly and crudely to and about his political opponents. He was demonized as authoritarian. He was an outsider. He had never served in government, nor in the military. He was a television star, famous for saying, “You’re fired!” In a country where leadership had too often descended into elitism, arrogance and hypocrisy, the mercurial Mr. Trump arrived as a disruptor.

To Washington’s establishment, Mr. Trump was naive. He is smart and shrewd, but the intelligence community is a different milieu, as Senator Schumer observed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “He was not,” as Andrew McCarthy wrote on May 2, “supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize during the campaign.”

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

Protesters demand an end to the statewide ’stay at home advisory’ and the new law enforcing everyone to wear a mask in public, outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on May 4, 2020. Photo: AFP

Life is returning to normal in South Korea, Israel, and urban China, thanks to the combination of massive public health measures and digital tracking. The United States remains locked down for the most part, although a number of states are gambling on re-opening without sufficient data to predict the outcome. Without comprehensive testing for Covid-19, government and academic models of viral infection are throwing out estimates that differ by hundreds of percentage points. A leaked Homeland Security report projects 200,000 dead this year, while the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has doubled its estimate of deaths through August to 135,000.

In an April 24 commentary I quoted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement that Covid-19 “is an affront to democracy,” adding, “There probably is no way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 except by locating and isolating every single individual carrier. Perhaps 40% of all cases are asymptomatic but nonetheless contagious, we know from Iceland and a handful of cities where the entire population was tested. That makes conventional tracking methods useless.” The checks and balances of the US Constitution, I argued, offered the best way to prevent government abuse of personal information obtained in an emergency.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/democrats-desperation-is-growing-about-tara-reade-so-is-their-hypocrisy/

Sufficient evidence that Joe Biden somehow mistreated Tara Reade has emerged for the double standard to become obvious.

There aren’t a ton of synonyms for the word “hypocrisy.” I’ve become aware of this problem ever since I began writing about the Tara Reade–Joe Biden situation. I keep gravitating towards phrases such as “despicable hypocrisy,” or “partisan hypocrisy,” or “unconscionable hypocrisy,” but you can only go to the well so often. Really, though, I’m not sure how else to describe the actions of someone like Senator Dianne Feinstein.

You might recall that it was Feinstein, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who withheld Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from the Senate so that it could not be properly vetted, in a last-ditch effort to sink the nomination.

Feinstein knew that Ford’s credibility was brittle — the alleged victim could not tell us where or when the attack occurred, hadn’t mentioned Kavanugh’s name to anyone for over 30 years, and offered nothing approaching a contemporaneous witness.

At first, Feinstein did not want to provide Ford’s name, or a place or time of the alleged attack, or allow the accused to see any evidence against him, denying him the ability to answer the charges.