RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/how-understand-enduring-trump-hatred-bruce-bawer/

I know you. You’re somebody I know well or slightly or only as a public figure, and you hate Trump.

No, you’re not out rioting and destroying and burning, but you’re doing your part. You ruin your TV shows or podcasts, which are purportedly about non-political topics and which I otherwise enjoy, by interjecting Democratic rah-rah rhetoric. One of you, for example, in the middle of a podcast about old movies and TV, broke without warning into a pro-Democratic rant, expressing the urgent hope that Texas will “turn blue” in November. Two others, on a podcast about the arts, actually asserted that the Democratic convention was splendidly produced and deeply moving.

Consistently, you talk about politics as if it were still, I don’t know, 1990, or earlier, when there were Republicans like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond on the Hill, when there were no socialists or sharia advocates in the House Democratic caucus, and when nobody had ever heard of gender non-binaries.

Some of you don’t have TV shows or podcasts. You’re just ordinary citizens, friends or acquaintances of mine who sit at home and reflexively share anti-Trump memes on your social-media accounts. Most of those memes misrepresent facts that I damn well know you haven’t got a clue about, one way or the other. You don’t seem interested in learning the facts. You just want to hammer Trump. Facts or lies, it doesn’t matter. For some reason, it makes you feel good.

This is nothing new. You opposed him, virulently, in 2016. On election night, as one state after another went his way, you were in a panic. And with good reason – or so, at least, it seemed to you at the time.

You had bought into the argument that he was dangerously unstable and that with him in the White House the world would go spinning out of control. The possibilities of misadventure were endless. First off, he would pull us out of NATO and the UN. Then, who knew? The sky was the limit. He could set off Armageddon by saying something crazy on the phone to Putin or Xi or Kim Jong Un. He could order sudden, unwarranted troop build-ups and fleet movements that would ratchet up tensions. Or he might even – in fact he almost certainly would – order an unprovoked, unilateral invasion of some foreign country or other. Iran, say, or North Korea. Or Venezuela. Or someplace in Africa. Who knew? With this madman, anything could happen.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/scott-atlas-attacked-for-joining-white-house-covid-19-task-force/

Dr. Scott Atlas is under attack from former Stanford colleagues for joining the Trump administration’s COVID task force.

Cancel culture has come to medicine. Dr. Scott Atlas, who was chairman of neuroradiology at Stanford’s medical school until 2012 and more recently a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, has been singled out for professional erasure by 98 of his former Stanford medical, epidemiological, and health-policy colleagues because he had the temerity to join President Trump’s coronavirus task force and advocate rational measures for safely reopening the economy. Their criticisms are unfair, yet typical of today’s political and academic climate.

Atlas’s one-time colleagues published an open letter to other medical-school faculty accusing him of “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that “run counter to established science.” The letter — written on Stanford Medicine letterhead that falsely suggests the imprimatur of the medical school — does not cite any publications or specific statements by Dr. Atlas and does not specify exactly what “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” he allegedly made. But it insinuates that his “failure to follow the science — or deliberately misrepresenting the science — will lead to immense avoidable harm.”

The letter lists five statements supported by “the preponderance of data” and implies that Atlas disagrees with them. The first says that face masks, social distancing, and handwashing reduce the spread of Covid-19. The authors do not cite anywhere where Atlas made claims to the contrary. A recent New York Times article claiming Atlas doubts the efficacy of mask wearing miscites an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson in which Atlas actually said people need not wear masks when they are alone but should wear masks when around others and unable to socially distance.

https://dianebederman.com/the-nobel-peace-prizedonald-trump-and-barack-obama/

In 2009 Barack Hussein Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize – not for anything he had done but because he had been elected. He won for being black. Well, the first Black American President. Well, not really black: he is bi-racial; mom was white, dad was black. Well, not really. Dad wasn’t black as in a Black American; he was from Kenya. But why let details get in the way of a heart-warming story?

Wonder what the Nobel people would say looking back at their choice. Did Barack Obama bring peace, anywhere?

Let’s look at the Middle East.

Obama referred to ISIS terrorists as the JV team. Nothing to worry about here. Was this the team that abducted James Foley, an American journalist, in Syria in 2012 and then murdered him in 2014?

Would this be the same team that burned Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh in the Syrian city of Raqqa and posted by the Islamic State on Feb. 3, 2015?

Seems the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a group that loves to share their Junior Varsity abilities in videos, also murdered 16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car in Iraq in 2015. Lovely.