RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/bidens-hostility-to-israel/

The year I began my rabbinic studies in Jerusalem, a full-fledged war broke out on Yom Kippur. My fellow students and I set aside our books and made ourselves useful wherever help was needed. Whether helping work in the city’s largest bakery so everyone could have bread, working in a home for severely disabled children, or one of the city’s major hospitals, along with my fellows, I did what I could.

Joe Biden was the number-two person in an administration that in every way sought to lower its commitment to Israel, and to undercut its ability to succeed as a nation or even to defend itself.

What has never left me is an acute appreciation of how slender is the thread upon which Israel’s survival hangs. We did not know that Syrian tanks had penetrated the Israeli lines and, had they been better led, could have unhinged all of Israel’s defenses. We did not know how useless the Bar Lev fortifications had proven against Egypt. That all came later. But that this was a moment of existential crisis was known by all instinctively. It was in the air.

What a difference it made when the news came that America had created an air lifeline for Israel. In the terrible fighting, the IDF had nearly exhausted its ammunition and necessary military hardware. Taking great diplomatic risk, President Nixon decided to set up a continuous air ferry of supplies that enabled Israel to continue to fight, to turn the tables, and to remove the threat of extinction that a Syrian-Egyptian conquest would have meant.

Ever since that time, when I was in my early twenties, I have made a candidate’s position on Israel a top priority in elections. By the time the next presidential came up in 1976, Nixon was gone and Ford’s policy was being unduly demanding of Israel. I was by no means a conservative then, and there was little else about Ford that inspired me, so I voted for the mysterious man from Georgia. But by the time 1980 rolled around, Carter had shown that he blamed Israel exclusively for the failure of Camp David to lead to full Middle East peace, and his fatuous policy towards Iran had allowed that country to turn into a seething cauldron of hatred against Israel and America. I voted for Reagan, though I also was voting for Teddy Kennedy for the Senate because of his friendliness to Israel’s cause.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal.

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was Obama’s policy “point man.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/decision-time-for-the-costco-mom/

If you get this wrong, those toilet paper scrums at Costco might become a routine occurrence.

Earlier this year, a strange spectacle kept recurring at one of the country’s most popular big box stores.

Costco shoppers across the land wrestled each other for industrial-sized packages of toilet paper; as panic set in about the looming coronavirus pandemic, well-heeled suburbanites quickly depleted the retailers’ nationwide supply of Charmin and Quilted Northern. Even the store’s discount Kirkland brand sold out fast.

It’s unclear exactly why toilet paper topped the list of the COVID-19 survival kit but the scenes were instructive as far as observing upscale suburban women in their natural habitat. The toilet paper rush of 2020 probably started with a few comments at the monthly Bunco game or the ladies’ league liquid lunch or at a bespoke med spa house party.

Soon enough, premium membership card in hand, suburban women cruised their Range Rovers to the nearest Costco ready to fight for their right to a 30-roll pack like it was the last size 4 Veronica Beard camo blazer at Nordstrom. Photos of TP booty were proudly posted on Facebook; the booties of Jacob and Olivia would be safely clean for years to come.

And thus we had a peek into the workings of the hivemind of modern-day suburban moms.

In 2018, the sorority of suburban sisterhood found a common enemy: Donald Trump. Suburban congressional districts from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to Orange County, California flipped from Republican to Democrat, giving Nancy Pelosi enough new members to take back her coveted speaker’s gavel. Like nearly all midterm elections, the outcome was a rebuke of the sitting president. Millions of white suburban women, amid a booming economy and period of international peace, cried “but his tweets!” all the way to their polling places.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/a-momentous-election/

So here we are, 10 days out from the most momentous election of my lifetime. 

Candor requires that I admit that I have often felt that sense of existential emergency around election time. But reflection tells me that the closest thing to the 2020 election was the 2016 election, and that was not because of its wild card—Donald Trump—but because of “sure thing” Hillary Clinton, the single most corrupt serious contender for president in our history. 

That may seem melodramatic, but the truth is often melodramatic. 

I did not, until recently, suspect Joe Biden of serious corruption. The ongoing revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” have led me to reconsider that judgment, especially when combined with the ongoing bulletins from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who claims that Joe Biden, contrary to his repeated assertions, was involved in discussions about his son’s business dealings. 

So far, I believe, the public is not privy to any smoking-gun evidence about Joe Biden’s involvement, but the gun is warm and the optics are bad. The implicit oath of omertà followed by the media with respect to the saga of Hunter’s laptop has been truly impressive. 

Day after day, the New York Post, which first broke the story a week or so back, has been broadcasting more and more tidbits from this extraordinary trove of perversity and apparent corruption. No matter that the Post is the country’s fifth-largest paper: Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and television news have joined forces to close the public’s eyes, seal its ears, and scream there is nothing to see here, move along, and pay no attention to those muffled cries from the oubliette. It has been an extraordinary act of malignant solidarity, worthy of the Politburo in the heady days of Joe Stalin’s airbrush. 

I think this strategy is in the process of backfiring. Twitter may close down the Post’s account and forbid people to retweet its stories, but that, too, is news and the news, finally, will out. The Streisand Effect will not be denied. 

I have limited curiosity about Hunter Biden’s choice in narcotics or prostitutes. His alleged influence peddling, however, trading introductions to “the Big Guy” for wads of cash, especially if some of that cash wound up in the Biden family fisc—well that is something else entirely. The implications of this story have yet to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream media, who are playing the three wise monkeys for Halloween, at least so far as Democrats are concerned. But it won’t matter. Curiosity is a stronger passion than politically fired discretion. We’ll find out what’s on that hard drive, and we’ll find out soon.