RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/23/things-really-are-looking-up-under-biden/

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden claimed that some Republicans are hoping that the talks over raising the debt ceiling fail and the government defaults on its debt.

“I think there are some MAGA Republicans in the House who know the damage that it would do to the economy, and because I am president, and the president’s responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame,” he said.

What Biden is claiming assumes, of course, that things are going swimmingly right now, a point the president repeatedly makes, and how it’s all thanks to his policies.

Let’s leave aside that lie, which we’ve written about many times in this space. And let’s also ignore the fact that all the scaremongering about failure to raise the debt limit is just that. If the debt limit is not raised, the government won’t need to default on its debt. Every month, it raises far more in taxes than is needed to pay interest on existing debt. Despite what Biden says, any default would be entirely his fault.

How about his claim that things are going well and that only Republican malfeasance could hurt the economy?

Well, it’s true that things are looking up in America. The problem is that they are all the wrong things. Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts. Those are all way up under Biden.

To show this, we’ve put together a series of charts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-voters-let-cops-be-cops-c6ebf736?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

After a violent era in Philadelphia, the city’s voters have rejected the broken and bloody promises of the progressive left and nominated two mayoral candidates pledging to restore public safety.

Since Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration, the likely winner will be Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member and state legislator. At a Monday press conference she talked about her goal of “restoring our police department to its full complement and that means using every tool that we can to make sure we get officers on the job.”

She also wants to let them use constitutional tools to do the job. Ms. Parker—and remember she’s a Democrat—is not just saying fund the police. Once funded, she wants them to police vigorously—and last week’s primary victory says that voters agree with her.

The Journal’s Scott Calvert noted last week:

Ms. Parker, the only Black candidate in the top tier of polling and the candidate who had the most Black support, has spoken favorably of police investigative stops commonly known as stop-and-frisk. The practice in Philadelphia has been under judicial oversight since 2011 amid claims of police abuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age/

A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:  

Reparations  

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? 

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track.  

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what? 

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.  

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.  

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm.  

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.  

Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.  

Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?