RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/05/americans-want-to-know-who-is-really-in-charge-in-the-white-house/

In last Thursday’s presidential debate, we saw the most decisive loss ever by an incumbent American president. Biden’s performance was so abysmal that it raises serious questions about how he can continue to function as president, especially in his role as commander-in-chief.

Donald Trump dominated the debate, making important new criticisms that Biden failed to answer—especially how the surge in illegal immigration during the Biden presidency is hurting social security. Trump put Biden on the defensive, parried tough questions, and pointed out how many of Biden’s statements were incoherent.

Biden could hardly have done worse. He was incoherent, lost his train of thought and appeared confused. He offered no believable defenses for his record as president. The defenses he did provide made no sense.

The left-wing publication Slate gave this stark assessment of Biden’s performance in the debate, claiming it “revealed that [he] is indeed an old man who appears to be in no condition to be running this country, even now—not to mention in another four years.”

Many Americans had the same concern after the debate.

We saw Biden staring into space and looking slack-jawed with his eyes glazed over when Trump spoke. If Biden acts this way during Oval Office meetings, cabinet meetings, and meetings with foreign leaders, one has to ask: How is he making decisions as president?  Is Biden simply signing everything his staff puts in front of him?  Do unnamed White House advisers run cabinet meetings while Biden sits motionless in his chair?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/04/the-democrats-civil-war-has-begun/

Let the great Democratic civil war begin. The impending demise of Joe Biden and the patched-together coalition he represents is threatening to accelerate the very intra-party conflicts his presidency was meant to assuage.

In 2020, Biden was able to cobble together the remains of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition, along with huge support from both the oligarchic elite and the progressive left. This was possible in large part because the repellant Donald Trump alienated not only the left, including the rising Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but also dominant elites and numerically strong moderate liberals.

Today, as the Republicans unite around Trump, the Democratic alliance has become creaky. As has been happening for decades, much of the traditional New Deal coalition has further abandoned the party. Biden’s inflationary policies and embrace of progressive cultural and environmental priorities have not gone down well with the traditional base of mostly working-class voters. This has been particularly alienating given that the majority of Democrats consider themselves moderate or even conservative.

Biden’s performance, even before last week’s disastrous presidential debate, has unsettled more than just his core voter base. It has also rattled the oligarchic elite that funded his 2020 campaign, as well as the party apparatus and its media appendages. They may still conveniently genuflect to cultural progressivism and climate-change hysteria, but are less likely to want a mass redistribution of wealth and other curbs on their power. There have been tentative signs, at least on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, that some are now contemplating support for Trump instead. These defectors may be few in number, but they reek of money.

Increasingly, the one reliable – and vocal – bloc of Democrats resides on the far left. This faction backed Biden in 2020 against Trump, despite his relatively moderate political record. The idea was to influence his administration afterwards. It would be an ‘evolution’, as Squad congresswoman Pramila Jayapal described it. Biden largely accommodated to this agenda, at least rhetorically, championing issues from Net Zero targets to the promotion of transgender ideology.

https://thespectator.com/politics/united-states-10-4-president-biden/

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.

The narrative, according to which Joe Biden was “sharp and intensely probing,” had been assiduously maintained by mendacious Democrats and their sycophantic lackeys in the media since before Biden became president. Few people outside that circle of magical thinking actually believed in Biden’s cognitive competence. I and many others have been calling attention to his debility for years. But the illusion has been cynically cultivated by uniparty lieutenants much as the illusory nostrums of communist solidarity were propped up by the Soviets as their regime teetered towards is final, senescent collapse in the late 1980s. Few people believed the illusion; everyone in power said they believed it, even though they could taste the cynicism and disbelief among the masses they sought to control. That curious dialectic of disbelief and acquiescence was part of the corrosive rust that eventually precipitated the collapse of the regime.

Has the uniparty changed its song about Joe Biden? There are signs that it has. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week, the narrative broke in two, or at least seemed to break in two. On one side there was horror and — word of the moment — “panic” among the Dems. The New York Times led the way in calling for Biden — for the good of the country — to resign. At the same time, there was considerable push back, encapsulated comically in the observation that dementia Joe “had a cold,” hence his gibbering incoherence. St. Barack weighed in with what appeared to be a supportive post of X: everyone has bad debate nights, he said, but “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary people his entire life [Obama meant Biden, in case you were wondering] and someone who only cares about himself [the bad orange man].”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-scotus-cases-show-how-an-unaccountable-administrative-state-hurts-ordinary-people/

After the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.” That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute. The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable, creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires, and fundamentally misguided, allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function.

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture. Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate. He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits the government owed him. Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/collaborator-intelligence-agency/

It has now emerged that Gina Haspel, director of the CIA from 2018-2021, was aware of the October, 2020 letter from 51 “intelligence community” officials charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” The signatories included three former CIA directors –Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, plus acting CIA directors John McLaughlin and Mike Morel. A full 41 signers were from the CIA – some still on contract to the agency at the time.  In 2022, many of the signatories refused comment on the letter or ducked the question.

Asked in early June if he would retract his signature, former director of national intelligence  James Clapper said “no.” In the recent debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden claimed that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” which he too knows is false.

As these events revealed, American intelligence officials are willing to deploy their spycraft on the domestic scene for partisan purposes. This failure goes back to events 50 years ago, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein  who, before he passed away at 88 in January, reprised many of his books and articles in Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe.

Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA broke new ground but was released in 1989 when the Soviet empire was breaking apart. The book landed in remainder bins, because readers thought the invisible war was over. It wasn’t, and Deception remains more relevant than ever.

Epstein’s primary source was James Jesus Angleton, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. In the style of a fly fisherman, Angleton liked to play Soviet defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko for all they were worth. Angleton needed to know if he Soviets’ deception loop included persons inside the CIA who could tell how the other side was interpreting the operations. CIA bosses were unwilling to believe they could be penetrated and in 1974, amid charges that the CIA was spying on Americans, Angleton was fired. For Epstein, this effectively turned the CIA inside out.