RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/19/texas-gop-looking-into-reports-that-dems-are-registering-noncitizens-to-vote-outside-of-dmvs/

Republican officials in Texas are looking into reports that Democrats have set up tables outside of several Department of Motor vehicles (DMV) offices and are registering noncitizens to vote.

On Sunday, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo revealed on X that, according to a friend, Democrats had set up voter registration drives outside of three DMVs in Weatherford and Fort Worth.

“Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license,” Bartiromo began.

Couldn’t get an online appointment (all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.

Brady Gray, Chairman of the Parker County Republican Party in Weatherford, reacted to the report on X, saying he would look into it.

“Under Kamala’s watch the border has been overrun, now MY county is being overrun,” Gray wrote. “I’m done listening to those who claim ‘replacement theory’ is racist and conspiratorial. Democrats are intentionally trying to circumvent law to steal elections. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact.”

The Republican chairman added that since Bartiromo’s disturbing post went out, he had been inundated with messages from concerned residents asking if the Parker County GOP was aware of the report.

“We are, and I will be fully investigating the claims in our community,” Gray said.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/beyond-scandal

Every presidential campaign opens with a controversy and closes with a scandal. Faced with this prospect, some observers feel disgust, others stoically accept it as the way of the world, and still others approach it with a Machiavellian delight. They see mudslinging and coarseness as the substance that drives great political drama.

The 2024 presidential election, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, is no different. Vice President Harris began her political career through a high-profile affair with the powerful San Francisco politico Willie Brown. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, cheated on his first wife with their children’s nanny, whom he subsequently impregnated. Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, has embellished his military service to the point that some critics have accused him of “stolen valor.” And since becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Harris has changed her positions on multiple issues. These scandal archetypes were once enough to torpedo, or at least damage, presidential campaigns of men like Gary Hart and John Kerry. No longer.

Former president Trump, too, has survived a protracted sequence of personal scandals. His romantic life has splashed through the tabloids for decades, with multiple marriages, accusations of infidelity and womanizing, and an alleged tryst with a pornographic actress. His political scandals as president included impeachment; after leaving the White House, they have included indictment, arrest, and conviction—incidents with no historical precedent.

And yet, Trump endures. He has refashioned his criminal conviction, even his scowling mugshot, as the inciting incident for a comeback narrative. Likewise, Harris has trampled the negative stories beneath her feet and presented herself as a defender of democracy. Trump surpassed his scandals through strength of personality; Harris, through the power of the national media.

What is the significance of this shift in political life? A moralist might argue that we have entered a period of ethical collapse. The old Christian standard no longer holds, it would seem. There is another possibility, however: maybe we have abandoned moralistic pretense and entered a period of greater realism.

https://www.thefp.com/p/john-fetterman-has-no-regrets?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

John Fetterman is skipping this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, to hear it from him, it has nothing—literally nothing—to do with him scotch-taping photos of the Israeli hostages to his Senate office walls. Or attacking fellow Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for falsely blaming a hospital bombing in Gaza on Israel. (“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”) Or comparing the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia to a neo-Nazi rally (“Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students,” he tweeted). 

Nor is it about “Fetterman Alumni for Peace”—a group of former Fetterman campaign staffers—publicly scolding their old boss: “It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history.” 

“I’ve got three young kids, and they’re out of school,” the Pennsylvania senator said of his absence this week in Chicago, waving off the suggestion that he might not be welcome there. “That’s four days I can spend with my children.”

The choice to skip the convention “was made well before that debate,” Fetterman told me in a one-hour conversation via Zoom—the senator at home, in the not quite one-square-mile, ex–steel town of Braddock, twenty minutes outside Pittsburgh; me in Los Angeles. He was referring to the June 27 Joe Biden–Donald Trump showdown that led the president to step aside and Vice President Kamala Harris to snag the Democratic nomination.