RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/christmas-in-a-time-of-war

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

EXCERPT:

Hamas’s barbarism, by contrast, is motivated by religious conviction—warped religious conviction, to be sure; false religious conviction, undoubtedly; but religious conviction, nonetheless. Yes, Hamas has a political program, and its slogan, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” is as despicable a euphemism for exterminationist anti-Semitism as was the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to Die Judenfrage (the “Jewish Question”). But what turns people into deranged Hamas murderers and “martyrs,” who by all accounts enjoyed killing 1,400 innocents on 10/7, is the vile belief that what they were doing was the will of God.

It was not; it could not be. Only a fundamentally distorted understanding of “God” could lead to such a wicked conclusion. The God of the Bible cannot command the murder he forbade in the Ten Commandments, because the God of the Bible is a God of reason, and reason cannot contradict itself. The God of the Qur’an, however, is a God of will, who can command whatever he chooses and demand submission to that command as the ticket to salvation. Taken to extremes, that false idea of God as Absolute Willfulness is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah, and their exterminationist anti-Semitism possible, and what gives these hopeless political movements their staying power.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/22/dear-santa-why-is-christmas-so-expensive-this-year/

Jill Biden’s creepy video, featuring a troupe of tap dancers showing off the garish Christmas decorations in the White House, prompted one journalist to comment that they are “really going for the Hunger Games as this year’s Christmas theme.”

While they’re prancing around in the capital, out in the districts everyone else is struggling to pay the sky-high cost of this festive season.

Are you traveling to be with friends and family? Airfares are 18% higher than they were Christmas 2020. And if you try to cut costs by driving, gasoline prices are 45% higher.

Buying food for your guests will cost 20% more than the last Christmas before Bidenflation took hold.

PNC Bank’s annual “Christmas Price Index,” a gimmicky index that measures the cost to buy all the gifts mentioned in “Twelve Days of Christmas,” has gone up more than 13% in the past two years.  

Haven’t bought a Christmas tree yet? It will cost you about 10% more than last year, which is on top of the 10% increase the year before, and 10% the year before that.

Those Christmas lights decorating the house? Your electric bill will be 24% higher. If you’re sending Christmas cards, stationery costs are up 27% under Biden.

At least drowning your sorrows in alcohol is getting less expensive.

https://tomklingenstein.com/video/the-hour-is-getting-late/

America today exists in a state of war, a cold civil war. On one side is the Woke Regime. On the other side, our side, is the American Regime.

The Woke Regime defines justice as group outcome equality. For the American Regime, on the other hand, justice is a reward for individual merit. A regime based on merit will always give rise to group differences. These two regimes are utterly irreconcilable. You can’t admit people to college, flight training, law schools, or anything else according to merit and, at the same time, according to group quotas. It’s one or the other. There is no middle ground; hence, the two sides are implacable enemies. This is what makes it a war. 

The woke left understands this; too often, the American side, especially its political leadership, does not. You don’t win a war if you don’t know you’re in one. The woke side fights. They show us no mercy; we, on the other hand, ring our hands and take a beating. We try to reach across the aisle, but in a war, this is a sucker’s game.

The Woke Regime is comprised of a loose confederation of our most important institutions: media, academia, government, charitable foundations, and corporations, particularly big tech. 

The George Floyd riots show this confederation in action. Woke agitators sparked the flames that lit the riots; the regime’s intellectual leaders justified the riots; its corporate donors gave billions to Black Lives Matter’s network; its media looked the other way; its justice system freed criminals, and its security apparatus and political leaders fanned the flames. No, not all Democrats are Woke Leftists, but virtually all Democrats go along so they might as well be Woke Leftists.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4371449-bidenomics-is-a-flop-and-america-knows-it/

“Wages for workers are up!”  

That was the sunny news delivered by President Biden at a recent campaign stop. Is it true? Not really. Though real wages have finally trended slightly higher, Americans are still underwater since Biden entered the Oval Office.  

The Biden camp may have dropped talking up “Bidenomics,” but the spiel’s half-truths and tone deafness live on.  

The Biden reelection campaign is still trying to sell its economic policies to skeptical voters, even as a recent Wall Street Journal shows that “Only 23% of voters say Biden’s policies have helped them personally, while 53% say they have been hurt by the president’s agenda.” Biden’s pitch hasn’t worked, isn’t working and won’t work. But, they aren’t giving up.   

Joe Biden is unhappy about his poll numbers — as well he should be. They are historically terrible; the only person those low grades could possibly please is Jimmy Carter, who no longer sets the benchmark for most unpopular president ever. According to Real Clear Politics, Biden’s average approval rating across all polls stands at 40.5 percent; that compares with44.5 percent for Donald Trump at the same point in his presidency, 46.5 percent for Barack Obama and 58 percent for George W. Bush.   

Biden apparently laid into his team before Thanksgiving, demanding his aides do something to improve his standing. The upshot is yet another salvo from the White House about the wonders of Bidenomics, including the usual rewriting of history about what a catastrophe Joe Biden faced as he took office in January 2021.  

In a campaign event just recently, Biden claimed, “You know, when we started, the … economy was reeling.” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that myth in a briefing a few days ago, saying the economy “was in a tailspin.” It was not; in the quarter he took office, the recovering economy grew 6 percent, unemployment was dropping sharplyand annualized inflation stood at 1.4 percent.   

The president’s pitch rests largely on dishonest or misleading data, as is the case when Jean-Pierre touts the number of new business start-ups and applications as a sign that Bidenomics is working. As it happens, there was a big surge in new business applications — during Donald Trump’s presidency.   

When Trump took office, in January 2017, monthly new business applications totaled 263,878; in December 2020, his last month, applications — at the height of the COVID panic — amounted to 349,734, an increase of 32.5 percent. So far in Joe Biden’s presidency, applications have actually dropped slightly, from 486,082 recorded in January 2021 to 464,838 last month.