RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not yet a week after the most extravagant Republican Party botch since the Bill Clinton impeachment, Beltway fingers are still pointing. And why not? The failure to make good on seven years’ worth of ObamaCare repeal promises has many fathers.

Take your pick. Sen. John McCain’s pique. The squishiness of those such as Sen. Rob Portman who voted for repeal when it didn’t matter, and then voted nay when it did. Behind-the-scenes undermining by governors such as Ohio’s John Kasich. A GOP bereft of party discipline.

There is truth to all these. Even so, perhaps the most obvious reason goes almost unmentioned: The Republican bills were unpopular.
This does not mean they were bad bills, notwithstanding the many compromises lawmakers included. It does mean that their merits went mostly unsold to the public. This allowed Democrats and their allies to paint the bills as but the latest Republican attempt to rob from the poor ($800 billion in Medicaid cuts) to give to the rich ($600 billion in tax cuts).

Even more astounding is that as this narrative took hold the president of the United States neglected the greatest bully pulpit of all: the Oval Office.

Notwithstanding his flaws, Donald Trump has proved himself able to connect with voters, especially those who voted for Barack Obama, in a way other Republicans have not. But the Trump White House has yet to recognize the unique punch a formal, televised address from behind the desk of the Oval Office still carries, even in the age of Twitter .

Ronald Reagan’s use of the Oval to push his tax cuts through in 1981 is a textbook example. Yes, the Gipper schmoozed those on the opposite side of the aisle. He had to, given that Democrats controlled the House. But as likeable as he was, folks on both sides of the political aisle were skeptical about his proposed tax cuts.

In a July 27 Oval Office address, Reagan made his pitch. In simple language, he gently mocked the Democratic leadership claims that their bill “gives a greater break to the workers than ours.” He said the whole controversy came down to whose money it was—the people who earned it or the government that wanted to spend it. And his call for Americans to “contact your senators and congressmen” to urge them to vote for his tax cuts touched off what Speaker Tip O’Neill described as a “telephone blitz like this nation has never seen.”

Though it’s now popular to reminisce about the warm cuddly Reagan who put partisanship aside, that’s not the way it was seen at the time. The day after his speech, the New York Times reported Reagan had “engaged in a series of partisan attacks on his opponents on Capitol Hill.”

At last, I am in a position to help the New York Times. It’s a good feeling. As anyone who has stumbled upon their website knows, our former paper of record, underscoring its insatiable appetite to provide the public with all the news that fits its agenda, prominently features a solicitation for hot tips: Got a confidential news tip? it asks. Click and amaze the world.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/30/pakistani-hackers-working-dnc/

I have a tip, an important one, though I cannot in truth call it “confidential.” Over the last few days, in fact, it has been blazoned across the samizdat press, outlets that your typical Times reader may never have heard of, or, if he has, that he reflexively discounts.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Computer hacking. A senior political figure threatening law enforcement officials. Destruction of evidence. Collusion with foreign powers. Financial corruption. Incompetence. Maladministration. Hot stuff.

Russia? Trump, Sr., Jr., or both? Nope.

It’s U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), former head of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton groupie, and, right now, the Barbie Doll in the center of (at last!) a real scandal involving a Pakistani computer guru called Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, various other family members, and the computer servers of various Democratic congressmen, including Schultz.

Last week, Awan was nabbed by the FBI at Dulles Airport trying to flee to Pakistan. His wife had already flown the coop for Lahore in March, taking $12,400 with her. (The poor thing forgot to read the fine print you see in all those travel advisories that it is a felony to transport more than $10,000 in currency without reporting it.)

Sunday is a big day of the week for The New York Times. Were you or (per impossible) I the editor of the Gray Lady, this story would have occupied a prominent place on the front page of Sunday’s edition. And sure enough, there it was, above the fold . . . Oh, wait, I was mistaken. It was not DWS after all. Silly mistake. It was actually an African herder surrounded by a bunch of goats. Also above the fold was a rare Times story lambasting Donald Trump. About Wasserman Schultz and the Iwan scandal there was precisely . . . nothing.

Not that the Times has totally ignored the story. On Thursday, the paper ran a deflationary column under the headline, “Trump Fuels Intrigue Surrounding a Former I.T. Worker’s Arrest.”

Isn’t English wonderful? “Trump fuels intrigue” is almost neutral-sounding (almost). But what does it mean to your averageTimes reader? “Trump fuels,” i.e., forget about it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Savor the opener:

For months, conservative news outlets have built a case against Imran Awan, his wife, two brothers and a friend, piece by piece.

To hear some commentators tell it, with the help of his family and a cushy job on Capitol Hill, Mr. Awan, a Pakistani-American, had managed to steal computer hardware, congressional data and even—just maybe—a trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails that eventually surfaced last summer on WikiLeaks. It helped that the story seems to involve, if only tangentially, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who is the former chairwoman of the committee and an ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

I add the boldface to highlight the tilt. Further along in the story, the Times goes full bromide: “few if any of the fundamental facts of the case have come into focus. The criminal complaint against Mr. Awan filed on Monday alleges that he and his wife conspired to secure a fraudulent loan, not to commit espionage or political high jinks.”

“Political high jinks,” eh? Cute. I think that qualifies as an example of (wait for it) floccinaucinihilipilification, “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.” Neither espionage nor high jinks. Really, nothing but the usual noxious pabulum served up by conservative news outlets trading in fuzzy “fundamental facts.”

Right.

Yesterday at National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy laid out the case with his usual thoroughness and precision. McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who put the Blind Sheik, the chap responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing, behind bars, a fact a I mention lest you think he was just another knuckle-dragging right-wing neanderthal whom you can ignore with impunity.

In 2008, presidential candidate John McCain bravely proposed a health-care reform that Fortune magazine said was a giant step toward “laissez faire liberty” in health care. He wanted to empower consumers to find the best health care and even end the tax break for employer-sponsored plans.

In 2015, McCain joined all but one other GOP senator in voting to repeal Obamacare. The next year he ran an ad in his primary campaign against a Tea Party Republican claiming he was “leading the fight to stop Obamacare.” That ad helped him win 51 percent of the primary vote.

Just this year, McCain introduced a bill to “fully” repeal Obamacare and replace it with a “free-market approach that strengthens the quality and accessibility of care.”

Then, last Friday, McCain faced a choice on the Senate floor. He could vote with all but two of his GOP colleagues for “a skinny repeal” bill and get to a conference committee, where negotiators from the House and Senate could devise a bill that might pass both chambers. Or he could effectively leave Obamacare in place, dooming any realistic effort at curbing it given the uniform Democratic opposition to any real reform.

McCain sided with the status quo, killing the “skinny repeal.” Journalists rushed to gush over his vote, cast only a few days after a surgery to remove a dangerous brain tumor. The New Yorker’s take was typical: “Throughout his political life, John McCain has for many reasons enjoyed bipartisan respect and even reverence: his independence of mind (usually), his candor (usually), his decency, his love of country.”

McCain’s stated reason for killing reform was that the bill in front of him “fell short of our promise to repeal and replace Obamacare with meaningful reform.” True enough, but this is a perfect example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.

Obamacare is a disaster that, left untouched, will be saved only by a massive taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. Premiums on Obamacare exchanges have gone up by double digits annually ever since their formation in 2013. Out-of-pocket expenses — including copays and deductibles — rose 40 percent, to $2,649 per person on average, between 2011 and 2014. Hundreds of counties across the country are likely to have no health insurers offering plans on their local exchanges next year.

Far from being a modern-day “profile in courage,” McCain’s vote against advancing Obamacare reform represents a complete reversal of the position he won his Senate election with last year. John Merline of Investor’s Business Daily notes that “In the private sector, promising one thing and delivering the other could be referred to as ‘deceptive trade practice.’ For some members of Congress, it’s just another day at the office.”

Like every American, I wish John McCain the best in his battle against a brain tumor. But in what may prove to be one of the most important votes he has cast in his 35 years in Congress, he chose to operate like the standard-issue politicians he likes to rail against.

It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and its radical agenda, but this Alabama-based organization has had its eye fixed upon you and your country for a very long time. For nearly 30 years, it has been working relentlessly to advance the notion that because the United States is so thoroughly awash in racist inhumanity, its culture merits no respect — and no defense — whatsoever. And EJI can’t be dismissed as some sort of fringe lunatic group that’s barely scraping by on a shoestring budget; its coffers are flush with cash. In 2015-16, one of the largest and wealthiest corporations on earth, Google.com, announced that it was proudly giving EJI a cool $2 million in donations. Half of that sum was earmarked to fund the creation of “civil rights landmarks” such as a large national memorial honoring the 3,445 black Americans who lost their lives at the end of lynchers’ ropes from 1882-1964, plus additional memorial markers that would be situated at the various sites where those lynchings took place.

You might wonder why EJI deems it necessary to now dredge up the memory of a horrific practice that last occurred in this country 53 years ago. One would think that an organization that truly cared about the well-being of black people, might be more concerned by the fact that in any given year nowadays, the number of black-on-black homicides that occur nationwide far exceeds the number of white-on-black lynchings that have taken place in all the years since the Civil War, combined.

Obviously, then, EJI’s motivation has nothing whatsoever to do with promoting the safety of modern-day blacks. The group’s chief objective, rather, is to incessantly scold and shame Americans for their racist heritage, and to thereby make them lose all faith in the very legitimacy of their society — thus setting the stage for its ultimate collapse. In essence, EJI faithfully follows the counsel of the late pro-communist guru of “community organizing,” Saul Alinsky, who urged his fellow radicals to seize every possible opportunity to “rub raw the resentments of the people,” and to “fan the[ir] latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” In that spirit, EJI is devoted to fomenting perpetual discontent and racial grievance in the hearts of black Americans — under the righteous-sounding banner of “social justice.” That’s because black discontent and grievance are good for business, when your business is to tear a nation apart along racial lines.

It is highly noteworthy that while EJI depicts lynching as an exclusively white-on-black phenomenon, there were in fact 1,297 whites lynched in the United States during that same 1882-1964 period. Obviously, this doesn’t in any way diminish the horror or the evil of the lynchings that were carried out against black people. Nor does it negate the fact that lynchings frequently had a racial component that targeted blacks, as evidenced by the fact that blacks comprised nearly three-fourths of all lynching victims. But as David Horowitz has pointed out, a majority of black lynchings were not incidents where groups of whites randomly chased down black people and strung them up for fun. Most black lynchings — like most white lynchings — were a form of extrajudicial “frontier justice” where angry mobs of vigilantes essentially anointed themselves as prosecutors, juries, and executioners. The mobs dispensed with due process and took it upon themselves to kill people — white or black — whom they believed were guilty of some transgression. Sometimes the transgressions were serious, like rape, homicide, or robbery. And sometimes, blacks were killed merely for violating social norms, like showing “disrespect” for a white person.

According to EJI, the practice of lynching “reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality” that remains “readily apparent in our criminal-justice system today.” This legacy, we are told, is reflected in the “mass incarceration” that “has had devastating consequences for people of color” — e.g., “African Americans [today] make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of those incarcerated in jails and prisons, and 42 percent of the population on death row.” As far as EJI is concerned, these statistics are evidence of the “implicit biases” that “have been shown to affect policing … and all aspects of the criminal-justice system” — and cannot be attributed to the demonstrably higher rates of criminality in the black community. In short, we are asked to believe that everything stems, ultimately, from the fact that “the United States has done very little to acknowledge [its] legacy of genocide, slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.”

The Equal Justice Initiative is the archetypal subversive organization of the American Left. It rejects the very notion of colorblind justice as nothing more than a means of perpetuating a racist status quo that favors whites over blacks. And the alternative brand of “justice” that EJI proposes, is concerned only with offering up rationales for interracial hatred that never goes away. In short, EJI’s agenda is to promote, in the name of “justice,” racial strife that tears America apart.

Following President Trump’s declaration on Twitter Wednesday that transgender people would not be permitted to serve in the armed forces, protesters converged on Times Square. Assembling in front of the Armed Services Recruiting Station, several hundred people cheered as local elected officials and LGBT activists denounced both the decision and President Trump generally.

Most of the crowd held small printed signs reading, “Resist”; others waved the familiar “NO!” signs from the Revolutionary Communist Party-backed Refuse Fascism movement. A few handmade signs stood out in the relatively compact crowd, in particular one that read, in black against a red background,

Lincoln
Garfield
McKinley
Kennedy
Trump

The first four names on this list, of course, are the presidents murdered in office, in chronological order; the last embodies the seeming wish of many on the American Left that someone put him on it for real. As seen in the picture accompanying this article, Trump’s name is embellished with horns and a tail, and flames indicate that the president is roasting in hell: the protester left little room for interpretation.

The sign was held aloft for the duration of the event, in full view of the crowd, the media, the NYPD, and at least a dozen elected officials, but garnered no comment or acknowledgement. Perhaps historical literacy is so low that the sign’s meaning eluded most people, but it’s more likely that the pitch of outrage is keyed so high in leftist political rhetoric that the message on the sign was basically unremarkable—uncontroversial, even.

Consider what now passes as respectable dissenting opinion. New York City comptroller Scott Stringer issued a press release this week announcing that “Republicans just made the U.S. Senate a death panel,” because they voted to permit debate on changing Obamacare, which is in a state of critical failure. The evening before the president’s announcement, Melissa Mark-Viverito, speaker of the city council, tweeted, in response to nothing in particular, “Just sickened by this maniacal, self-absorbed, narcissistic, sadist, misogynistic, so-called President. Your days are numbered, FOOL.” Given Mark-Viverito’s open support and affection for convicted political terrorists like Oscar Lopez Rivera and Isabel Rosado Morales, it is hard to read “your days are numbered” as only figurative.

Public advocate Tish James spoke at the rally, and, in view of the sign calling for his death, led chants in favor of resistance to Trump. James first ascended to office in 2003, after her predecessor, Council Member James E. Davis, was shot to death by a rival at City Hall. One would have hoped that James would thus be attuned to ugly, violent political discourse, but she chose to ignore its presence.

Council Member Corey Johnson, speaking at Wednesday’s protest, said that Trump’s announcement “is not just an attack on trans service members; this is an attack on the entire United State military by this president.”Another city legislator, Jumaane Williams, tweeted a picture of the rally, including the sign calling for Trump’s assassination, with the inscrutable comment, “At 42nd street rally against @realDonaldTrump #transmilitaryban. You cannot hate nearly. #istandforhumandignity”—presumably meaning that there is no limit to the amount of hate that one should feel toward the president.

When asked about the hateful message of the protester’s poster