RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/07/that-other-watergate-scandal/

When the Watergate movie All the President’s Men came to Canberra in 1977, I rushed to the cinema. Half an hour into this engrossing drama, a middle-aged man in the row in front of me turned around and cursed me, “Thanks to you, I can’t see any more of this and I’m going home.” I was upset by his outburst, but in my high tension, I’d been heedlessly kicking the back of his seat.

I’m sure all the Press Gallery tribe were equally engrossed. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (“Woodstein” for short) and the Washington Post broke the mould and won glory with their investigative journalism. They demonstrated the White House’s guilt for the Watergate burglary and forced the first-ever resignation of a US President, namely the Republican’s Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. Forty or so members of his fiefdom were convicted. Journos ever since, including myself, have fantasised about ourselves making history and millions with exposures of high-ranking evil-doers.

There were actually two burglaries of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) offices in Watergate within three
weeks in mid-1972. The first involved some successful phone-bugging; the bungled second burglary was mainly to photograph a large volume of documents. Security guards caught the five-man team red-handed. A sixth burglar lurking nearby escaped detection, never to be officially identified but now named as CIA contractor Lou Russell.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/jews_as_enemy_aliens_in_britain.html

Eighty million refugees roam the world today.  We view all of them through a political lens, and the language used to label runaways reveals our biases and defines their treatment.

There are 5 million (good) refugees from Ukraine.  (Bad) illegals flood America’s southern border.  British officers are deporting (bothersome) displaced persons to Rwanda.  Three million (ignored) Venezuelans seek political asylum in Colombia.  (Pitiful) African Blacks and Middle East Muslims drown, and others are enslaved trekking from Africa and Syria.  (Dismissed) Afghanis on the run are just dying.

My father was a German-Jewish (enemy alien) refugee.  The Nazis freed him from Buchenwald around 1940.  His mother bought him a visa to Panama.  Hitler expected refugees to be a burden to destination countries.  Dad traveled from Fulda to Hamburg, boarding a boat sailing to Panama.  The ship refueled and resupplied in England.  Dad jumped off.

The British interned him in a camp for enemy aliens, Jews and non-Jews, Orthodox and secular, working men and intellectuals.  Interns had to convince Colonel May that they were not spies.  From concentration camp to internment camp like a summer fling.  We visited a cousin who spent her teen years in a concentration camp.  My young son piped up, “I’m going to camp this summer.”  We busted out laughing until my cousin wished he would not go to the same one she survived.

Now there is a book that tells the rest of the story.  Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art behind the Wire by Ines Newman with Charmain Brinson & Rachel Dickson (Vallentine Mitchell 2021) fills in the details about the missing time.  They built the book around a diary kept by Newman’s grandfather, Wilhelm Hollitscher.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/18/lock-down-architect-deborah-birx-admits-to-using-subterfuge-and-slight-of-hand-to-hide-information-from-trump/

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under former President Donald Trump in 2020, has admitted in her new book that she engaged in “subterfuge” and “slight-of-hand” to “hide” information in weekly reports from Trump officials so she could control the recommendations sent to states to guide their COVID mitigation efforts.

In her book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, Birx also explains how she tricked Trump into going along with a “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” lockdown in March of 2020, knowing that it was just “a start.”

Birx explains that her recommendations—which included random testing, masking, and restricted indoor gatherings—were met with resistance in the Trump White House, especially after Dr. Scott Atlas joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force in August of 2020.

“In vivid detail… examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties.”–The Boston Globe

“Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China’s past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China’s modern history.”–LA Review of Books

An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country’s deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/14/how-mattis-betrayed-his-fellow-marines-at-the-behest-of-the-deep-state/

My new book, A Few Bad Men, details the mendacity and mad dishonesty of retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis. The fact that it was written by a Marine once under his command, whom he betrayed for the sake of politics and getting to slap on another star, says volumes about this once-lionized figure.

It all goes back to an incident in Afghanistan in 2007, and the Court of Inquiry trial of innocent Marines that followed, which Mattis himself instigated.

Lt. Colonel Steve Morgan, USMC (retired) and jury member of the 2008 Marine Special Operations Command’s Court of Inquiry says in the foreword to A Few Bad Men, “This is a case of a perfect storm of toxic leadership.” 

The most legendary Marine of all time, Lieutenant General John A. Lejeune, the 13th commandant of the Marine Corps, laid out clearly how to effectively nurture and lead Marines: “Make every effort by means of historical, educational, and patriotic addresses to cultivate in their hearts a deep abiding love of the Corps and Country” and “the key to combat effectiveness is unity and esprit that characterizes itself in complete irrevocable mutual trust.” 

If only General Mattis had taken this to heart.

On February 3, 2005, when Lieutenant General Mattis was attending the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Associations forum in San Diego, he said: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/agency-important-new-book-about-america-frontpagemagcom/

The Gallup polling organization seems to serve up endlessly bleak news about how Americans feel about God and country.

I wrote recently about their report of the historically low percentage of Americans that say they believe in God.

Now Gallup reports that a historically low number of Americans believe in ourselves and our country.

The percentage of Americans who now say, per Gallup, they are “extremely proud” of their country is at a historically low 38%.

And the average percentage, 27%, of Americans that have confidence in our major institutions is at an all-time low.

Inflation, slow growth and weekly reports about pointless violence do not inspire good feelings and confidence.

But the good news is we can still speak freely and express ourselves. Often, it takes courage to say publicly what you see and feel is wrong. But you can do it.

We have a wonderful example in a new book from American Enterprise Institute scholar Ian Rowe, “Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power.”

Rowe is well positioned to speak about our country, what works and where the problems are, as the son of Jamaican immigrants who struggled so their sons would “make it” in America.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/08/well-be-back-but-will-trump/

EXCERPT:”We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America” by Kurt Schlichter 

There are a few things you can rely upon. The sun will come up in the east. You will be expected to pay taxes. The third season of a given Netflix or HBO series that began promisingly will suck, mostly because the plot will get woke. And Joe Biden will make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan. 

Biden has to fail. Besides being stupid, which probably gave him a solid head start on his senility, he adheres to an ideology that not only never succeeds in bringing prosperity or freedom but cannot do so if it wishes to continue. Things will get worse and worse, and all the legacy media tap-dancing in the world is never going to convince Americans that 20 percent inflation is a good thing and proof of a booming economy. He is going to screw it up, and there is going to be a huge opening for a Republican in 2024. And, hopefully, it will not be a terrible Republican. 

Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.

Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of “re-education” and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country.

Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan’s most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters, linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing Li tells her aunts’ story for the first time, honoring her family’s history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the bitter political rivals of mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts’ remarkable legacies.