RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/obama_defames_millions_of_americans_as_racists_in_new_memoir.html

Barack Obama owes the people of America an apology.

“For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House,” writes Barack Obama in his new memoir, A Promised Land, “Donald Trump promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Rather than speak for the millions of Americans whom Barack Obama casually defamed, I am going to speak for the 130,000 or so residents of Chautauqua County, New York, a semi-rural “rust belt” county tucked away in the far southwest corner of western New York.

I know the county well.  I spend a good chunk of each year there and set my first published novel, 2006: A Chautauqua Rising, therein.  (Word to would-be writers: do not use names in book titles that no one can pronounce: sha-TAWK-wa).

In 2008, Mr. Obama, you won Chautauqua County.  In that the county is only 2 percent black, it was the white people of Chautauqua who elected you.  In that many residents have not seen a black American since the Buffalo Bills moved their training camp, “racial anxiety” is preposterously low on the list of local motivators.  You appeared just as black in 2008 as you did in 2012, and you scared no one.

High on the list of real anxieties was the economy.  The once prosperous county had been hemorrhaging jobs and people since 1970.  In 2008, with the economy collapsing, you promised “hope and change.”  People ignored the details and put their trust in you.

In October 2012, after four years of left-leaning economic amateurism, the national unemployment rate stood at 7.9 percent, the worst “recovery” in our history.  It was higher still in Chautauqua County.

Months before the election, with Congress unable to pass a law giving relief to the so-called “DREAMers” — young people brought to this country illegally by their parents — you unilaterally decided to give as many as a million people relief from deportation proceedings, as well as the right to apply for work authorization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/deep-state-inside-out-jack-cashill/

“The Trump administration is suffering under withering information campaigns designed to first undermine, then delegitimize and ultimately remove the President,” so wrote National Security Council staffer Rich Higgins in a May 2017 memo that ultimately landed on President Trump’s desk. Although the NeverTrumpers in the NSC did not succeed in removing Trump, they did remove Higgins.

The Higgins memo reportedly distressed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who had replaced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in the position. McMaster ordered a probe that some described as “McCarthy-type” to identify the author. That search led to Higgins, a Flynn loyalist who had worked on the Trump campaign.

After his authorship was established, Higgins had to choose between resignation and termination, the latter coming with the potential loss of his security clearance. Higgins resigned and was promptly escorted out of the building.

An everyday guy from Boston, Higgins had started his career as an army bomb technician with a hands-on specialty in IEDs, worked his way up to become an anti-terrorism expert, and ended his stint in the Deep State as a national security expert in the Trump administration.

Here is one unnerving fact: Trump received only 4 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia. As Higgins tells the tale in his new eye-opening memoir, The Memo: 20 Years Inside the Deep State Fighting for America First, the staffers at the National Security Council were no more disposed to support the president’s agenda than were the District voters writ large.

Higgins tells his tale well. I downed the book in two quick gulps. It was that good, that readable, that prescient, and that essential. As closely as I follow events, before reading this book I had no real sense of just how deep and murky the swamp is.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The book reviewed, Great Society by Amity Schlaes, is a timely history of what happens when hopes and expectations exceed capabilities. It is especially timely now when Socialism and the “Green New Deal” are being pushed on the American people by a progressive left that has become distanced from the average American.

By the time John Kennedy became President, The Depression was a distant memory and World War II had been over for over fifteen years. Americans were prospering. Theys felt good about themselves. They were admired by friends and feared by enemies. But, as happens once prosperity becomes common, people don’t seem to care or understand the role capitalism plays in eliminating poverty and making lives comfortable and happy. They don’t understand that nothing moves in straight lines – GDP growth, stock market performance, human emotions, or views of liberty. In the 1960s, the compounded rate for the Dow Jones Industrial Averages (DJIA) was 4.9% – all in the first half of the decade – and in the ensuing decade, the DJIA lost eight percent. What happened in the ‘60s, and its effect on subsequent decades, is the subject of this well-researched history of the period from the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1972. 

On January 20, 1961, a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest U.S. President since Theodore Roosevelt. In his inaugural he focused on the Country’s strength and the meaning of freedom: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Americans were confident. In May of that same year, Kennedy announced a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yet the Cold War persisted, poverty had not been vanquished and civil rights were not equally shared. Convinced of a need to stop the spread of Communism got us entangled in Vietnam. Concern for those living in penury led to the War on Poverty. Disquiet about equality and fairness were behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A decade that began on a high note, exemplified in Kennedy’s inaugural, ended with Nixon taking the nation off the gold standard on August 15, 1971. The years between witnessed a growth in national debt, a declining Dollar, student riots, and the assassination of a President, a civil rights leader and a U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate.