RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/book-review-it-was-all-a-lie-sanctimonious-stuart-stevens-scolds-republican-party/

Our ‘burn it to the ground’ maligner of the Republican Party should just give it a rest.

It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, by Stuart Stevens (Knopf, 256 pages, $26.95)

N o matter how we regard the influence of President Donald Trump — as prime source of things gone wrong in politics or as deeply resented corrective — November 6, 2012, holds as good a claim as any date to being remembered as a turn of history and point of departure in the remaking of the Republican Party. Without Romney’s defeat, no Trump takeover. And no Republican other than Utah’s freshman senator himself had more to do with the fateful outcome on that Election Day than Mitt Romney’s sole campaign strategist in 2012, principal advertising consultant, and convention speechwriter, Stuart Stevens. Strange, then, to pick up Stevens’s new book, It Was All a Lie, to find him accusing Republican voters of all manner of sins, failures of judgment, and squandered opportunities, as if they were due the harsh accounting and he was the one left disappointed.

The book is billed as a “lacerating mea culpa,” a painful outpouring of regret by “the most successful political operative of his generation,” though in practice what the penitent mostly confesses is having for too long overlooked the faults of others, and having kept the wrong company when he should have known better. Presenting himself as the battle-weary veteran of many a campaign, with “the best win-loss record of anyone in my business,” Stevens shares his sadness and remorse at having labored so long as a Republican consultant, in service to people he now realizes are mostly frauds and to ideas he now regards as “lies” unworthy of his talents.

“If I look back on my years in politics,” he reflects, “the long-standing hypocrisy of the Republican Party should have been obvious.” But it wasn’t, and now in atonement he is prepared to testify that Donald Trump’s arrival merely revealed “the essence” of a selfish, backward, hateful, hopelessly racist “white grievance party” — defined by “the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology” — our lofty Republican ideals all along just for show. As he tells us in his Prologue, “This is a book I never thought I’d write, that I didn’t want to write. But it’s the book I now must write. It’s a truth to which I can bear witness.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/06/26/the-future-of-western-civilization-

“In words striking in the face of our challenges today, Churchill said: “Civilization will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”

The war on history has spread across our country and has even spilled over to other parts of the Western world.

Now, on a daily basis, we see scenes of lawless mobs attacking and tearing down statues, and defacing monuments of every type—often as authorities stand idly by. 

But this violence has hardly been reserved just for statues.

After toppling a statue of an abolitionist who gave his life to the cause as a member of the Union Army, a mob in Madison, Wisconsin, mercilessly beat a Wisconsin Democrat state senator who supported the protests.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Mob rule is indeed coming to America. It must be stopped.

Authorities have numerous tools to stop the destruction if they would just show the willingness to use them. Failure to act will only encourage more acts of vandalism and destruction.

As I explained in my book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” the attacks on our shared history go beyond any individual or statue.

What’s in peril now is not just the reputation of Christopher Columbus, the merits of the Founding Fathers, or the legacy of the Civil War. It’s something much broader and deeper.

What’s being threatened is the long history of ideas and institutions created and developed in the West.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-pathology-of-american-communism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick (Verso, 288 pp., $19.95)

Progressives may be riding high these days, but Vivian Gornick believes they lack good role models as they set about trying to “achieve a more just world from the bottom up.” Gornick, the New York journalist and memoirist whose radical feminist writings appeared regularly in the Village Voice, believes The Romance of American Communism is what they need. Verso has reissued her 1977 book, a group portrait of the men and women of her parents’ generation who embraced Communism during its mid-20th-century heyday. 

Much of America scorned the “old Reds,” to use Gornick’s term. The reasons why come through clearly in the interviews she conducted. Her quixotic mission is to make us warm to her interviewees even as they relate, in excruciating detail, how disillusioned the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) left them. One testifies to “all the bullying, all the petty despotism, and all the real horror of being tied to the Soviet line.” His comment is typical. Summarizing the book’s recollections of life in the Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Gornick writes: “There are many, many Communists who remember with fear and self-loathing the cruelties both inflicted and received” in the name of “democratic centralism,” the Leninist concept around which a “vicious tyranny,” the CPUSA, was built.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/18/the-rebirth-of-john-bolton/

The mustachioed ogre who the Left once wanted tried for war crimes is finally earning the affection of the Trump-hating Beltway establishment that eluded him for years.

In 2008, a British environmental activist attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest on John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, during a speech in London. He failed. Top officials with George W. Bush’s Administration, Bolton in particular, were widely considered war criminals for their role in launching a deadly war in Iraq, torturing prisoners, and hiding evidence of wrongdoing.

The crux of this international animus was Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and therefore posed an immediate and mortal threat to global security. As an advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell during Bush’s first term, Bolton enthusiastically pushed the WMD pretext for war. 

“Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a robust program to develop all types of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and the capability to deliver them,” Bolton said a few months after the 2003 invasion.

That was just one of Bolton’s many exaggerations—to put it charitably—about Hussein’s arsenal. A bipartisan Senate committee the following year concluded the Bush Administration’s pre-war intelligence about WMDs was faulty and the threat had been overstated—no stockpiles of active agents intended to kill large numbers of people were found. The war escalated and officially ended in 2011, even though U.S. troops remain in Iraq today. Nearly 5,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq, including seven this year alone.

But being a dishonest warmonger means never having to say you’re sorry to the country you misled, or to the families of the soldiers and civilians killed by your malfeasance; in fact, it means you land lucrative gigs at think tanks and news outlets—which is exactly what Bolton did—as you patiently await your next opportunity to infiltrate the perches of power and bring your incompetence, ego, and careerism with you—which is exactly what Bolton did to Donald Trump.

Now, the mustachioed ogre who the Left once wanted to see strung up at The Hague is earning affection and attention by the Trump-hating Beltway establishment that has eluded him for years. Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, is the latest broadside against Donald Trump and, as the story goes, the president is really done this time!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-confessions-of-john-bolton-11592522040?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

On the matter of John Bolton’s book, it’s hard to tell who looks worse: the former national security adviser for writing it while President Trump is still in office, his lifelong political opponents who now hail Mr. Bolton as a truth teller, or the President of the United States as depicted in the book.

Mr. Bolton has been a frequent Journal contributor across his long public life, and he’s a defender of American interests. We have gone to the barricades on his behalf more than a few times. His account of Mr. Trump’s private words and actions sounds right because the President often says similar things in public. As far as we know, Mr. Bolton has never lied to us.

Yet we also have to wonder what happened to honor in public service. Presidents should have some expectation that their advisers will wait until they kiss and tell, especially about their private conversations with foreign leaders. It used to be that advisers wouldn’t write about the Presidents they served until they had left office.

These days too many advisers bid for fame the minute they leave the White House, and Mr. Bolton has managed to do so in the middle of a re-election campaign. Mr. Trump didn’t treat him well, but the President treats few people well beyond his immediate family. Mr. Bolton certainly knew what to expect when he accepted the job.

www.nysun.com/editorials/john-bolton-is-called-on-a-point-of-old-fashioned/91165/

Of all that has been disclosed so far in John Bolton’s campaign to get his book published, the most significant — at least to us — is the classified information non-disclosure agreement that binds Mr. Bolton to keep our national secrets. It starts with the words “intending to be bound.” It describes his obligations in detail. It places the burdens on Mr. Bolton. It ends with his signature. So whatever else is bound up in this dispute, one of the issues will be the value of Mr. Bolton’s word.

We understand one question in the lawsuit the government just filed will be whether the former national security adviser has actually fulfilled the agreement’s terms. And whether the White House, with its vow to focus solely on protecting national secrets, has been acting in good faith. Or whether it’s trying to protect President Trump politically. It’s hard to spot in the court documents, though, anything filed so that far releases Mr. Bolton from his agreement.

So for Mr. Bolton to plunge ahead with publication absent an unambiguous closing letter from the government would be — at least to us — a shocking breach. We don’t know Mr. Bolton well personally. We have, though, worn our fingers to the stubs over the years defending him. We can recall few diplomatic missions so heroic as Mr. Bolton’s leadership of President George H.W. Bush’s successful campaign to get the United Nations to repeal its resolution equating Zionism and racism.