RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/john_boltons_book_looks_like_a_fairytale_for_trump_haters.html

The Trump administration has sued to stop John Bolton’s purported “tell-all” from being released next week on the ground that it is filled with classified information that affects national security. That suit hasn’t stopped Bolton’s publisher from leaking the supposed “bombshells” in the book.

Those bombshells will excite Trump haters, but those who support Trump will immediately recognize them as lies, deliberate misinterpretations, and resentment. Expect the activist Democrat media to sing the book’s praises, but that won’t change the outcome of the November election.

The book’s biggest alleged bombshell, which Bolton writes about in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), is his claim that, in June 2019 at the Osaka G20, Trump begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him get reelected. According to Bolton, Xi said that America’s relationship with China was important and that it was wrong for some in America to want a Cold War. Trump countered that Democrats were hostile to China and then, says Bolton, the begging started:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/18/knives_out_bolton_lacerates_nikki_haley_in_new_book__143483.html

As far as exit interviews are concerned, this one was unofficial and especially ugly.

In his forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton condemns President Trump as a bumbling executive and mocks Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a political opportunist and dismisses Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as generally averse to conflict.

But he doesn’t stop there, as one rising GOP star is finding out.

The highly unflattering 494-page tome, cataloguing the former national security adviser’s time in the Trump White House, seems destined for bestseller lists — that is, if it can get published. Citing national security concerns late Wednesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to issue a restraining order.

But copies are already floating around Capitol Hill, and regardless of what the court rules, a harsh picture of Nikki Haley is among the portraits emerging. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during much of Bolton’s tenure acted like a “free electron” more concerned with political ambition than international diplomacy, according to a copy of the book obtained by RealClearPolitics.

Haley, the rare Cabinet member to leave the White House on good terms with the president, is considered a top presidential aspirant in a post-Trump Republican Party. Bolton seems intent on denting that reputation.

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a chemical attack on his own people, Bolton suggested that Haley stand with ambassadors from the United Kingdom and France in the U.N. Security Council to present a united front against the rogue leader.

“I had done that many times,” Bolton wrote, “but Haley declined, preferring to have pictures of her alone giving the U.S. statement in the Council. That told me something.” It was indicative, he added, of an “untethered performance in New York over the past year-plus,” and Bolton, still new in his job at the time, made a note to discuss the performance with Pompeo.

https://mailchi.mp/peaceandtolerance/apt-webinar-our-new-book-on-radical-islam-in-new-england?e=c4e6370125

How the Muslim Brotherhood obtained a foothold in Boston through an organization called the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB).

• How the ISB built the largest mosque in the Northeast to radicalize Boston’s Muslims.

• How the ISB’s radical leadership defrauded the political and civic leaders of Boston, who accepted the mosque as an authentically moderate Muslim force for good.

• How Jewish leaders, knowing about the antisemitism of the ISB mosque leaders, decided nevertheless to give the mosque a kosher stamp, giving political cover to the rest of Boston’s civic and political leadership to embrace the mosque.

• What mosque leaders are preaching to Boston Muslims now, in 2020.

Ilya and Charles will name names of those Jewish leaders who refuse to tell Boston’s Jews, or anyone else, what they know about the radicals who own and run the mosque. They will show the primary source videos and documents described in Ilya’s book, which expose the extent to which Boston’s leaders have ignored and aided Islamist extremist efforts in the city.

This willful ignorance has cost the city significantly: Fourteen leaders, donors, and congregants of the Islamic Society of Boston — including the Boston Marathon bombers — are either in prison, awaiting trial, on the run, or dead due to their involvement in Islamic terrorism.

Ilya based his book on thousands of documents obtained from years of on-the-ground monitoring of the ISB’s activities, from the ISB’s internal financial and governance records subpoenaed during its defamation lawsuit against its critics, and from moderate Boston Muslims who have been fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in Boston even longer than we have.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/hillary-without-bill-bruce-bawer/

In his 1976 novel The Alteration, Kingsley Amis imagined a contemporary Britain in which the Protestant Reformation never took place. In The Plot against America (2004), Philip Roth imagined a 1940s America in which Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election and signs peace treaties with Germany and Japan. In her new novel, Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld imagines an equally portentous alternate world: one in which Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton – and ended up being elected president in 2016.

Well, it’s not quite correct to say that Sittenfeld imagines it. There’s not really much in the way of imagination in this stunningly vapid, pedestrian piece of work, which plods from incident to incident without a single vivid detail or snappy exchange of dialogue or hint of wit. It’s so flatfooted, so thoroughly uninspired, that one assumes, in the early pages, that Sittenfeld – who is a woman – banged it out prontissimo, Joyce Carol Oates-style, with the cynical objective of cashing in on all the poor hapless women who were so devastated by Hillary’s loss that they’d presumably be desperate to escape into an alternate universe in which Hillary won. But as one reads on, one acquires the distinct, and horrifying, impression that Sittenfeld’s heart is actually in this leaden, lifeless thing, and that escaping into her own sketchily depicted parallel universe is Sittenfeld’s way of consoling herself.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/a_first_look_at_erasing_america.html

“Progressives” throughout the West seem eager to erase our history and impugn our civilization, with ample blowback from those beastly “deplorables.” You know, those horrid patriotic people who hang out at Dunkin Donuts and live on farms or in small towns, or who serve(d) in the military, or who are blue collar. Thankfully, James S. Robbins, Ph.D, formerly a professor, journalist, and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Council, has effectively researched this phenomenon from an American perspective. His recent book, Erasing America: Losing our Future by Destroying Our Past (2018), is clear, well written and well researched, without getting bogged down in esoteric jargon. Nor is much spared as the falsehoods of sacred cows are exposed. 

Robbins reminds us that America’s first and third presidents, both southerners, are impugned as slave owners, which we know is evil, thanks in no small measure to the history we have been taught. There have been demands to remove their statues as well as their names from schools, government buildings, streets, etc. But should this be the sole basis for judging George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? Slavery was commonplace in their era, especially in the South, and it is not fair to completely judge those of a bygone era by contemporary standards (here’s looking at you, Halifax). Fairness demands a balanced portrayal, not just a negative one, which means the greatness of Washington and Jefferson must also be acknowledged. Besides, these America and western civilization hating “progressives” might want to grudgingly concede that  Great Britain and her Commonwealth were first to abolish slavery, a worldwide blight hardly unique to the English speaking world. And while the United States followed suit a few decades later, it was still long before many anti-Christian, non-Christian, or non-western societies; the ones romanticized by the politically correct postmodernist left.