RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-red-thread.html

There is more blatant corruption, sniveling conspiracy, and underhanded intrigue revealed in Diana West’s new book, The Red Thread, than in the Kevin Spacey version of The House of Cards, which ran on Netflix from 2013 to 2018. The actors behind the attempted coup against Donald Trump, however, are bland, nondescript nonentities and mediocrities — James Comey, John Brennan, Christopher Steele, Nellie and Bruce Ohr, Reinhold Niebuhr (Who!?!!), the Kramer brothers, Bill Browder and his family, and a passel of others, none of them engaging actors, able to credibly project the immorality and villainy of their characters.

None of them is a Frank or Claire Underwood, though their insatiable hunger for power and control is not fictional and their appetite for power nearly cost this country the 2016 election. And the one character in the series I detested the most in House of Cards was Doug Stamper, Frank’s loyal assistant, “researcher,” gofer, arranger, blackmailer, and Mafia-like enforcer.
They don’t exude or broadcast evil or show any tell-tale signs of duplicity, malice, or a drooling unquenchable appetite for power or a penchant for lying and deceit. They’re about as average-looking as anyone you’d have to wait in line behind at a Wal-Mart check-out. We’re not dealing here with Jack-and-the Beanstock monsters, nor with Leviathans or Behemoths. But rather with a swarm of human termites.

The full title of West’s book is The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Red Threads could be said to be an overture to West’s other knock-em-flat title, American Betrayal (reviewed by me twice (https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/06/our-enemy-inside-gates.html
https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/04/our-enemy-inside-gates-revisited.html), is a much longer work that details the rise of Communist influence in the U.S. in the 1930s and during the FDR years.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/the_moral_odyssey_of_an_american_doctor.html

Call it providential intervention or just the wisdom of a Chinese fortune cookie, but whatever the impetus, Dr. Richard Moss embarked on a journey to the Third World that he elucidates in his masterful book titled A Surgeon’s Odyssey — a book that deserves a space on everyone’s nightstand.

Moss, a son of the Bronx, was “exposed to most of the common pathologies of the inner city.” But he beat the odds when after 14 years of grueling study and training, he embarked on a journey that led him to Thailand, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. While working as a cancer surgeon from 1987-1990 he sought to ameliorate the suffering of people who lived under “extraordinarily horrifying circumstances.”

As a Board Certified Head and Neck Surgeon, Moss brought his skills to these people –many who had “unimaginable diseases at advanced stages and amidst tragic human suffering.” This volunteer stint was not for the fainthearted, as he documents the heartbreak he saw at every stage of his time working in the various countries. But the words of the fortune cookie were “Do not forsake your dream for material security,” and thus he began a journey that led him to “help the neglected and diseased” as well as “understand healing, its essence, and embrace it as something sacred.”

He admires the respect accorded him as dictated by Thai custom. He explains the quintessential Thai greeting of “wai” and how it underscores the importance of showing respect. He learns to understand the nuances of the Thai language where “depending on the tone” of one’s voice, a word could mean either “beautiful” or “bad luck.” He soaks in the nuances of a culture where even the act of walking reflects a smooth “never hurrying” approach, quite the opposite of the hustle and bustle of his New York City upbringing. He comes to view this contemplative walking as a “form of meditation helping to ward off the assault of modern life.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-dissidents-testimony-vladimir-bukovskys-judgment-in-moscow-now-in-english/
It’s the United States of America, and the year is 2019, and a hard-bitten old Commie named Bernie Sanders is, for the second time in a row, a popular candidate for the presidency. Meanwhile, the youngest and most high-profile new member of Congress is a staggeringly callow woman whose fatuously utopian rhetoric has made her a media darling. At the same time, the Democratic Party center itself is quickly lurching leftward, with once sensible politicians now spouting foolish and dangerous socialist bromides.

Some observers profess astonishment at these developments. In fact there’s no reason whatsoever for surprise. For one thing, as the legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky laments in his book Judgment in Moscow (Ninth of November Press, $24.99 hardcover) — which appeared in French in 1995 and in Russian and German the year after, but is only now being published in English for the first time — the fall of the USSR was not followed by the kind of conspicuous moral reckoning and housecleaning that went on in Germany after Hitler’s defeat. There was no post-Soviet equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Politburo and KGB members like Vladimir Putin, instead of being imprisoned or banished or fleeing to the Brazilian rainforest or the mountains of Bolivia, simply altered their public profiles and retained or resumed power in the new, purportedly post-Communist Russia.

As Bukovsky puts it: “To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow traveler); that is improper, a ‘witch hunt.’” How to convince the Western multitudes that Communism is horrible when its avatars were let off scot-free?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/immune

We are at the dawn of a health revolution. Cancer physicians agree that immune therapies – the subject of the most recent Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – is a game-changer, and now sits alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, as a mainstream option for the treatment of some types of cancer.

Crucially, neither of the two Nobel Prize winners, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo, directly set out to cure cancer – “that wasn’t it at all,” Allison has said – they were trying to understand how the immune system works. And this can’t be emphasised enough: curiosity-driven research won the prize and brought us new cancer medicines.

Some scientists do and should focus on understanding cancer or other diseases but we must also fund science which might seem esoteric – those who are merely asking what does this or that gene or protein do in the body – because so many of our greatest discoveries came out of left field. As cosmologist Martin Rees once wrote: “A research proposal to make flesh appear transparent wouldn’t have been funded, and even if it had been, the research surely wouldn’t have led to the X-ray.”

It was in trying to understand the details of what two specific receptor proteins did in the immune system which led Allison and Honjo to stumble upon our immune system’s brakes. They discovered brakes built into the immune system to dampen its activity after some time. Brakes act on the immune system to bring the body back to its normal resting level after a virus, for example, has been cleared from the body. This led to the idea of using medicines to block or switch off these brake receptors to unleash a stronger and longer-lasting immune response to better fight cancer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/bulwark-review-the-case-for-trump-response/

A sophist in service to self

I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:

But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls” — those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.

Though wishing to leave “a stench on them,” Schoenfeld instead gives us a sad exercise in self-abasement. And his review offers an illustration of the poverty of Never Trump personal venom and incoherence.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

In his review, Schoenfeld tosses out names such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the Third Reich Jew-haters in service to Hitler, to suggest, with a wink and nod, that I play a comparable role in relation to Trump.

Schoenfeld certainly has an odd sense of timing. The same day that Schoenfeld, an adjunct Hudson fellow, leveled his smears in The Bulwark, I was speaking at his own home Hudson Institute about the book. I discussed, among other things, Trump’s support for Israel and the dangerous anti-Semitic drift of the Democratic party, a theme I repeated again that evening on television.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dr-crankleys-not-so-great-grandchildren-diana-west-analyzes-why-the-anti-trump-putschists-persist/

A review-essay of the new monograph The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West.
“Running like a red thread through Communist teachings from the very inception of the movement is the note of total hostility to our form of government.”– from The Communist Party Of The United States Of America: What It Is. How It Works. A Handbook For Americans,” at a hearing by the Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, December 21, 1955, P. 16. Strident never-Trumper Max Boot, quoted in a 3/2/2016 NY Times article, infamously encapsulated his unhinged vacuity on the subject of then-leading GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump by belching forth: “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.”

Forgive the gentle, attentive reader of Diana West’s uniquely insightful, painstakingly researched new monograph, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, for pausing to re-consider whether Boot’s sneering utterance was pure hyperbole.Whittaker Chambers, apostate from the Communist religion of immoralism, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto with a thoughtfully acid February 23, 1948 Time essay on Karl Marx and his legacy entitled “Dr. Crankley’s Children.”

The essay’s title derived from a pseudonym, “Dr. Crankley,” Marx adopted in a March 3, 1865 letter to his daughter. Chambers recounted Marx’s triumphal hypocrisy, producing a publication that declared itself an “organ of democracy” while admitting the “reality” that it “was nothing but a plan against democracy.” This behavior segued to “the first Party purges,” conducted by a man who despised “sentimental socialism” and was described by a contemporary thusly: “Baring his teeth, Marx will slaughter anybody who blocks his way.”

The inevitable progression of such dogma, and behaviors, observes Chambers, was Marx’s conclusion that he must “capture” the state with police power and establish his dystopian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Written down,” Chambers averred, “it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.” Assessing what Marx bestowed through his ideological progeny, Chambers characterized three classes of Dr. Crankley’s children. Those Chambers dubbed the “children of pity,” epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, concurred with Marx’s indictment of capitalism, but believed in an inexorable “steady bicycle ride toward socialism.” Benito Mussolini was Chambers’ archetype for the “children of hate,” who “put the machines and classes to work for war.”The third class of Dr. Crankley’s children “inherited the cold disciplined logic necessary for the serious pursuit of power.” Embodied by Lenin, who, “like Father Marx, knew what was best,” they were (and remain) the “most important and the most terrible of the Marxist brood.” Lenin, Chambers reminds us, “snatched away” democracy, “organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a disciplined gang of power monopolists,” and his acolytes “smashed men freely.”With meticulously researched detail, and fearless, extraordinary originality of thought, Diana West’s remarkably compendious The Red Thread introduces us to key (not-so-) great-grandchildren of Dr. Crankley. Their continuing machinations amount to nothing less than an anti-Trump putsch.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-fights-deep-state-swamp-fights-back/

Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander-in-chief earned the antipathy of so many — and lived to tell the tale.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump. It appears here with permission.

T rump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Former administrative-state careerists were not shy about warning Trump of what was ahead. The counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who had worked in the CIA and the FBI under Robert Mueller, warned CNN host Jake Tapper in August 2017 that “the government is going to kill” President Donald Trump. Kill? And what was the reason the melodramatic Mudd adduced for his astounding prediction? “Because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd then elaborated: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. The government is going to kill this guy. The government is going to kill this guy because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd further clarified his assassination metaphor: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’”

It was difficult to ascertain to what degree Mudd was serious or exaggerating the depth of deep-state loathing of Trump.

A writer for the London Review of Books, Adam Schatz, seemed even more direct. He reported a supposed conversation that he had with an American political scientist knowledgeable of the Washington permanent caste. He purportedly had assured Schatz that if Trump were elected, he would likely not survive his full term: “He will have to be removed from power by the deep state, or be assassinated.”