RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/the_american_horatius.html

Donald Trump has been in America’s headlights for decades.  By now, we know he’s impulsive, brash, boastful, proud, successful, charismatic, irreverent, and retaliatory.  We also know he’s foresightful, confident, bright, obstinate, entertaining, self-assertive, tenacious, and independent.  This admixture of characteristics couldn’t be more useful in our zeitgeist. 

What isn’t Trump?  He isn’t a utopian.  He isn’t anti-Caucasian.  He isn’t a secularist.  He isn’t unpatriotic.  He isn’t anti-populist.  He isn’t a globalist.  He isn’t a socialist.  He isn’t an ideologue.  He isn’t anti-tradition.  He isn’t anti-police.  He isn’t anti-family.  He isn’t anti-nation-state.  He isn’t a progressive.  He isn’t a deep-statist.  He isn’t anti-heteronormative.  He isn’t an insurrectionist.  He isn’t a vegetarian.  And he isn’t perfect.  

Trump’s natural metapolitical vibe is a spanner in the works of the administrative state, that oligarchy of scalawag bureaucrats and experts who believe themselves entitled to play with America’s past, present, and future.  Trump is a force unto himself, and for that, the left and their media allies ceaselessly malign him, claiming he’s a demagogue, an authoritarian, a threat to democracy.  Humbug!  There’s no greater threat to America than progressive Democrats and their “transformative” ideology.

Trump represents a nascent centripetal power engaged in the necessary and long overdue contraction of leftist ideologies and programs.  He possesses an authentic ineluctable resistance to prevailing postmodern delusions.  Such a person cannot avoid becoming the bête noire, the Nosferatu of the American left. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/you-hate-trump/

A great many Americans claim that they cannot vote for former President Donald Trump because they loathe him.

That was also their argument in 2016 and 2020.

That argument was childish in 2016 and 2020, and it remains childish in 2024.

I say “childish” because mature people don’t vote on the basis of whom they like. They vote on the basis of which candidate is best for their country. As I asked both eight years ago and four years ago, other than friends and a spouse, whom do you choose based on how much you like a person? Do you choose your surgeon on that basis? If you or a loved one had cancer and were presented with a choice of two surgeons, one known to be an honorable man and loyal husband, the other known for his abrasive personality and for being a womanizer but also known as one of the best cancer surgeons in the country, which would you choose?

We all know the answer. So, why would you choose a president based on marital fidelity or personality traits?

Though they always mention Trump “the liar” (as far as truth-telling is concerned, Trump is Abe Lincoln compared to President Joe Biden), Trump “the adulterer,” Trump “the mean,” and now Trump “the felon” (although no one can tell you what he was charged with), Trump haters would respond that those are not the only reasons why they would never vote for Trump. He is, they constantly tell us, a threat to democracy.

Trump haters have to say that — because they know that merely listing his alleged and actual obnoxious personal traits makes them look foolish. The problem, however, is that the claim that Trump would end democracy in America is baseless. He was already president for four years, and he in no way threatened democracy. Of course, Trump haters will point to Jan. 6 — and only to Jan. 6, because they have no other example from all four years of the Trump presidency of Trump allegedly threatening democracy.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-trump-harris-debate-scorecard

Yes, the moderators of ABC’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were egregiously biased in favor of Harris. Yes, Harris recycled patent lies about Trump without the slightest pushback from the referees—that Trump has embraced the supposedly infamous Project 2025, that he supports a national abortion ban, that he called the anti-Semitic and racist demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2019 “fine people,” that he refused leases to black would-be renters. (The New York Times lauded the ABC team as a “model for real-time fact-checking.”)

But a low-information voter who, incredibly, still has not made up her mind about the election could easily decide for Harris on the basis of Tuesday’s debate. Trump put all his worst traits on display—his narcissism, his gratuitous nastiness, and above all, his penchant for using hyperbole as a substitute for argument.

Conservative commentators have been busy collecting examples of ABC’s shocking partiality. The following set-up, from the worst offender of the two moderators, David Muir, is particularly hilarious in its sycophantic delivery to Harris of a soft pitch over home plate:

[Trump] said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election. That was won by President Biden and yourself. But I do want to ask you about something that’s come up in the last couple of days. This was a post from President Trump about this upcoming election just weeks away. He said, “When I win, those people who cheated,” and then he lists donors, voters, election officials, he says “Will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.” One of your campaign’s top lawyers responded saying, “We won’t let Donald Trump intimidate us. We won’t let him suppress the vote.” Is that what you believe he’s trying to do here?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fair-debate-moderators-would-have-fact-checked-harris-on-these-misleading-claims/

The ABC anchors never disputed any of Vice President Kamala Harris’ claims.

Guns

On gun control, the vice president claimed, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away” and pointed out that both she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, are gun owners.

In late 2019, though, Harris publicly claimed, “We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.” Neither moderator probed deeper into her sudden policy shift on the position.

As a senator in 2019, Harris signed onto a bill that would have banned so-called “assault weapons,” a category that encompasses the most commonly owned rifle in America, the AR-15. And at a rally just a month ago, Harris vowed to sign into law a ban on such weapons if she’s elected in November.

The moderators failed to raise Harris’s record in the Senate and the positions she’s taken on the stump this cycle.

Abortion

The moderators also passed up an opportunity to drill down on what, if any, abortion restrictions Harris supports, allowing her to simply deny that abortions were ever performed in the final trimester.

“I absolutely support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade,” said Harris when asked if she would support any restrictions on abortion.

Although Trump remained uncommitted on vetoing a prospective national abortion ban, Harris refused to oppose abortion in “the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month” when challenged directly by the former president, simply replying, “C’mon.”

“Under Roe v. Wade, you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month,” Trump said. Harris interrupted him: “That’s not true.”

Roe v. Wade requires a “health exception” up until the point of birth. But the definition of “health” under that framework extends to “mental health, financial concerns, and familial circumstances,” according to the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/12/a-forgettable-warped-debate/

The September 10th presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy.

The swarmy and evasive Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes.

The ABC moderators proved they were predictably and shamelessly biased.

And an irate Donald Trump confirmed that he was too touchy and easily triggered.

Harris’s instructions were not to explain her agenda. She never defended disowning policies that she had embraced as a lifelong, self-confessed, “woke” “radical.”

Instead, Harris’s threefold strategy was simple enough—and it mostly worked.

One, goad Trump as a coward and racist. Then smile and call for unity, kindness, and an end to such name-calling.

Harris’s orders were to zero in on hair-trigger irrelevancies that would incite and sidetrack the thin-skinned Trump.

So, Harris claimed his massive rallies were failures, crackpot—and worst of all, boring!—as she falsely added that weary attendants left early.

All that was missing from her adolescent putdowns was Barack Obama’s earlier convention speech obscenity that Donald Trump supposedly suffered from undersized genitalia.

In Harris’s upside-down, projectionist world, ex-president Trump caused the Biden-Harris disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan.

He was accused of being mostly responsible for the effects of the global COVID-19 plague that killed over 100 million.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/12/absolutely-no-chance-cheney-and-other-never-trumpers-would-have-supported-reagan/

Liz Cheney – who recently endorsed Kamala Harris, a person Cheney described as a “radical liberal” just four years ago – now says there is “absolutely no chance” that Ronald Reagan would support Donald Trump.

She has it exactly backward. It’s people like Liz Cheney and the cabal of other never-Trumpers who never would have supported Reagan when he ran in 1980.

“Donald Trump doesn’t stand for any of the things that Ronald Reagan did,” Cheney said. “It’s another place where I would urge my Republican colleagues … to really look at Donald Trump’s policies, to really look at the danger that he presents,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”

Cheney’s claim that Reagan didn’t support Trumpian policies is demonstrably false.

In his first term, Trump enacted pro-growth tax cuts, started eliminating regulations, and built up the nation’s military after years of neglect by Democrats. He appointed conservatives to the Supreme Court. He championed the working class.

In Reagan’s first term, he did likewise.

Reagan called the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” – a massive guide to conservative policymaking – the bible for guiding his administration and handed it out to every Cabinet official. Trump enacted two-thirds of the recommendations contained in Heritage’s 2016 “Mandate.”

https://nypost.com/2024/09/11/opinion/heres-the-fact-check-that-abc-didnt-give-kamala-harris/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

During Tuesday night’s debate, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis interrupted Donald Trump five times to “fact-check” his answers.

They did the same to Kamala Harris … never.

The vice president was allowed to skate through the debate without substantive follow-up questions or pushback on some of her obviously false claims.

So since ABC didn’t do its job, here are some of the fact checks they should have made:

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris listens as former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024.AFP via Getty Images

Kamala claim: “As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Fact check: Our troops in Middle East are absolutely in a combat zone, under attack from Iran, which the Biden-Harris administration has allowed to grow more aggressive in its use of proxies. In January this year, three US soldiers in Jordan were killed by a drone attack from an Iran-aligned group, and dozens of others have been wounded in similar strikes.

Kamala claim: “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

Fact check: The Heritage Foundation, an independent think tank, produced Project 2025, not the Trump campaign. Trump has repeatedly said he wasn’t involved in its writing, does not believe in its policies and won’t implement it.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/10/fact-checking-claims-made-in-trump-harris-debate/

The rules in this debate were the same as the June debate. Candidates’ microphones were silenced while the opponent answered questions.

1. Trump: We had no inflation

Trump repeatedly said he “had no inflation” during his tenure in the White House. While inflation grew much faster under Biden and Harris, prices also rose under Trump.

Prices overall rose 19% over the first 42 months of Biden’s term compared with 6% during Trump’s first 42 months, according to Forbes. Year-over-year inflation peaked under Biden at a four-decade hgh of 9% in 2022.

2. Opportunity economy

Harris said she is the only candidate promoting an opportunity economy, but Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act gave the 82% of middle-income earners a tax cut that averaged about $1,050, according to FactCheck.org.

“I was raised in a middle-class home,” Harris said, “And I am actually the only person on the stage who has a plan to lift up the middle class and the working people, and when you look at his economic plan, it’s all about tax breaks for the richest people.” 

But even the Biden-Harris administration’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, acknowledged that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut taxes for all.

The year following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, new job openings surged, and about 83,000 more Americans voluntarily left their jobs for better opportunities at the end of 2019, compared with the trend before the reform.

3. Trump: Harris’ father Is a Marxist professor

The claim that Harris’ father is a Marxist was fact-checked by Snopes as “true” after a viral X post from political economist Maxine Fowé.

Donald Harris, a now-retired professor of economics at Stanford University, was the author of a 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution.” It features ideas on Karl Marx’s theory of capital. “His book, ‘Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution’, published in 1978 and dedicated to Kamala and her sister, examines the pitfalls of relying on profit-seeking capitalists to direct an economy,” writes The Economist. The New Yorker wrote of Donald Harris being “a renowned Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University for decades.”

4. Border ‘Security’ Bill

With the border and illegal immigration being one of the most important issues among voters in the 2024 presidential election, it’s no surprise moderators raised the issue early on in the debate.

Muir began by asking Harris why the Biden administration waited “until six months before the election” to take action on the border, referring to Biden’s recent executive order limiting illegal border crossings.

Harris answered by touting her work prosecuting “transnational criminal organizations,” before attacking Trump for opposing a controversial border bill that failed in the Senate twice.

Harris said the failed bill “would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl” coming into the U.S., and would have provided “more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations.”

The failed bill directed the Department of Homeland Security to close the southern border “during a period of seven consecutive calendar days, [if] there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day.”

Over 1.8 million illegal aliens a year still would have been permitted to enter the United States under the now twice-failed legislation.

Harris blamed Trump for the bill’s failure, saying the former president “got on the phone” and told Republican members of Congress to “kill the bill.”

Trump, and many GOP members of Congress, were clear about their opposition to the proposed border security bill, arguing it would enshrine harmful border policies into law.

The Senate border bill “codified Joe Biden’s open border,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said of the bill in February.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., led the way in negotiating the terms of the bill with Democrats. Lankford was one of the few Republicans who voted in favor of advancing the border and foreign aid bill, along with Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah.

Even if the Senate had successfully passed the bill, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill would have been “dead on arrival” in the House.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/debate/

What was supposed to be a presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris hosted by ABC News, instead became a debate between the former president, his current challenger, and ABC’s two moderators: David Muir and Linsey Davis.

Even as Kamala Harris lied about her positions on fracking, gun control, and Israel, Muir and Davis repeatedly jumped in to argue with Trump under the guise of ‘fact-checking’ him.

The 3-on-1 debate format may very well mark the end of mainstream media presidential debates. It also represented a new low in not just media bias, but election interference.

The media marks each year by giving the public new reasons to distrust it, and ABC News, Muir, and Davis were clearly so insecure about the performance of their candidate that they repeatedly felt called on to argue with Trump instead of letting Kamala rebut him.

ABC News, Muir, and Davis also had no trust in the voters to decide for themselves. 

And so what was supposed to be a debate between two candidates instead became a debate between the establishment and an insurgent. Paradoxically this cut against efforts by the Kamala campaign to brand her an “underdog: and an insurgent candidate swimming upstream.