RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/bidens-hostility-to-israel/

The year I began my rabbinic studies in Jerusalem, a full-fledged war broke out on Yom Kippur. My fellow students and I set aside our books and made ourselves useful wherever help was needed. Whether helping work in the city’s largest bakery so everyone could have bread, working in a home for severely disabled children, or one of the city’s major hospitals, along with my fellows, I did what I could.

Joe Biden was the number-two person in an administration that in every way sought to lower its commitment to Israel, and to undercut its ability to succeed as a nation or even to defend itself.

What has never left me is an acute appreciation of how slender is the thread upon which Israel’s survival hangs. We did not know that Syrian tanks had penetrated the Israeli lines and, had they been better led, could have unhinged all of Israel’s defenses. We did not know how useless the Bar Lev fortifications had proven against Egypt. That all came later. But that this was a moment of existential crisis was known by all instinctively. It was in the air.

What a difference it made when the news came that America had created an air lifeline for Israel. In the terrible fighting, the IDF had nearly exhausted its ammunition and necessary military hardware. Taking great diplomatic risk, President Nixon decided to set up a continuous air ferry of supplies that enabled Israel to continue to fight, to turn the tables, and to remove the threat of extinction that a Syrian-Egyptian conquest would have meant.

Ever since that time, when I was in my early twenties, I have made a candidate’s position on Israel a top priority in elections. By the time the next presidential came up in 1976, Nixon was gone and Ford’s policy was being unduly demanding of Israel. I was by no means a conservative then, and there was little else about Ford that inspired me, so I voted for the mysterious man from Georgia. But by the time 1980 rolled around, Carter had shown that he blamed Israel exclusively for the failure of Camp David to lead to full Middle East peace, and his fatuous policy towards Iran had allowed that country to turn into a seething cauldron of hatred against Israel and America. I voted for Reagan, though I also was voting for Teddy Kennedy for the Senate because of his friendliness to Israel’s cause.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal.

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was Obama’s policy “point man.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/decision-time-for-the-costco-mom/

If you get this wrong, those toilet paper scrums at Costco might become a routine occurrence.

Earlier this year, a strange spectacle kept recurring at one of the country’s most popular big box stores.

Costco shoppers across the land wrestled each other for industrial-sized packages of toilet paper; as panic set in about the looming coronavirus pandemic, well-heeled suburbanites quickly depleted the retailers’ nationwide supply of Charmin and Quilted Northern. Even the store’s discount Kirkland brand sold out fast.

It’s unclear exactly why toilet paper topped the list of the COVID-19 survival kit but the scenes were instructive as far as observing upscale suburban women in their natural habitat. The toilet paper rush of 2020 probably started with a few comments at the monthly Bunco game or the ladies’ league liquid lunch or at a bespoke med spa house party.

Soon enough, premium membership card in hand, suburban women cruised their Range Rovers to the nearest Costco ready to fight for their right to a 30-roll pack like it was the last size 4 Veronica Beard camo blazer at Nordstrom. Photos of TP booty were proudly posted on Facebook; the booties of Jacob and Olivia would be safely clean for years to come.

And thus we had a peek into the workings of the hivemind of modern-day suburban moms.

In 2018, the sorority of suburban sisterhood found a common enemy: Donald Trump. Suburban congressional districts from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to Orange County, California flipped from Republican to Democrat, giving Nancy Pelosi enough new members to take back her coveted speaker’s gavel. Like nearly all midterm elections, the outcome was a rebuke of the sitting president. Millions of white suburban women, amid a booming economy and period of international peace, cried “but his tweets!” all the way to their polling places.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/a-momentous-election/

So here we are, 10 days out from the most momentous election of my lifetime. 

Candor requires that I admit that I have often felt that sense of existential emergency around election time. But reflection tells me that the closest thing to the 2020 election was the 2016 election, and that was not because of its wild card—Donald Trump—but because of “sure thing” Hillary Clinton, the single most corrupt serious contender for president in our history. 

That may seem melodramatic, but the truth is often melodramatic. 

I did not, until recently, suspect Joe Biden of serious corruption. The ongoing revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” have led me to reconsider that judgment, especially when combined with the ongoing bulletins from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who claims that Joe Biden, contrary to his repeated assertions, was involved in discussions about his son’s business dealings. 

So far, I believe, the public is not privy to any smoking-gun evidence about Joe Biden’s involvement, but the gun is warm and the optics are bad. The implicit oath of omertà followed by the media with respect to the saga of Hunter’s laptop has been truly impressive. 

Day after day, the New York Post, which first broke the story a week or so back, has been broadcasting more and more tidbits from this extraordinary trove of perversity and apparent corruption. No matter that the Post is the country’s fifth-largest paper: Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and television news have joined forces to close the public’s eyes, seal its ears, and scream there is nothing to see here, move along, and pay no attention to those muffled cries from the oubliette. It has been an extraordinary act of malignant solidarity, worthy of the Politburo in the heady days of Joe Stalin’s airbrush. 

I think this strategy is in the process of backfiring. Twitter may close down the Post’s account and forbid people to retweet its stories, but that, too, is news and the news, finally, will out. The Streisand Effect will not be denied. 

I have limited curiosity about Hunter Biden’s choice in narcotics or prostitutes. His alleged influence peddling, however, trading introductions to “the Big Guy” for wads of cash, especially if some of that cash wound up in the Biden family fisc—well that is something else entirely. The implications of this story have yet to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream media, who are playing the three wise monkeys for Halloween, at least so far as Democrats are concerned. But it won’t matter. Curiosity is a stronger passion than politically fired discretion. We’ll find out what’s on that hard drive, and we’ll find out soon. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16682/american-election-party-system

The American two-party system resembles cartel arrangements in business: it restricts access to power to two gigantic machines that, like big business driving out little business, prevent diversity and competition on a large scale. As a result, small radial groups are forced to infiltrate the two parties and push them in directions not necessarily wanted by the mass of their followers.

The two-party system offers unusual political stability.

The reverse side, however, is that it narrows policy options to two and the role of elections to deciding the exercise of power rather than its substance.

Does the current presidential campaign in the United States have an ideological content?

Having covered six of the last nine campaigns as a reporter and followed the other three from the sidelines my answer is “yes and no”.

Let’s start with the no side of my equivocal answer first.

The current campaign is focused on two themes that leave little room for the broader questions the US faces with dramatic demographic, cultural and societal changes at home and the crumbling structure of world order.

The first theme of the campaign has been the personality of Donald J Trump. No leader in American history has been the subject of such vilification as Trump.

Jimmy Carter was mocked as “the peanut farmer” and Ronald Reagan dismissed as “Hollywood cowboy”. Bill Clinton was laughed at as “the skirt-chasing bozo” while George W Bush generated an industry with his Bushisms. Barack Obama was dubbed “the ventriloquist’s dummy” who, as Hillary Clinton quipped, “makes a speech each time there is a crisis”. Before that, Richard Nixon had been branded “Tricky Dick” and Lyndon Johnson castigated as serial liar.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/bidens-foreign-policy-folly/

He has been wrong about everything 

Early on in his first term as vice president, Joe Biden asked for a private meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been appointed to the job by President George W. Bush in the shake-up after the 2006 midterm election, and President Obama kept him on for continuity. Biden had abstained from voting for Gates’s confirmation under Bush, making him one of only five senators who hadn’t voted to confirm him.

Besides shoring up Obama’s reputation as a man who could work with longtime moderates in the Democratic Party, Biden’s addition to the ticket was meant to give Obama some extra credibility on foreign policy; Biden had been the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee since 1997. But the White House is different. Gates was serving his eighth president. So Biden solicited his advice on how to play a constructive role as part of the administration’s foreign-policy team.

Gates told Biden that there were two models for a vice president. Under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush had his team attend all relevant national-security meetings and brief him afterward. Bush gave his opinions and advice only to Reagan himself, usually privately. By contrast, Dick Cheney attended most meetings and was a forceful advocate for his own views. Gates said that the Bush approach was more fitting to the dignity of the office and would also protect Biden. Cheney’s approach came with a price; it eventually became obvious to outsiders when Cheney was losing the argument in the administration, and it diminished him. Writing in his memoir of this time, Gates recalls that Biden “listened closely, thanked me, and then did precisely the opposite of what I recommended, following the Cheney model to a T.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/election-meddling-redux/

Our adversaries have figured out that the best way to promote American discord is to give the left-wing media what it craves and watch our divisive politics do the rest.

I t is not an attack on the American election. It is an influence operation aimed at the American media, using the $60 billion per annum American intelligence apparatus to pull it off.

And it’s working.

On Wednesday night, it was suddenly announced that U.S. security services would conduct a press conference to announce vital information. With millions of Americans already voting, with our official Election Day less than two weeks away, and with minds ever attuned to the specter of 2016 election shenanigans that the media-Democrat complex has never stopped litigating, there was an instant supposition that some new “attack on our democracy” was afoot.

Sure enough, out trotted the directors of national intelligence and the FBI, mien studiously grave, to proclaim . . . well . . . I’m not sure if we want to call it abject nonsense or agitation of exactly the kind hostile foreign intelligence services would take joy in hearing from U.S. spy chiefs — in which case, it really is 2016 all over again.

The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, somberly explained that those Iranian rascals, posing as (to quote the Wall Street Journal’s report) “the far-right group the Proud Boys,” have been poking at registered Democrats in election battleground states: “Intimidating” them with emails that contain — hope you’re sitting down for this — “false information”; warning them that the Proud Boys have captured “the entire voting infrastructure,” and that Democrats must “vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” And — try to contain your astonishment — the black hand of Moscow, and who knows what other sinister alien forces, are similarly up to no good.

“These are desperate acts by desperate adversaries,” Ratcliffe declaimed. FBI director Christopher Wray was even more stern: “We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections, or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/22/hunters_ex-business_partner_says_joe_biden_lied_about_business_deals_in_china_fbi_has_proof.html

Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, accused former VP Joe Biden of lying about his role in his son’s international dealings during a statement to the WH press corps just 90 minutes before Thursday’s presidential debate. Bobulinski, who will be a guest at the debate, said he has three phones that will prove his claims and he is giving them to the FBI.

BOBULINSKI: Good evening. My name is Tony Bobunlinski. I served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy with high security clearance. My father and grandfather, both served for decades in our country’s armed forces. Since leaving the Navy, I’ve been involved in various successful businesses, both in this country and abroad. I’m making the statement to set the record straight about the involvement of the Biden family, Vice President Biden, his brother Jim Biden, and his son Hunter Biden, in dealings with the Chinese.

I’ve heard Joe Biden say that he’s never discussed business with Hunter. That is false.

I have first hand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden. I have also heard the Vice President Biden said on Tuesday, that Senator Ron Johnson the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, should be ashamed for suggesting the Biden family sought to profit from their name. Well here are the facts, I know. And everything I’m saying is corroborated by emails, WhatsApp chats, agreements, documents, and other evidence and American people can judge for themselves.

I brought, I guess, for the record three phones, that spanned the years 2015 to 2018. These phones have never been held by anybody else besides myself. I was told this past Sunday by somebody who was also involved in this matter that if I went public this information would be it would bury all of us, man, the Bidens included.