RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-england-journal-of-politics-part-ii-11602283219?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) his week published an editorial denouncing “dangerously incompetent” leadership in Washington on the pandemic and all but endorsing Joe Biden for President. This will go down well in all the right precincts. But then please don’t complain if half of America suspects that science is increasingly politicized.

The editorial recites the government’s well-known failures in managing the coronavirus, such as the initial struggles to roll out testing and hand out enough protective equipment. We can’t disagree with that, but the editors go on to extol China’s virus management, conveniently ignoring its early cover-up and manipulation of the World Health Organization. Why are American elites so enamored of authoritarian command and control? The editors then hit the U.S. for late and inconsistent quarantines, without taking into account the public-health and economic costs of lockdowns.

You might say “the New England Journal is joining the ranks of academic publications risking their reputations as non-partisan arbiters of good science in order to rumble in the political tarpits.” That’s a line from our 2006 editorial “New England Journal of Politics” describing how the NEJM had waded into a legal dispute over Merck’s painkiller Vioxx. The NEJM also appeared in these pages in 2007 for working to tank a diabetes drug and help Democrats in Congress to regulate treatment approvals more tightly.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-pelosis-insanity-plea-11602283493?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

You might think the Democrats’ procedural extremism to oust President Trump would wind down as the election gets closer with polls showing a large Joe Biden lead. But that underestimates their fanatic animosity. Now they’re invoking the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to declare the President non compos mentis.

On Friday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced legislation that would pave the way for an unelected committee to work with the opposition party to strip a President of his powers under the 25th Amendment. Mrs. Pelosi said the legislation, written by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, “is not about President Trump.” She also said, 25 days before the election, that “it’s not about the election at all.”

Mrs. Pelosi wants to distance this 25th Amendment ploy from her party’s years-long effort to overturn the 2016 election results, but even the press corps was skeptical. Mrs. Pelosi said later in her presentation that “any of us who is under medication of that seriousness”—referring to President Trump’s coronavirus treatment—“is in an altered state.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/08/trump-is-now-one-with-countless-essential-workers/

President Trump has no reason to apologize for getting sick. He took risks to meet the obligations of his office and is now one with the millions who do the same thing, every day.

Joe Biden has redefined mask wearing. It is now the thinking man’s patriotism, what every “scientific” and “refined” mind naturally does.  

Biden, the media, and the progressive party all blame the now ill Trump for becoming infected. They accuse the president of becoming sick because he was selfish. You see, he was not always wearing a mask, or not always isolating in social-distancing fashion, or not always staying inside except for essential expeditionary trips.  

Upon reading these condemnations, one could be forgiven for thinking Trump was the mayor of Fresno, not the president of the most powerful and necessary nation in history. 

The subtext is that Trump is no Biden. Joe follows “science.” He “gets it.” He “listens” to “experts.” Like Trump his rival septuagenarian has health issues, but very much unlike Trump, Biden, until lately, seldom was seen or heard. For Biden, the way to run a presidency is the way he wishes to conduct the second debate—by Zoom. 

Who Is the Real “Patriot”? 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/09/beware-the-joe-biden-tax-and-spend-nightmare/

With Americans distracted by COVID-19, an unexpected Supreme Court nomination and ongoing leftist rioting in our city streets on a near-nightly basis, they might be forgiven for forgetting about what might happen to their taxes should Joe Biden be elected. It won’t be pleasant.

Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate was enlightening, if only because it showed how little Sen. Kamala Harris understands about how Washington works and how the economy works — and what would-be President Biden really intends to do.

Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”

Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.

But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.

The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.

A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/10/donald-trump-rewrites-the-narrative/

“Trump has shown the only way to pierce the official narrative is to live life to its fullest and confront, rather than cower from the virus. And it is Trump’s apparent defeat of the virus which may now have placed him beyond defeat in November.”

Perhaps when President Trump said that he “had to confront [the coronavirus] so the American people stopped being afraid of it so we could deal with it responsibly” he understood that his personal battle would create an entirely new narrative about the virus. Defeating it would be a powerful symbol that there is little to fear. Succumbing would dramatically prove the opposite.

Now that Trump, by his own reckoning, has got the better of the virus in just three days, and in doing so has done more to break the psychological stranglehold the virus has on citizens in the US and around the world than any social-distancing measure, vaccine, or mask-wearing ever could. He has embodied the journey that the US and the rest of the world must go through to relinquish their fear of the virus.

As Trump texted from the Walter Reed Medical Centre to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, “If I had handled it any other way, I would have created more panic, more fear in the American people.”

Yes, the virus can be lethal. But we have known for months that is the elderly and those of otherwise ill-health who are disproportionately affected, as is the case with most health maladies. In Australia, no one under 30 has died from the virus. Just six Australians are in an intensive care unit as a result of it. And the population-wide infection rate is one-in-a-thousand and the population-wide fatality rate is one-in-three million.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/08/7-quick-takeaways-on-the-2020-vice-presidential-debate/
The vice presidential debate between Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Vice President Mike Pence was more traditional and less raucous than last week’s debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. That debate was a three-way interruption fest marked by Biden losing track of his thoughts and Trump clumsily returning to slights that had occurred 25 minutes earlier.

This debate was less exciting, a reminder of what politics was like before Trump came onto the scene. Still, it had its moments that bolstered each campaign’s strongest arguments. For Pence, that meant a frequent recursion to first principles and first-term successes. For Harris, that meant a focus on coronavirus and negative descriptions of the Republican Party and its president.

Here are a few quick takeaways on how it went down.

1. Pence’s Superpower Is Debating

Mike Pence, a former congressman and talk radio host, started off strong and just kept getting stronger. He clearly came prepared for the debate. He had a ready recall of facts and figures to bolster his points. He nailed the questions he wanted to answer and deflected on the questions he preferred not to answer.

While he let several zingers fly, he stayed calm and steady, pushing back at what he perceived as unduly false statements but without the constant interruptions of the Trump-Biden debate. He spoke slowly and left few cards on the table unplayed. He was nice, firm, decent, and likable.

Pence’s weakest points were when he was on defense about the global pandemic gripping the country. However, he came into the debate prepared to lay out how a Trump-Pence vision for America is better than the one put forth by Biden and Harris and he accomplished that consistently throughout the debate.

He made a strong case for Trump’s foreign policy being effective and Biden’s being decades of failure. He had Kamala Harris on the ropes about whether she and Biden would raise taxes on Americans on their first day in office. He effectively showed the country her refusal to openly support court-packing, a position she previously supported.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-pence-harris-debate-and-a-divided-america-645095

The debate between US Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris on Wednesday night turned out to be a whole different ballgame from the Donald Trump-Joe Biden face-off that took place eight days earlier.

Unlike Trump, Pence is soft-spoken and unflappable. In contrast to Biden, Harris possesses the confidence of an attractive woman combined with the fangs of a pit-bull prosecutor and the complacency of a left-winger encouraged by the latest polls in her party’s favor.Another shift was the identity of the moderator. Fox News’s Chris Wallace had lost his cool during the September 29 presidential debate. Though his questions were intelligent, his intolerance with Trump was glaring.

USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page, who moderated the Pence-Harris match, was calm and collected. But her questions belied her political slant toward Harris.

None of the above, however, explains why millions of Americans and others around the world tuned in and stuck around to watch the 90-minute contest, broadcast on all major channels and live-streamed on websites of major news outlets. It is particularly odd, considering that many viewers voiced their boredom on social media, while others spent the duration joking about the fly that landed on Pence’s head.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-cant-have-it-both-ways-on-the-virus/

When your campaign media arm is also known as “the media,” not only may you enjoy being asked almost nothing but friendly questions, but you may also find that internally inconsistent assertions go unchallenged. Consider the Biden position on coronavirus: He would be tougher on the virus and also easier on the economy at the same time. How’s that?

Think of coronavirus response as a seesaw: If you stomp down on the economic end, and grind it into the ground, the other end — public safety — rises high. At least in theory. We can’t actually be certain how effective the lockdowns have been in containing the virus.

But here’s something we do know: You can’t have both ends of the seesaw high up in the air at the same time. Crush the economy, maybe there’s a big uptick in safety. Loosen up the economy and allow people to mingle in public spaces, and there is a corresponding rise in risk. What is the proper balance of health vs. jobs? No one can really say. If we welded shut the door of every American dwelling, we’d probably reduce the transmission of the virus. And as soon as the doors opened, the virus would start spreading again.

Abetted by the media that shows no interest whatsoever in calling out the logical inconsistencies of Democrats, Biden contends both that he would have been quicker on the draw to prevent the spread of the virus and that he would have magically saved everyone’s job at the same time.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/kamala-harris-lied-repeatedly-and-got-away-it-daniel-greenfield/

Senator Kamala Harris rambled through the debate lying about everything, from her call to ban fracking to Abraham Lincoln’s response to a Supreme Court vacancy.

And she won’t be called on it or fact checked about it because her lies are mostly the second hand products of the media that claims to fact check politicians.

If Kamala appeared to be a vacuous and hollow personality, it’s because she’s a delivery system for media narratives that are detached from her own record. Politicians lie a lot, but Kamala doesn’t simply lie, she mimics and echoes, when you listen to her, it’s like putting your ear to a seashell. Her career provides ample evidence that she doesn’t believe in anything. It’s why she can play a tough-on-crime prosecutor one minute and a race-baiter the next. It’s all parts with no substance behind them.

It’s not so much that Kamala is lying, it’s that she adapts, fitting in clumsily to any role, never being good at it, but going with the flow. If the flow appears to be for ending private health care, she’s for it. Then when she realizes it’s controversial, she’s against it.

She can falsely claim that the Biden-Harris, or Harris-Biden, administration wouldn’t raise taxes, even as it proposes to repeal tax cuts, and wouldn’t ban fracking, despite repeatedly promising to ban fracking, without missing a beat because she is a human green room who pushes narratives, without treating them as real. 

Having gotten some briefing materials from her staff, she glances through them, absorbs the substance, and comes to “court” with them, without really understanding them or caring if they’re true, or feeling bound by them. Words come out of her mouth, bypassing her brain which spends most of its time on the laborious process of trying to mimic human social behavior and appearing relatable to the denizens of this planet. Kamala lies all the time, but she has no idea she’s lying.