RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/one-year-after-oct-7-american-voters-face-stark-foreign-policy-choice/

Within minutes of Hamas jihadists breaching the Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, and commencing the largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Western leftists and other defenders of the genocidal Palestinian-Arab cause rallied around a talking point: “This did not occur in a vacuum.” The claim, blithely offered by armchair revolutionaries without even acknowledging the many hundreds of butchered babies, sadistically tortured families, raped women, and young music festivalgoers taken hostage, was that Israel had somehow impelled the horrific rampage on its own civilians. Those with a functioning moral compass recognize this as obvious terror apologia.

Reflecting back one year later on the Hamas massacre and the current Middle East imbroglio in which Israel is now fighting a seven-front war, however, I wonder whether the terrorist apologists may have had a point. That is not to suggest that these moral monsters were in any way whatsoever correct to justify, defend, or praise a pogrom so barbaric that it would have made Heinrich Himmler blush. But the mini-jihadists were correct to suggest there was a broader geopolitical context to the massacre—just a totally different one than what they had in mind. The actual relevant context was the weak, failed, and Iran-emboldening foreign policy of former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

As Americans get ready to select our next commander-in-chief, the stark contrast between the failed foreign policy of successive Democratic administrations and the successful foreign policy of the interregnum Republican administration, that of former and perhaps future President Donald Trump, is instructive.

The basic Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy doctrine is simple: Reward America’s enemies and punish America’s friends. Obama famously sought to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, America’s most dependable and national interest-aligned Middle East ally. He removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office—a symbolic slap in the face to the United Kingdom, with which America has (had?) a “special relationship.” He emboldened the Islamist fanatics in Tehran, bamboozling a skeptical American public with his wretched nuclear accord and even secretly sending $400 million in wooden pallets of cash to the mullahs. The Biden-Harris administration has doubled down on every count: It has been the most anti-Israel administration since Israel’s founding in 1948, it has lavished the mullahs with billions in ransom payments and sanction waivers, and it has continued the Obama-Biden administration’s mollycoddling of America’s Chinese Communist Party civilizational arc.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/fake-crowds-fake-ads-real-ridicule-a-week-of-failures-for-harris-walz/

If I may start with an understatement:  It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris.  First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.  Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked.  But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.

That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network.  As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”

Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”  The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally.  But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.

And that was not the worst of it.  A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted.  As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doug-emhoff-dismisses-domestic-violence-allegations-as-distraction-doesnt-deny-report/

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff says claims that he “forcefully” slapped his then-girlfriend in 2012 are a “distraction” – but did not deny the allegations in a new interview that aired Friday.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough gave Emhoff an opportunity to respond to several “tabloid stories about your personal life.” Reporting from the Daily Mail has claimed Emhoff slapped his then-girlfriend during the Cannes Film Festival more than ten years ago, with sources telling the outlet he hit the unnamed woman so hard that she “spun around.” The story, which is based on claims from several of the unnamed women’s friends as she declined to speak with the outlet, suggested he may have hit her in a moment of jealousy after he believed she had been flirting with a valet.

Other reporting from the outlet indicated he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” during his time working at a Los Angeles law firm.

“We don’t have time to be pissed off,” Emhoff told Scarborough. “We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”

While Emhoff did not deny the allegations, a spokesperson for Emhoff previously told Semafor that the report was “untrue.” “Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false,” the spokesperson said.

Vice President Kamala Harris began dating Emhoff in 2013 and the pair wed in August 2014.

Emhoff in August publicly admitted to having an affair during his first marriage after the Daily Mail reported that he cheated on his first wife and got their nanny pregnant.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/09/let-the-economy-roll/

Maybe the primary complaint against Kamala Harris is that voters don’t know who she is nor where she stands on issues, given her flip-flopping-for-votes campaign. But we can be sure that her instincts are to bridle the economy rather than unleash it.

Not many weeks ago, we argued that Harris’ Marxist roots, from both her mother and father, inform her economic positions. It should be kept in mind whenever looking at her economic proposals.

Without giving her economic positions a label, Harris, who has spoken appreciatively of the impact her parents had on her, is definitively, though not necessarily nominally, a Marxist. She insists that public policy objectives have ‘to be about’ ensuring that everybody ends ‘up in the same place.’ She favors ‘equitable distribution’ and ‘giving resources based on equity.’

…

How is this different than the socialist creed ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ that Karl Marx popularized?

This is the opposite of letting the U.S. economy, the most powerful force on Earth when not bound by ideological chains, roll freely.

It is not a radical position to support a free market economy. The moral and material benefits of an open economy are enormous. No other system can match its dynamism and positive outcomes. (We must emphasize that the free market, or capitalism, as not a system but instead the natural human interaction.)

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/08/vance-shows-the-power-of-a-silver-tongue/

J.D. Vance was my number one draft pick for vice president, and his complete slaughter of Tim Walz at the debate last week only reassured me of my choice.

Vance is a breath of fresh air for many, including conservatives still harboring misgivings about Donald Trump. Vance is appealing because he has qualities that used to be more familiar in politics and lately have become rare, as most offices have become less competitive and the American people have become less engaged in the process.

Most important of these qualities, Vance is a “good talker,” and this used to be a prerequisite to being an effective politician. By this, I mean he was articulate, organized, calm, and friendly. He also was steeped in detailed policy knowledge, avoided rhetorical traps, calmly and politely objected to the biased moderators’ fake fact-checking, and generally did circles around Walz.

Walz was tongue-tied, looked nervous, and rarely made his points in an articulate way. Even though Kamala Harris and Walz have had longer careers in public life, Vance is everything they are not.

There has not really been a skilled debater on the presidential stage since Bill Clinton. We have instead been burdened by a parade of tin-eared, rhetorical failures. Neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore were compelling speakers, nor were John McCain or John Kerry. Stilted, stammering, and just generally unsmooth and unmemorable describes them all.

Obama had a deserved reputation as a good speaker, and he was certainly more skilled than most of his peers, but all of his words were completely vaporous and forgettable. What the hell was the “audacity of hope?” Also, while Obama was a decent orator when he had a teleprompter and a good speechwriter, he was not particularly memorable on the debate stage or when speaking extemporaneously.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/08/kamala-the-tax-cutter-ii-tipp-poll-finds-trump-losing-the-messaging-battle-with-harris/

Of all the results from the latest I&I/TIPP poll, the most unsettling has to be that voters think Kamala Harris is at least as much of a fiscal and economic conservative as Donald Trump.

Our latest poll, taken of 997 likely voters, finds that more voters say they trust Harris (who’s already announced $4 trillion in tax hikes) than Trump to cut taxes by a 48%-45% margin. Among the crucial independent voters, the margin is even greater – 49% to 36%.

That’s not all.

More trust Harris to bring about energy independence, 48%-47%.

Trump is essentially tied with Harris on growing the economy (49%-48%), but he’s far behind with independents on this critical issue, with half saying they trust Harris to grow the economy and just 42% trusting Trump.

Harris is tied with Trump on cutting spending and fixing inflation. But among independents, she leads on the former, 44%-33%, and the latter by a 47%-39% margin.

Two other areas where Trump leads – lowering the national debt (46%-44%) and reducing crime (48%-46%) – are well within the poll’s margin of error.

The only two issues on which Trump holds a clear advantage over Harris are national security (50%-45%) and securing the border (54%-41%).

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/07/trump-vs-harris-still-knotted-up-but-voters-prefer-trump-policies-on-key-election-issues-ii-tipp-poll/

ith less than a month to go before the election, who has the edge in the presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump? Disappointing as it might be to both sides, the race remains too close to call. But Trump has a solid lead when it comes to voter trust in dealing with the nation’s most serious issues, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

First, the big question we’ve asked each month since beginning our presidential poll: “If the presidential election were held today, and the following were the candidates, for whom would you vote?”

In the national online poll of 997 likely voters taken from Oct. 2-4, former President Trump garnered 46% support while Vice President Harris received 49% in a head-to-head matchup. Another 1% of those responding said “other” and 4% said “not sure.” The poll’s margin of error of +/-3.2 percentage points means the race remains a statistical tossup.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-10-5-bias-of-debate-moderators-in-their-own-words

Usually, I don’t waste much time watching the presidential or vice-presidential debates; but on Tuesday I watched most of the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. I applaud Vance on a skilled performance. But I particularly want to comment today on the overt hostility that Vance faced from the moderators, which is unfortunately typical of the hostility of the corporate media toward all Republican candidates.

If you watched some or all of the debate, you probably came away with a general impression of the moderators attempting to help Walz; but without a transcript it is difficult to remember specifics. Fortunately, CBS has produced a transcript of the debate. So I thought it might be informative to go through the transcript and compile some of the more absurd efforts of the moderators to give a boost to Walz. The moderators in this instance were Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS. What becomes noticeable when you do this is the extent to which the moderators insert into their questions contested, or even clearly false, Democratic Party talking points as if they were uncontested facts.

The second topic of questioning in the debate, introduced by moderator O’Donnell, was stated to be “Hurricane Helene,” which she used as a proxy for supposed climate change. Here is the text of the introductory question:

Let’s turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/why-the-slow-collapse-of-harris-walz-wont-stop-before-election-day/ar-AA1rK1tZ

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as anticipated, easily won the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, October 1, on demeanor, facts, and analysis. But in fairness to a sometimes herky-jerky and nervous Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he had the harder task of defending the temporary pseudo-conservative make-over of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. 

His additional burdens were her co-culpability for the last three-and-a-half-years of the Biden disaster, and her unwillingness to implement her supposedly “change” agenda in the last months of her vice-presidential tenure. 

The CBS News moderators, Nora O’Donnell, and, especially, Margaret Brennan, also as expected, ganged up on Vance. They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing from the last disastrous, and biased debate moderators.  

The two moderators shamelessly broke their own rules by fact-checking (wrongly and solely) Vance. They ignored questions of the administration’s tardy responses to Hurricane Helene, the Ukraine war, the recent Trump assassination attempts, or crime, while only briefly touching on Iran and a Middle East on the brink of total war. Instead, they concentrated, as also expected, on climate change, abortion, healthcare and childcare.  

All were issues they thought might more easily embarrass Vance. And, of course, as also expected, the two ended the debate pressing Vance on January 6. And yet Vance again parried easily and won decisively. In doing so, he dispelled the smear that he was somehow “mean,” when, in fact, he proved calm and magnanimous as he methodically dissected Walz.

The nation perhaps learned that a confident Trump selected him to articulate his MAGA positions, and perhaps in a manner superior to Trump’s own.