RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-sorry-tale-of-two-photographs/

As visitors to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem wind their way through the main exhibition, they are confronted by a series of unsettling photographs from the first decade of Nazi power: Jews forced onto their hands and knees to clean the sidewalks; a young Jewish woman fleeing from a crowd in a blind panic, her dress ripped open; Jewish schoolchildren compelled to wear a yellow Star of David as a badge of shame.

What these images convey is a powerful sense of how anti-Semitism can progress from being a mere ideology to everyday reality. Many visitors to Holocaust exhibitions are stunned that these atrocities occurred in places that look, to our eyes, modern and familiar, with the signs for shops and cafes signaling a sense of normality in the face of the systemic cruelty visible in the treatment of the Jews in those same photographs. It forces us to ask—in part because we can see the beginnings of our own consumer society in those images—whether we would be capable of doing the same in our own time.

For many years after 1945, there was real hope that the depraved, violent anti-Semitism of the Nazis had been consigned to history. And as trying as the current situation is for Jews in those countries where anti-Semitism is now rising—from Argentina to Germany and all other points of the compass—the reasoning behind that hope remains sound. Post-war generations of Jews have not lived with fear and terror guiding their every decision, great or small.

And yet, sometimes we find disturbing cracks in that overall sense of post-war safety, particularly when we encounter instances of anti-Semitism that resemble those past horrors. The unease that is caused does not come from the fear that a Fourth Reich or an Islamist Caliphate or some other nightmarish totalitarian state will suddenly spring up. It comes from the more fundamental realization that human beings are still capable of extraordinary cruelty when animated by bigotry and hatred.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/04/impeachment-comments-democrats-would-rather-you-forget/

More than 20 years ago, when President Bill Clinton was being impeached for lying to a grand jury – then as now a documented fact that no one can credibly dispute – some Democrats who today want to impeach and have the Senate remove President Donald Trump from office ASAP, were whistling a very different tune.

Back then they strongly argued:

There was no bipartisan consensus.
An impeachment would be traumatic for the country and distract Congress from solving major domestic and foreign policy problems.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden (then a U.S. senator):

“It would have been wrong for Richard Nixon to have been removed from office based upon a purely partisan vote. No president should be removed from office merely because one party enjoys a commanding lead in either house of the Congress …

“It is our constitutional duty to give the president the benefit of the doubt on the facts …

“Brett Kavanaugh, who was associate independent counsel in Ken Starr’s office for three years, put this argument most succinctly in a recent article he published in the Georgetown Law Journal: ‘The President is not simply another individual. He is unique. He is the embodiment of the federal government and the head of a political party. If he is to be removed, the entire government likely would suffer, [and] the military or economic consequences to the nation could be severe’ …

“To remove a president is to decapitate another branch and to undermine the independence necessary for it to fulfill its constitutional role … To remove a duly-elected president clashes with democratic principles in a way that simply has no constitutional parallel …

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23319/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-eternal-childhood

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The humanitarian hoax of eternal childhood is a deliberate political strategy to destroy America from within by regressing its chronological adults to emotional children unable to think and behave as rational adults. It is a sinister psychological operation (PSYOPS) designed to invert the growth process and deny Americans the emotional maturity required to support ordered liberty and a free society.

The United States of America is the greatest experiment in individual freedom the world has ever known. Our Founding Fathers drafted a Constitution that rejected monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, and any form of statism that deprived individual citizens of their individual rights. The United States of America celebrates individualism in a socio-economic structure that demands the adult attitudes of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and willingness to compete in a system of free market capitalism.

Freedom is an adult enterprise. Individual rights that support freedom require the individual responsibility of rational adult maturity. A society of emotional children cannot sustain itself. This is the key to understanding the insidious scheme to destroy America from within. Does this surprise you? It surprised me.

The 50th and concluding article in the Humanitarian Hoax series brings me back to its beginnings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-senate-should-change-its-rules-on-impeachment/

The Constitution gives the Senate flexibility on whether and how to hold an impeachment trial.

Now that the House has launched an impeachment probe of President Donald Trump, the Senate should reform its antiquated rules for the looming trial. Under current procedures, a trial produces the worst of both worlds. If the House has a flimsy case, the Senate must still put the country through the wrenching, divisive political spectacle without any opportunity to dismiss the case. But if the House has a strong case, senators must sit silently by without any chance to participate directly in the trial. Allowing a real trial will improve the decision-making over whether to fire Trump and will make the Congress more responsive and accountable to the American people.

With House Democrats suggesting a swift march to impeachment by the end of the year, senators can attend to the defects revealed by President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trial. Those rules give senators a passive role: They cannot reject the House’s decision to send an impeachment over, they must sit and listen to House prosecutors and White House defense lawyers without making a peep, they never see witnesses or documents, and they never make arguments over the facts or the law of conviction, particularly the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced this week that the Senate will automatically hold the trial if the House impeaches. Some conservative commentators argue that Senate Republicans should instead slow-walk the process. Perhaps they could repeat their success in holding open the seat of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by refusing to schedule a vote. If Republicans could delay indefinitely, or at least until after the 2020 elections, Trump might never face removal from office at all.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/forget-the-impeachment-circus-republicans-need-to-worry-about-the-economy/

Below is an open letter to Larry Kudlow I posted here on July 19, 2018. I warned that Trump’s trade war would backfire. Today we heard that the National Association of Purchasing Managers’ industrial production index had fallen to the lowest level since June of 2009. We are in a manufacturing recession, according to the Federal Reserve. Factory output is contracting. Trump won in 2016 by carrying key manufacturing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconson. This blunder could lose him the election. This is MUCH more dangerous than the impeachment masquerade. Americans really don’t care about Ukraine but they do care about their jobs. The president is trying to deflect blame onto the Federal Reserve, but he’s not fooling anybody.

Otherwise, we’re getting our heads handed to us by the Chinese. After a year of twisting the arms of our allies to boycott Huawei’s rollout of 5G broadband, the Chinese national champion will ship 600,000 5G base stations this year, and the latest batch has zero U.S. components. All of our attempts to jawbone their customers and cut off their access to U.S. technology have failed.

I hate being right about this sort of thing, because I want to see Trump re-elected, and I’m horrified at what a Democratic victory in 2020 would do to this country. Nonetheless, I’m going to tell you I told you so. Tariffs don’t work. We need a JFK- or Reagan-style mobilization of our technological and human resources to force the advancement of U.S. technology and maintain our preeminent position before the Chinese pull past us. That’s what won the Cold War. It’s what we’re good at. And it’s the only policy that will work.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/do-republicans-see-the-strategy-to-discredit-the-barr-investigation/

Democrats and their media friends are attempting to paint the Barr investigation, in the public mind, as a corrupt extension of a down-and-dirty Trump 2020 political campaign.

In the weekend column, I observed the media-Democrat complex’s politicized reporting of the July 25 conversation between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart:

Trump detractors hyper-focus on the president’s request that President Zelensky provide Attorney General Barr with any information Ukraine might have about Biden twisting arms to quash an investigation involving his son’s cashing in on dad’s influence. I say “hyper-focus” because there was a lot more to it than that. Long before the conversation came around to the Biden topic, the “favor” that Trump asked for was Zelensky’s assistance in Barr’s ongoing investigation of the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation. 

Virtually all mainstream-media reporting and Democratic commentary on the conversation now fits this pattern. It is noted that Trump, immediately after the “quid pro quo” set-up — “I would like you to do us a favor though” — invoked the attorney general, the nation’s top federal law-enforcement official. Studiously omitted is the context of this invocation: a wholly appropriate request by the president, to the head of state of a country in possession of relevant evidence, for cooperation with a legitimate investigation being conducted by our country’s Justice Department.

Instead, the coverage skips a few hundred words. It cuts directly to Trump’s suggestion that Zelensky look into whether there was any impropriety in former vice president Biden’s having purportedly “stopped the prosecution” that might have arisen out of a Ukrainian investigation involving his son.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/…/jews_fight_back_.html

The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and even Manhattan began almost a year ago. We have cell phone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing Alah Akbar and from younger Black and Hispanic men often yelling dirty Jew. They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks, stones, breaking bones, smashing eyes and do so, at times, as groups. There was no mainstream media discussion about any of this until a few weeks ago and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.

You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish or if the victims were Black, Muslim or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism, accusing America of systemic racism, and pontificating about something rotten within American society. Thus far, their response has been tepid and without any passion or urgency.

My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most American citizens have no clue about what is happening in places called Boro Park, Williamsburg or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the bucket list of many office holders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain, something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocassio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders.

In the case of the President Trump and impeachment, a verdict has been rendered without a trial. A visceral hatred for Mr. Trump, an outsider who campaigned on cleaning the swamp that was (and is) Washington, D.C., is all that Democrats need as prima facie evidence.

Outside this maelstrom of malice, the West faces stark alternatives. But instead of debating issues that will affect us, our children and grandchildren, specifically capitalism and sovereignty, politicians have chosen to throw up red herrings, like climate change, white supremacy, equality, gender identity, immigration, etc. Progressives have tried to undo the will of the people, i.e. to deny Brexit to the people of the UK and to declare fraudulent an election in the U.S. Debate is impossible when personal, venal hatred replaces deliberative and respectful disagreement. An intentional consequence has been unprecedented scrutiny of Mr. Trump and his appointees. With individuals vilified and high legal expenses incurred, lives have been destroyed for some and bankrupted for others. Is it any wonder so many have left the Administration?

This is not meant to trivialize these other issues. The constant effect of an ever-changing climate is something we must monitor and do what we can to alter and/or adapt, but we shouldn’t let emotions substitute for reason, or use children to score political points. No real conservative denies the existence of white oppression and privilege, but we question its ubiquity. Where it exists, it must be confronted and addressed. Equality is tricky and subject to interpretation – are we referring to equality of opportunities or equality of outcomes? Conservatives believe in the former, while progressives desire the latter. Conservatives are mindful that the favored should bear some responsibility for those less fortunate, but they believe that concern should be manifested in the actions of individuals, not diktats of the state, for morality and compassion are characteristics of people, not bureaucracies. Al genders deserve respect. As for immigration, politicians believe this crisis unresolved is better than were it resolved.

Posting will resume tomorrow.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/28/the-little-engine-that-couldnt/

The Democrats think the very fact that a president is impeached is enough to tarnish his reputation and diminish his chances of success in the election. Don’t bet on it.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. Has it happened to the Democrats yet? I think so, yes. I think so.

“Whistleblower” is already being enrolled in the lexicon of political disasters, and not just on account of pictures of the priapic Bill Clinton with Monica Lewinsky and featuring a rude joke about “whistleblowers” (“You know how to whistle don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow”).

No, “whistleblower” has entered the joke book of American politics because of the wild discrepancy between aspiration and reality that it represents.

Just last week, an all-points bulletin was blaring from the Get Trump media and the assorted fantasists in the Democratic Party. “Now we’ve got him, lads. Impeachment is just around the corner.” The New York Times said so. So did CNN and MSNBC. So did Nancy Pelosi, soon-to-be-former speaker of the House. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was so certain of it that he thought he could get away with pretending to read the transcript of Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president while actually just making stuff up.

Really. There he was, piece of paper in hand, addressing the House Intelligence Committee (and millions of viewers at home), exuding his signature “the-President-is-not-above-the-law-deer-in-the-headlights-automaton” countenance. The whole thing, Schiff said, was a “mafia-like shakedown.”

“I want you,” he pretended to read, “to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it, on this and on that. I’m going to put you in touch with people, not just any people, I’m going to put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States, my attorney general Bill Barr. He’s got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him.”