RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-kissingers-record-on-israel-renders-him-unfit-to-speak-at-jewish-conference/

The Jewish Leadership Conference has invited Henry Kissinger to be featured speaker at its November conference in New York.

That Kissinger was invited to speak at the “Jews And Conservatism 3rd Annual Conference” is especially alarming because we now know that while Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fighting against the notorious Zionism-Is-Racism resolution at the United Nations, Kissinger was battling against Moynihan.

The ongoing question of Kissinger’s record on Israel and Jewish affairs should have precluded his selection as speaker, but his behind-the-scenes fight against Moynihan, especially considering the recent and explosive growth of support for BDS, which utilizes the racism charge to legitimize its anti-Israel crusade, should leave no question that the Jewish Leadership Conference has seriously erred.

Kissinger’s war against Moynihan, is detailed in Prof. Gil Troy’s book, “Moynihan’s Moment, America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism.” A professor of history at McGill University, Troy is a political centrist, a widely-respected commentator on Jewish affairs and scholar. Troy keynoted the American Zionist Movement’s Biennial Assembly in March 2019.

Kissinger’s pressure on Israel not to strike first on the eve of the Yom Kippur War is well known. So are his 10-day stalling of U.S. arms shipments so that Israel would be — as he put it —  “a little bloodied,” his cut-off of U.S. weapons to Israel during the “reassessment” in 1975, and his relentless campaign to undermine Soviet Jewry and the Jackson Amendment.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/peter-smith/2019/10/trumperman-and-the-joker-legions/

BIFF! BOFF! BAM! WACK! THWACK! POW! KAPOW! KRUNCH! WHAM! ZAP! OOOFF! Devotees of Adam West’s Batman will recognise these vivid descriptions, among others, of blows landed on the villains by the crime-fighting duo. I am not sure that Mike Pence quite fits the mould of Burt Ward’s Robin but (HOLY EMULATION!) he comes close enough. Trump, however, is surely the archetypal Batman. Flawed but heroic.

Faster in print than the NYTimes, more powerful than a Clinton, able to build tall buildings before breakfast. They’d like to impeach him here and impeach him there, those Dems they try to impeach him everywhere.

Sorry, I have totally mixed comic book and literary heroes. But, let’s face it, take your pick, Trump is a superhero of one description or another. Making America Great Again, slapping down Dems as he bats away yet the latest fake exposé. Achievements already too long to count, here’s a (very) attenuated accounting.

# Taking the unemployment rate to a fifty-year low and combining that, at last, with rising wages

# Taking unemployment among blacks and Hispanics to record lows

# Performing the impossible miracle (according to Obama) of bringing back hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs

# Reducing those needing food stamps by some 7 million

# Replacing the job-killing NAFTA with the USMCA (if Pelosi would only bring it to the floor)

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-america-entering-a-dark-age/

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?

California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/has-the-time-come-to-put-down-lawlessness-insurrection-and-rebellion/

In 1347 a London resident by the name of Roger the Raker plunged through the rotting floorboards of his house into a makeshift latrine and drowned in his own accumulated excrement. As historian Martyn Whittock informs us, “One major problem in the Middle Ages was sewage disposal,” with many householders forced to dig cesspools in their cellars, or pipe their ordure “into the unused cellars of unwary neighbours,” to accommodate the overflowing waste, practices which sealed poor Roger’s fate. Medieval sewage provides a compelling metaphor for the dubious political sanitation issue of our own times, and especially for the ideological filth voided by the American Left on the social, cultural and political landscape of the nation.

Any decent and impartial observer can see that leftist and corporate America has come to resemble a cloacal bog of lies, corruption, slander, censorship, entitlements and violence, a veritable “swamp” as it has been aptly called. What commentator Diana Sitek writing in American Thinker calls “the entitlement to depravity embedded in the Left’s social justice dogma” is both massive and unrelenting. The media, the academy, the entertainment industry, Big Tech, the Democrat Party, and the “Deep State” are profoundly engaged in a networked alliance to overturn the results of a lawful election and subvert a legitimate and effective presidency. President Trump has vowed to “drain the swamp” but it is moot whether a single individual, regardless of the power of high office, with little in the way of institutional support — and despite his strength of character and resolve — can thwart what is nothing less than an ongoing political putsch.

The attempt to impeach the president on no reasonable or substantial grounds is merely another frantic yet tenacious effort by the coup-obsessed Left to unravel the fabric of a constitutional republic. This is plainly the purpose behind the Democrat’s infamous Green New Deal inspired by the U.N.’s Agendas 21 and 2030 which, under the guise of sustainable development, lay out a plan for the punitive regulation of reliable energy sources, the elimination of private property, redistribution of personal wealth, restriction of due process and, of course, the diminishment of American dynamism and prestige. It is a program that perfectly encapsulates the overarching agenda of the political Left, namely, a protracted war on the free enterprise system and the emasculation of the Constitution of the United States, to be accomplished under the stewardship of a plutocratic elite.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-8-is-it-possible-for-the-united

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the news cycle seems to have shifted away from IMPEACHMENT!!! and over to TRUMP IS ABANDONING OUR KURDISH ALLIES IN SYRIA TO A CERTAIN SLAUGHTER!!!!

On Sunday the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw most or all U.S. troops from the Northeastern part of Syria. There are currently about a thousand U.S. troops in the area, working with allied Kurdish forces.

Within hours, the official talking point — that Trump was abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered by Turkish forces, and thereby sending a dangerous message to all U.S. allies everywhere — had taken universal hold.

From the Washington Post: “Trump abandoning Kurdish partners in Syria sends a chilling message to every other American ally. . . . President Trump’s erratic foreign policy gives allies good reason to doubt America will follow through on its security commitment.”

From the New York Times: “The Kurdish forces in the area, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., have been the most reliable American allies in the region for years, a critical element in recapturing territory once controlled by the Islamic State.”

From Business Insider: “Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurds in Syria sends a dangerous message to US allies around the world.”

Even a collection of Republican Congresspeople got in on the act of accusing President Trump of abandoning one of our best allies.

https://www.newsweek.com/antisemitism-bds-natan-sharansky-3d-test-1461305

The global resurgence of anti-Semitism that we are experiencing today began almost 20 year ago, mainly in Europe. At the time, I was serving as Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and was grappling with the question of how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism.

That is when I came up with what I call “the 3D test for anti-Semitism”—the three Ds are demonization, delegitimization and double standards.

If we watch a 3D movie without 3D glasses, we see a blurred, partial picture. But when we put on our 3D glasses everything becomes clear—and when we use the 3D test for anti-Semitism we can easily distinguish between legitimate criticism and anti-Semitism.

These 3Ds—demonization, delegitimization and double standards—are the three main tools that anti-Semites employed against Jews throughout history. For thousands of years, Jews were demonized, they were charged with blood libels, with poisoning wells, and, later, with controlling the global banking system. The Jewish faith and the Jewish claim to nationhood was delegitimized. And double standards were applied to Jews, either through the imposition of special laws—from the Middle Ages in Europe, to the Russian Empire and Nazi Germany— or through de -facto government policy discriminating against Jews, as I experienced in the Soviet Union.

Throughout history, demonization of Jewish people, delegitimization of their faith or nationhood, and double standards applied to Jews created fertile soil for pogroms, expulsions and genocide.

In observance of Yom Kippur there will be no posting on October 9.  Ruthfully yours will return on Thursday October 10.  rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/07/patriot-trump-vs-the-leninist-impeachment-pushers/

Unlike Schiff’s fiction, Trump’s reality has defied the evisceration the Constitution has suffered over the decades and challenged progressives in ways not seen in the Republican Party for over a century.

Should President Obama have been impeached for giving cash and assets worth as much as $150 billion to Iran by executive order? Or for lying about Obamacare? No, because that kind of punishment even for these injustices would have trivialized the grave constitutional purpose of impeachment and conviction. Clearly, it would have fulfilled a legitimate partisan purpose, though one which is more appropriately resolved through elections.

If the current impeachment fever materializes into reality, virtually any executive action with which the opposition party disagrees can be made an impeachable offense.

The Trump impeachment inquiry seeks to besmirch President Trump, fundraise for Democrat House and Senate candidates, destabilize the markets, knock Joe Biden out of the race, and mock presiding Chief Justice Roberts at the Senate trial. These are nothing but crude partisan appeals and clearly not constitutional purposes. Demagoguery is too gentle a word. Whatever else these political aims are, they are not affirmations of constitutional government. Once the dust settles all of these motives may well have backfired, but the Democrats have powerful enablers.

amgreatness.com/2019/10/07/time-to-reassess-crowdstrikes-credibility/

Trump foes dismiss any scrutiny of CrowdStrike as part of a “conspiracy theory.” But the tangled web between CrowdStrike, Democratic operatives, the Trump-hating media and the Obama Justice Department isn’t a theory, it is fact.

Days before the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh last year, a former FBI assistant director appeared on MSNBC to suggest the Supreme Court nominee had a major credibility problem. “This is not…an investigation about the sexual allegations, I think it really has moved toward credibility,” Shawn Henry, an NBC News analyst, told Nicolle Wallace on October 1, 2018. “At this point now, there are very clear allegations, and subsequent to the judge’s testimony, people have come out who appear to be credible who…appear to be contradicting his testimony sworn before the United States Senate.”

Henry, clearly reciting Democratic talking points to imply Kavanaugh perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September showdown with Christine Blasey Ford, also referred to Ford as a “victim” and claimed that the FBI’s investigation into Kavanaugh’s testimony had “fallen short.”

Henry was presented to viewers as the channel’s “national security analyst,” but there was one title the network overlooked: Shawn Henry is a top executive for CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the infamous hack of its email system in early 2016. Perhaps not coincidentally, the firm determined that the Russians were behind the intrusion. CrowdStrike’s June 2016 assessment remains the sole source of evidence to supply the pretext of the government’s Russian election interference claim; later, it would help bolster the Trump-Russia collusion fable.

The president, according to a transcript released by the White House, mentioned CrowdStrike during a phone call with the new Ukranian president over the summer. Now, the California-based company is facing renewed scrutiny both about the handling of the DNC email hack and the firm’s political affiliations. Last month, in response to questions about the firm’s clear connections to Democrats, CrowdStrike rejected accusations of bias in an FAQ posted on its website:

“CrowdStrike is not affiliated with any political party. We are a public cybersecurity company, and are non-partisan. We have done cybersecurity work for, and currently protect, both Republican and Democratic political organizations at the state, local, and federal level.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/quid-pro-quo-and-extortion-welcome-to-foreign-relations/

A president’s management of foreign policy and his political interests naturally overlap.

The coverage of the Trump administration’s pressure on Ukraine is verging on the absurd, as to both what is alleged to have been a wrong and the degree to which we should judge it wrong. In particular, I am referring to the concepts of quid pro quo and of extorting a foreign government.

To listen to commentary, not only by anti-Trumpers but even some Trump defenders who don’t seem to understand what they’re talking about, one would think that a quid pro quo is always bad, and that it is a terrible thing to pressure a foreign government.

This is nonsense. Foreign relations typically involve quid pro quo arrangements. Governments do not ordinarily assist each other out of fondness. Nations pursue their interests in the world. Where interests align, they assist each other. Where interests are opposed, they are adverse to each other. In any event, they bargain with each other to advance their interests. It is a matter of “We want you to do this; what do we need to do – whether for you or to you – to make you do it?”

The term quid pro quo has a sinister connotation because we most often hear it in connection with political-corruption cases, often involving bribery. In truth, all exchanges involve a quid pro quo, but most are not corrupt. When they are corrupt, it is not because Country A is asking Country B for something, but because Country A is asking for something that it is wrong to ask for. If the request is not improper, there is nothing wrong with a quid pro quo.

There is, similarly, nothing wrong with squeezing a foreign government in furtherance of American interests. Indeed, that is exactly what we are trying to do with Iran right now. If important American interests are at stake, the president’s job is to pressure other countries. International relations and domestic law enforcement are very different. In the latter, extortion is a crime. In the former, applying inducements (including threats, and sometimes worse) is what countries do to each other. As long as what an American president is asking for advances an American interest and does not violate either American law or any international obligation we’ve taken on, there is nothing wrong with pressuring other countries.