RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/08/same-people-behind-iraq-war-lies-pu

For more than two years they misled us.

Exploiting fear and confusion after a shocking event, they warned that our country was in imminent danger at the hands of a mad man. They insisted that legitimate intelligence, including a CIA report issued a month before a national election and a dossier produced by reliable sources in the United Kingdom, proved the threat was real. The subject monopolized discussions on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in the press.

They argued that the situation was so dire that it was straining our relationship with strategic allies. Any evidence to the contrary was readily dismissed. And anyone who questioned their agenda was ridiculed as a coward, a dupe, or a conspiracy theorist. The news media dedicated endless air time and column inches to anyone who wanted to repeat the falsehood.

But an investigative report released two years after the propaganda campaign began found no evidence to support their central claim. The CIA report was highly flawed. The official dossier, some concluded, was deceptive and “sexed-up.”

No, I’m not referring here to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, although the similarities are nearly identical. I’m talking about the period between 2002 and 2004 when many of the very same people who recently peddled collusion fiction also insisted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—including material to produce nuclear bombs. On the heels of the horrors of 9/11, the United States and our allies waged war against Iraq in 2003 based primarily on that assurance.

But in 2004, a special advisor to the CIA concluded Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no stockpiles of biological or chemical agents; no plans to develop a nuclear bomb. The main argument for the war had been wholly discredited. But it was too late: The conflict officially raged on for another seven years, including a “surge” of 20,000 more U.S. troops in 2007 at the behest of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). We still have a troop presence in Iraq to this day.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-radical-suggestion_2869905.html

I wouldn’t call it an out-of-body experience exactly, but I did get a thrill in reading the autobiography of former CIA Director Richard Helms, “A Look Over My Shoulder.” It served as strong validation of the line of research I followed to write my new book, “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”

Helms’ book explained that it’s this same line of research—which Helms followed in 2003—that helped identify Soviet agents.

Helms, who led the CIA between 1966 and 1973, was recounting a post-retirement luncheon he had with a World War II buddy from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. It was the day before Helms was to meet with the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, and his old friend told him: “Remind them that no intelligence agency can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component. And recommend that they chisel the words into the granite entrance out there.”

Helms continued: “He had a point. A quick glance in the rearview mirror shows that the most notorious traitors and successful spies in this century would have been barred from sensitive government work, or exposed early in their careers, had basic counterintelligence measures been taken.”

As Helms explained them, these basic counterintelligence measures include conducting precisely the kind of research I have put together under the rubric of “red threads” to build ideological profiles of leading persons in the anti-Trump conspiracy: Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, John Brennan, James Comey, and others.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-5-if-there-is-white-privilege-what-does-it-consist-of

You can’t have helped noticing that assertions of “white privilege” are all the rage on the left these days. Or maybe it’s “white male privilege.” For example, back in January, there was CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson throwing down the “white privilege” gauntlet on Beto O’Rourke: “Beto’s excellent adventure drips with white male privilege.” Beto, of course, promptly acknowledged that Henderson was right, stating in Iowa on March 16, “As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on, or take for granted, I’ve clearly had advantages over the course of my life.”

When I first heard the term “white privilege” gaining currency, my initial reaction was to doubt that it could amount to much of significance. In my own experience, ever since I was old enough to notice, every institution that I came in contact with, to the extent I could tell, was making every effort it possibly could to attract and advance minorities candidates, particularly African Americans. In many cases, these efforts would clearly have the effect, explicit or implicit, of disadvantaging whatever white candidates were competing for a limited number of slots. For example:

Way back in 1968, when I was applying to college, elite colleges already explicitly practiced affirmative action. Although the details were closely guarded then as now, my own college (Yale) constantly boasted about its efforts to find and admit qualified minority candidates.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/07/all-the-progressive-plotters/

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative.

When that did not work, more than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks. Then San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer toured the country and lavished millions on advertisements demanding Trump’s removal by impeachment—and was sorely disappointed when he discovered that billion-dollar-fueled virtue-signaling proved utterly bankrupt virtue-signaling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cultural-revolution-comes-to-north-america-11554661623

My friend Caylan Ford has spent her career advocating for international human rights and supporting victims of religious persecution. When I began speaking out against abuses in my native China, she helped me stand up to the Communist regime’s bullying. So I was excited when she decided to run for office in the Canadian province of Alberta.

But last month she had to withdraw after she became the target of a character-assassination campaign. Her adversaries and several reporters used quotes from private online conversations to portray her falsely as a racist.

She was quoted as describing a double standard whereby officials and media figures assert that the perpetrators of Islamist terrorism “do not represent Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, etc.,” and look for explanations of how they went astray. When the terrorists are white supremacists, on the other hand, “attempts to understand the sources of their radicalization or their perverse moral reasoning is beyond the pale,” and anyone who wants “strong borders and immigration control” is “painted with the same brush” as the racists. Although she called white supremacy “odious” as well as perverse, a headline on the public broadcaster CBC’s website matter-of-factly described these as “white supremacist comments.”

https://freebeacon.com/blog/thinly-disguised-anti-semitism/

Again, do not worry: he is talking about Zionists, not Jews, so no anti-Semitism to see here.

A good rule of thumb is that, if you can take a statement and replace the words “Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Zionist” with “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewish people,” and that statement then sounds like it came straight out of the Dark Ages or Nazi Germany, it is probably anti-Semitic. The same goes for replacing “Zionism” with “Judaism.”

Look at what happened to Alain Finkielkraut, the French Jewish intellectual, last month in central Paris. Finkielkraut was walking in the street when a group of protesters in the Yellow Vest movement cornered him. “Dirty Zionist, you’re going to die!” they yelled at the philosopher, along with “Go back to Tel Aviv!,” “Get lost, dirty Zionist shit!,” and “France is ours!” Now, it is possible that the protesters just hate and want to expel from France those who believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and not Jews themselves. After all, they did call Finkielkraut a Zionist. But, just to entertain me, try applying our rule, and come to your own conclusion.

All of the aforementioned incidents are, of course, anti-Semitic. Those who say otherwise have a very dark sense of humor, are hopelessly ignorant, or are probably the ones making such anti-Semitic comments in the first place. And that third group is no longer comprised only of fringe elements on the political left and right—the radical tenured professor and the former KKK leader, both of whom almost always share the same views on the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Just look at Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, who in 2013 accused British “Zionists” of having two problems. “One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either,” Corbyn said at a conference promoted by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian terror group. “They needed two lessons, which we could perhaps help them with.”

And then there is Rep. Ilhan Omar, who in 2012 tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Omar has also accused American politicians of supporting Israel because of the influence of Jewish money, and has insinuated that American Jews are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country,” meaning Israel.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, such as David Duke, use the words Zionist and Jew interchangeably. So do Omar, Corbyn, the Students for Justice in Palestine, and other like-minded progressives who despise Israel and do not believe in its right to exist as a Jewish state. In each case, one can see the bizarre, illogical obsession with, and the visceral, ingrained hatred of, Israel and Zionism. One can also see the conspiracy theories concerning the Jewish state. Israel secretly controls the media, the banks, and American foreign policy, according to these voices. It is a devilish state, somehow committing genocide against a Palestinian population that has actually grown since Israel’s founding. Israel is the Jew among nations, singularly worthy of scorn for its very existence.

But, remember, we are supposed to buy that none of this is anti-Semitism, because, supposedly, none of this is about Jews, just Israel and Zionists. Indeed, Western progressives will say their hostility toward Israel is actually about legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, despite all of its overlaps with traditional anti-Semitism. Do they not realize that judging Israel by a standard different from that applied to all other countries and accusing the Jewish state of cosmic evil are the two key features of anti-Semitism, at least now that hatred and persecution of Jews are based primarily on their nation-state, not their race or religion? And do they not realize that supporting efforts that seek Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state, like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, is inherently anti-Semitic? Apparently not.

The worst part of this thinly disguised anti-Semitism is that Western society has accepted, even normalized, it. One can get tenure at an elite university, or enter Congress or Parliament, or even become a prominent pundit, by using blatantly anti-Semitic language. Just replace Jewish with Zionist and the Jewish people with Israel, and you are probably set. In some circles, you are an intellectual giant, an inspiration. And people wonder why most Jews think Israel is so important.

Students Supporting Israel at Columbia put the shameful depiction into context. “This kind of repugnant caricature of Jews is a sore reminder of blatant anti-Semitism from the dark ages of medieval Europe when anti-Semitic propaganda depicted Jews as satanic consorts and an incarnation of absolute evil,” the group wrote on Facebook. “Physically, Jews were portrayed as menacing, hirsute, with boils, warts, and other deformities, sometimes with horns, cloven hoofs, and tails. It is extremely painful to see that the same rhetoric is being used on the campus of an Ivy League university in the United States.”

https://quillette.com/2019/03/30/socialisms-endless-refrain-

Germany’s socialist left is currently embroiled in a row over the correct stance on Venezuela. The conflict came to the fore at the February conference of Die Linke, the country’s main socialist party, when a group of Nicolás Maduro fans stormed the stage, chanting slogans and waving banners with pro-Venezuela messages.

Nicolás Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chávez, and has served as Venezuelan President since 2013. The legitimacy of his presidency has been in free fall in recent years, and many now call him a dictator. As Maduro’s popularity has waned, his tactics have become increasingly brutal. In 2018, a panel of legal experts convened by the Organization of American States recommended that the regime be referred to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Many members of the Die Linke party establishment, however, still side with Maduro, whom they see as a comrade under siege. Others, especially in the party’s youth organisation, take the opposite view—which is why the February conference was contentious. One young member describes the party’s in-house Chavistas as “die-hard reactionaries, who have an antiquated understanding of socialism.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22541/the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-greasehttp://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” is an American proverb that means that whoever screams the loudest gets the attention.The Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) is a very squeaky wheel. 

CAIR is the propaganda arm of the Muslim Brotherhood whose unapologetic stated objective in North America is settlement – NOT assimilation. The tactical strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in America is documented with precision in their 1991 Explanatory Memorandum which was recovered in an FBI search of the Virginia home of Ismail Elbarrasse. The Memorandum was found among 80 banker-boxes worth of documents discovered hidden in Elbarrasse’s sub-basement.

The document confirms that most Muslim-American groups in the United States are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Explanatory Memorandum was entered into evidence in the 2008 U.S. v Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that convicted HLF leaders of providing material support to Hamas Terrorist Organization. In other words the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic “charity” was the fundraising arm of the Palestine Committee in the US. The Palestine Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas in its efforts to create an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-top-5-investigations-obstructed-by-the-obama-administration/

With Democrats and the media licking their wounds over the Mueller Report not finding Russian collusion, they’ve been refocusing their energy on claims of obstruction of justice, even accusing Trump Attorney General William Barr of “protecting” Trump. Which is both amusing and hypocritical considering how they tolerated obstruction of justice by the Obama administration and sometimes assisted in that obstruction.

If Robert Mueller couldn’t conclude that Trump obstructed his investigation, then it’s quite clear there wasn’t any. Having written extensively about Obama-era corruption, I felt it was necessary to remind everyone that not only was the Obama administration plagued by multiple scandals but that obstructing investigations was standard operating procedure. For Democrats, Trump calling the Mueller an investigation a witch hunt is an impeachable offense, but Obama refusing to cooperate with investigations was much ado about nothing.

Despite many abuses of power during the Obama years, not once did Attorney General Eric Holder or Attorney General Loretta Lynch ever appoint a special counsel to investigate them. Instead, they’d occasionally launch their own investigations, which always exonerated them, or, when the Republican-controlled House launched their own investigations, the Obama administration refused to cooperate and obstructed their investigations. In August 2014, 47 of 73 inspectors general wrote an open letter to Congress informing them that the Obama administration of obstructing investigations by not giving them full access to the information they need to investigate properly. Such a letter was unprecedented, and the systemic corruption and obstruction the inspectors general would have been considered an impeachable defense for almost any other president. Emboldened by the lack of outrage (thanks to lack of media attention to the scandal) emboldened the Obama administration to impose new restrictions on the investigative powers of inspectors general. Imagine President Trump trying to get away with that today?

Obstruction of justice was integral to the entire operation of the Obama administration. Whenever a scandal erupted, the kneejerk reaction by Obama and his cronies was to cover-up and obstruct. Below are the top five examples of investigations obstructed by the Obama administration.CONTINUE AT SITE

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/04/revolution-comes-creepy-uncle-joe/

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency,” Maximilien Robespierre wrote in his post-French Revolution impassioned defense of state tyranny against the ruling class. “To forgive them is cruelty.” Robespierre, was, of course, the architect of the great terror, where thousands of innocents were sacrificed in the zeal of purifying fire, as every revolution undergoes.

While observing that revolutionary social restructuring, Edmund Burke compared the virtues of a fixed rule of law in relatively peaceful England: “To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”

In what became the most recurring twist of irony thereinafter, Robespierre was himself guillotined. Talking of revolutions devouring their own children brings us to Joe Biden, who is the frontrunner in the Democratic primary without having announced that he is running. He is also perhaps the first candidate whose candidacy is already toast, even before he starts the sprint.

He seems to be aware of the great danger to his possible campaign, as he’s released a response to the mounting allegations of sexual impropriety and weirdness against him: