RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/victor-davis-hanson-trump-paradox

John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is the unloved Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion, the community he has saved symbolically closing the door on him.

If he is lucky, President Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate. By his very excesses, Trump has already lost in conventional terms of being admired or considered presidential, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.

No one can still quite calibrate whether Trump’s combativeness and take-no-prisoners management style always hurts him as president, or is a necessary continuum of his persona that ensured his unlikely election and early political effectiveness as president. And no one quite knows either whether Trump’s inexplicable outbursts are sometimes planned by design to unnerve his critics and the media, or are instead spontaneous expressions of indiscipline and crudity. Conventional wisdom squares these circles by concluding that Trump’s ferocity shores up his base, but his base is not large enough to give him a reliable 51 percent popularity rating among voters. Most also have concluded that Trump’s unorthodox style, speech, and comportment likewise are designed to advance his agendas, but are usually overtaken by his fury. But how often the last three years has conventional wisdom been right?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/pigs-on-two-

Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community.

In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.

Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.

Now even the divine Obama is having his ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/02/a-bulwark

In keeping with the annual custom, a progressive journalist attended this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., with the sole purpose of mocking the event.

The self-admitted liberal posted an ongoing Twitter screed that made fun of several CPAC speakers, including a beloved, elderly man recovering from a brutal bout with cancer. She questioned why so many pro-life, pro-gun and anti-socialists were among the 10,000 attendees, but concluded it must be because Trump supporters are “poorly educated.”

A college dropout herself, the reporter nonetheless tried to shame Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also for being a college dropout. Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), among others, were on the receiving end of her unfunny, unimaginative insults. “We’re listening to a bearded Ted Cruz fellating Donald J Trump,” she tweeted Friday morning.

She seemed confused at discussions about conservatives being stifled by Big Tech companies and wondered why there was so much hostility toward the news media. She laughed off criticism of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the Green New Deal, and Planned Parenthood. “I’m happy to have the night off and not have someone screaming at me about socialism,” she tweeted on Friday.

When she was confronted on social media about her hostility to pro-lifers, she proudly brandished her pro-abortion credentials, which included a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that defended late-term abortion after she considered having one herself. “How dare I say an anti-choice panel was anti-choice. Owned.”

No, the reporter—Molly Jong-Fast—doesn’t work for the New York Times or MSNBC. She is a freelancer for The Bulwark, a new site that claims it will save conservatism from the clutches of Trumpism. “As much of the Right descends into sophism and trollery, we will be a forum for rational, principled, fact-based conservative commentary,” wrote The Bulwark’s editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes when the site launched in January.

swtotd.blogspot.com

Despite the harmonious influence of Valentine’s Day, hate filled the days of February, as they have for the two years of Mr. Trump’s Presidency. “Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate will eventually destroy the hater,” wrote George Washington Carver, a thought we should all consider. President Trump is the focus of hate among smug elites whose sense of superior self-righteousness governs their behavior. Mr. Trump embodies all that coastal elites love to hate: He is white and male. He is not politically correct. He is coarse. His accent does not conform to an ivy league education. His words come out jumbled, even when using a teleprompter. In speech, he is in sharp contrast to the mellifluous tones of his predecessor. His orange hair, blue suits and red “power” ties compare poorly to the easy casualness of Mr. Obama. Not trained in politics nor encumbered with graciousness, Mr. Trump says what’s on his mind. He does not hide behind a veil of diplomacy or hew to pre-programmed messaging. All this is in contrast to politicians who say what is expected and who live in a world where style supersedes substance.

It was a month that offered clear distinctions for what voters might expect in November 2020. Mr. Trump is portrayed as being of the far-right, whereas his policies have been centrist: the economy is doing well, no wars have broken out overseas and his poll numbers have risen, though modestly. On the other side, Democrats have moved sharply to the left, with even former centrists like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, following, pied-piper like, the siren call of socialism expressed by Representative Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez, with her Green New Deal, and by Bernie Sanders, with his call for free public college and Medicare for all. And both, for their demagoguery of everything Trump. One is reminded of C.S. Lewis, whose posthumously published book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology included the lines: “Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Think of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao.

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It is C.S. Lewis’ quote that leads me to believe that the most significant news in the month was not the silly Green New Deal; it was not the passing of the budget and the avoidance of another government shut-down, nor the subsequent exercise of emergency powers to fund a barricade along the U.S.-Mexico border; it was not progress on the China-U.S. trade deal, nor the sit-down in Hanoi between President Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. It was not the withdrawal by the U.S. from the Nuclear Missile Treaty that Russia had already violated; nor was it the childish, ill-tempered behavior of the EU’s leadership towards Britain’s democratically-determined decision to leave the EU. It was not rising tensions in Kashmir. No. The most important news item of the month was the revelation that a small cabal of unelected senior law enforcement officials in Washington plotted to take the law into their own hands, to plan the removal of a duly elected President of the United States – a traitorous and unprecedented action.

Their “gotcha” moment has come and gone.  It was a low moment. They tried everything…even using the race card and the vainglorious boast of Representative Elijah Cummings Democrat of  Delaware (District 7) who said:
“”200 Years From Now People Will Be Reading About This Moment”

As Daniel Greenfield observes (https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273005/rep-cummings-200-years-now-people-will-be-reading-daniel-greenfield)”According to Rep. Cummings, a courageous joke still searching for a punchline with a lantern and a scowl, this day when Democrats brought a convicted liar to lie on Capitol Hill is so memorable that it will be remembered 200 years from now.”….”What President Trump is trying to do in Vietnam may still matter two centuries hence. Cummings’ desperate posturing won’t.”

The Baltimore Sun, however printed this idiocy: (http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/z-on-tv-blog/bs-fe-zontv-cummings-cohen-closing-20190227-story.html)

Maryland Congressman Cummings redeems Cohen hearing with passionate, poetic closing remarks….” It was one of the most inspirational TV moments I have seen in more than 30 years of writing about media and politics. What a moment for Cummings and the nation.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/26/progressive

Have you heard this one? A federal judge has ruled that the all-male military draft is unconstitutional.

How did you feel about this bit of news when you first learned of it? Did you think the ruling was ridiculous? An outrage? Did you feel hopeless about what is happening to our country? All of the above?

Not long ago, another federal judge ruled that the Constitution requires that male prisoners who identify as female must be provided with sex-change surgery and hormone-replacement therapy at the taxpayer’s expense, and be transferred to a prison for women.

There is so much to comment on here. For one thing, these rulings make it perfectly clear that we no longer live in a free, self-governing country. Instead of governing ourselves by means of our votes, increasingly we are subject to the dictates of judges who rule over us by managing to find the darnedest things in the Constitution. Like magicians pulling rabbits out of hats, judges can be counted on to astonish and amaze us with the wizardry by which they perform their conjuring tricks.

Read and re-read the Constitution—please!—but you won’t find anything in it to support these rulings. What you will find, however, are the rules that make clear how the federal government is supposed to work—how we are to do elections, how the powers of government are divided among the three branches of government, and so on. You can be sure the Framers did not put these rabbits in the Constitution and that they would be as amazed by these acts of judicial sorcery as you are.

Of course, the problem with these rulings is not limited to judges making free with the Constitution. That alone is outrageous enough, but it’s not enough for them. Isn’t it clear by now that in addition to the initial outrages they are now delighting in rubbing our noses in them? The more outrageous the ruling, the better it is from the progressive point of view.

From my favorite Australian Journal- Quadrant

“Hollywood will convene on Monday morning (Australian time) to hand out Oscars, congratulate itself for being so very wonderful and, inevitably, let the world know the extent to which cocaine-snorting, self-absorbed leftoid libertines disapprove of President Donald Trump. Last year, the top award went to a movie, The Shape of Water, that told the story of a young woman who conjugated the horizontal with a bipedal fish, so it’s anyone’s guess what might tickle Tinseltown’s fancy this year.”

My sentiments exactly. So I skipped the event and went to Birdland to hear the Emilio Solla Tango Jazz Band- with piano, bass, reeds, brass,percussion and even an accordion. The joint was jumping. rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/24/yes

There have been so far about three general reactions to the concocted Jussie Smollett psychodrama.One, and the most common, has been apprehension that Smollett’s lies will discredit future real incidents of hate crimes against gays and minorities. This could be a legitimate concern, given the tensions within a multiracial society.Yet, in fact, there is no evidence in the past that false reports (some lists of such fake hate crimes put the number at around 400) have had such an effect—either on spiking real hate crimes, suppressing reporting, discouraging police investigations, or preventing even more race-crime hoaxes.

As Heather Mac Donald has recently once again noted, the 2017 upswing in reported hate crimes from the prior year may well be largely because an additional 1,000 police agencies were for the first time reporting such crimes. Mac Donald also notes that a “hate crime”—a micro percentage of reported violent crime—is narrowly defined not to include general interracial violent victimization, a category in which African-Americans on average commit 85 percent of such crimes.From Tawana Brawley to the Covington kids, fictive accounts of race-based bias and violence have not stopped purported victims from believing that they, too, could invent such incidents and win credibility—to say nothing of profitable attention. After all, the publicity of the Duke Lacrosse or Covington hoaxes did not suggest to Jussie Smollett that he would not be found credible. In fact, the opposite may be true. The more we hear of fake hate crimes, the more we will likely hear of future fake hate crimes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272923/bad-ideas-make-bad-progressive-policies-bruce-thornton

Behind the stark melodrama of our political conflicts lies the progressive consensus: The collective use of power to pursue various policy aims depends on technical knowledge and science. But this view itself depends on certain contestable modern ideas about human nature and behavior that are matters not of science, but of ideas found in philosophical speculation. Policy–the aims collectively we should pursue and how–reflects ideas, not technical knowledge. And all ideas, good or bad, assume some vision of what humans are and what they should do as members of a political community.

Barack Obama, for example, entered office vowing to “restore science to its rightful place,” implying that his predecessor just “made stuff up,” a phrase he used recently in South Africa in a subtle dig at Donald Trump. Our partisan disputes over policy reflect this unearned assumption of certainty on the part of the left, and explains their passionate hatred of those who oppose them. To progressives, such people are irredeemable flat-earthers resisting the progress of knowledge in order to serve evil ends like defending their racist and sexist “privilege.”Yet on the level of ideas that reflect notions of human nature, the self-styled “brights” on the left are often the slaves of some defunct intellectual or outdated received wisdom, not the sober, rational followers of scientific facts. And those bad ideas lead to bad policies.

Take the perennial progressive “crisis” of income inequality. Much of what progressives mean by “social justice” comprises eliminating gaps between wealthier Americans and everybody else. Any disparities represent the injustices of capitalism and the tax system designed to benefit the rich.

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/jussie-smollett-hate-hoaxes-mainstream-media/

People give in to the temptation to manufacture reasons to be pitied, and the buyers can’t resist the pitch because it comes with the opportunity to hate included.

Here’s something you might not know: In Nazi Germany, very few Jews staged bogus hate crimes against themselves.Here’s some more trivia: Very few blacks in the Jim Crow South went to great lengths to pretend that they were harassed or attacked by racists.You know why? Because that would be incredibly stupid. What, exactly, would the German Jew who staged an assault on himself gain from it? Where would he or she go to ask for sympathy or recompense? Conjure any horror story you like, the Nazi official you brought it to would say, “Yeah, and . . . ?” The black sharecropper who took the time to make his own cross and burn it on his own property would benefit . . . how?