RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/22/an-outrage-meter

There was a daytime television show I remember from my youth called “Queen for a Day.” It had three essential features. Hard luck stories from a handful of women. Loot in the form of kitchen appliances, nights on the town, fashionable clothes, etc. And the central gimmick: the applause meter, through which the studio audience would register its enthusiasm for its favored candidate. The contestant who attracted the loudest response won the title and collected the pelf.

Someone should tweak the applause meter for the internet age, recalibrating it to record the chief entertainment of our day: the serial ginned-up outrage against things that President Trump says.

There is certainly a lot of that going around. And while it is about as sincere as the cataract of sentimentality that greeted the Diane-Arbus-like hard-luck stories on Queen for a Day, it is undeniably intense. A few enterprising souls have made video compilations of the skirling media announcing that now, at last, Donald Trump had reached a “turning point” and would shortly be escorted out of the White House, preferably in shackles, in the wake of the latest “bombshell” revelation.

Those compilations are good fun and remind us of just how ridiculous and unhinged are the president’s more doctrinaire critics. What I want, however, is a real-time Presidential Geiger Counter so that the public can predict just how foolish Rachel Maddow or Jim Acosta, or Anderson Cooper—and let’s not forget Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin—are going to be following some statement made or initiative undertaken by the Trump Administration.

This past week featured at least two promising candidates for the Outrage Meter: first, the back-and-forth between the president and Chief Justice John Roberts about the ruling of Jon S. Tigar, an Obama-appointed judge on the infamously left-leaning Ninth Circuit, that blocked the president’s executive order halting asylum claims at our Southern border, and second, the president’s statement on our relations with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of the Muslim Brotherhood propagandist and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I will be spending the holiday weekend with my children and grandchildren and friends so there will be no postings until Saturday November 26th.

I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. rsk

Two hundred years ago, the Congress of the United States issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation stating that it was “the indispensable duty of all nations” to offer both praise and supplication to God. Above all other nations of the world, America has been especially blessed and should give special thanks. We have bountiful harvests, abundant freedoms, and a strong, compassionate people.

I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/scott-kellys-winston-churchill-comment/

Advocating magnanimity in politics, Scott Kelly holds up Churchill as a model and provokes a firestorm of indignation.

There are many reasons I pity today’s younger generation of Americans.

Among them are:

• The unconscionable debt we are leaving them.

• The obliteration of male and female as separate and distinct categories — and the sexual confusion that is left in its wake.

• The emasculation of men and the de-feminization of women.

• The undermining of the value of marriage.

• The lack of God and religion in their lives — and the consequent search for meaning in the wrong places.

• The receiving of indoctrination, rather than education, in most schools from elementary through graduate.

• The inability to celebrate being American.

Tragically and ironically, each one of these was brought on by the very group many young people identify with: the Left.

You can add to the list the Left’s tearing down of heroes.

With all the brouhaha about undocumented and illegal immigrants, I wondered what it takes to obtain legal entry now.

The best source I could find was from the official website of the Department of Homeland Security’s Global Entry pages:

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry/international-arrangements/registered-traveller/citizens-united-kingdom

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Anyway, the consequence of all this is that kids were left pretty much to decide for themselves what games they would play – indeed even to invent their own games.”

Antonin Scalia (1936-2016)

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, 2017

My wife and I spent a few days, recently, at the home of four grandchildren, while their parents went to New York for a well-deserved weekend. While they were at a casino charity gala at the Yale Club, sitting in the bleachers at a Dartmouth-Columbia football game and attending Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, with the German tenor Jonas Kaufman, at the Met, we were in our cars. In the roughly forty hours we were at their house, I made fifteen four-mile trips into town. (My wife made a few of her own.) Two of the trips were for my own purposes – buying newspapers – but the rest involved the grandchildren: visits to friends, sporting events, shopping, restaurants, etc. Heading out on the 15th trip to somewhere, I thought of the gap between their growing up and mine. Mine were the post-Depression and post-War years. My parents, being artists, worked from home. Both of them had traveled abroad when young, but once settled in Peterborough, NH – apart from the War, visiting parents in East River, CT and Wellesley, MA, attending horseshows and going skiing – they rarely left home. The decades since my childhood have seen vast changes.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s there were, at least in our house, no electronic gadgets, apart from a radio on which we listened to WBZ broadcasts of Red Sox games and shows like “The Lone Ranger,” Fibber McGee and Molly” and “The Shadow.” There were no electric appliances – no stove, refrigerator, washer-dryer or dishwasher; no blender, TV or toaster. A wood stove served the house until after I was married – and an electric refrigerator only arrived in 1953. Before that, we made weekly trips to the ice-man. (In my earliest memories ice was delivered, but that service was suspended not long after the War.) Ice was stored in a wooden, tin-lined ice chest and had to be replaced every four or five days. Dishes were washed by hand, and my mother, at least initially, used a laundromat. After my father died in 1968, she got a television and an electric stove. In terms of news, and apart from the radio, my parents subscribed to The New York Herald Tribune. Life, allowed us to imagine ourselves in foreign and exotic places. We read The Saturday Evening Post for its serialized stories and glanced through The New Yorker and Punch for their cartoons. We read a lot, as there were hundreds of books in the house.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/19/there-is-no-surge

This has been a particularly violent year for Republicans across the country. Candidates were assaulted and Republican campaign offices were vandalized. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his wife were chased out of a restaurant; Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and his family were harassed by Democratic activists and reporters up until Election Day. Trump Administration officials were publicly intimidated and humiliated, and a leading Democratic congresswoman called for more aggression against Trump aides.

Republican senators were verbally accosted in elevators and on the streets of Capitol Hill during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process; a female Republican senator received death threats and a suspicious package at her home after she voted to confirm his appointment. Of course, this is all on top of the mass murder attempt against several Republican congressmen that nearly killed a top House lawmaker in the summer of 2017.

One would assume that any post-election analysis by a self-styled “conservative” about the menacing atmosphere on the Left would harshly condemn the incoming Democratic House majority for condoning such destructive behavior, and warn Democrats to clean up their act for the sake of the country. That sort of tongue-lashing by a leading outlet on the Right is not just appropriate, but essential.

But David French at National Review has other post-election targets in mind—namely, the imaginary cabal of white supremacists taking over the Republican Party.

Outlandish Claims, Distorted Evidence
French’s November 15 column, “The White-Supremacy Surge,” is more cowbell to amplify the media’s nonstop drumbeat that Donald Trump and his supporters are bigots, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazis. (A despicable Washington Post column over the weekend suggested that massacres and death squads might be in the offing because of Trump.)

Sadly, French’s incendiary analysis wasn’t far from that Post screed. It is a literary junk drawer of anecdotal evidence and conjecture scattered with overworn insults about Trump supporters.

In an attempt to boost his inaccurate claim that white supremacy is surging, French cited a sketchy study while overlooking exculpatory data in the very same report, and he mentioned random racial crimes that are vile but no indicator of a coordinated white supremacist movement. “Trump’s words have emboldened white supremacists,” French outlandishly declared, again without evidence.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/18/the-progressive-synoptic

In the post-election aftermath, Republicans are wondering about how they can capture that missing 2-5 percent of the electorate that lost them the House of Representatives.

Could they pry away 40 percent of the institutionalized Democratic Latino vote on delivery of a full-employment economy of rising wages? Can they win over 20 percent of the African-American electorate on the basis of more jobs and less competition from illegal immigrants?

Can Trump tone down his ad hominem invective and tweeting to reassure an additional 10 percent of independent and middle-class suburban women that his national security agenda, free-market prosperity, traditionalism, law-and-order, and national sovereignty policies ensure greater tranquility, safety, and opportunity—even if they are not packaged in the manner of his more mellifluous and vacuous “presidential” predecessor?

No Escaping the Culture Wars
Republicans, in deer-in-the-headlights-style, appear shocked that they are increasingly prone to winning the vote on Election Day only to lose it in the ensuing weeks when absentee ballots and what-not filter in with astounding Democratic majorities. Someone is spending a lot of money to get the absentee voting ballot out, correctly marked, and returned. And whatever that “lot” is, it is killing Republican candidates.

Yet there is a larger obstacle to achieving that long-term 51 percent Trump solution along with the shorter-term strategy of matching Democratic absentee ballots with Republican absentee ballots. Conservatives have lost entirely the culture and establishment wars. The result is that they are besieged by a circle of hostile progressive, but quite establishment institutions that are relentless.

Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.

There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21799/blaming-the-victim-in-the-digital-age

Consider the following scenario:

A murder investigation is underway to determine the identity of the shooter. The detective questioning the suspect accuses him of shooting the woman he robbed. The suspect indignantly retorts, “BUT SHE WOULDN’T GIVE ME HER PURSE!!”

WHAT? The robber is blaming the victim because she refused to give him what he wanted! The victimizer is rationalizing his behavior and misrepresents himself as the victim.

The facts of this case are not in dispute – the suspect admits he shot the woman he was robbing. It is the interpretation of those facts that are being disputed – WHO is to blame – victim or victimizer?

In a sane society the shooter is blamed for the murder and is held criminally responsible. In today’s upside down world of Leftist Democrat identity politics, society accepts the shooter’s interpretation and the victim is being blamed for not surrendering to the demands of the victimizer. The perpetrator has been allowed to frame the argument.

The escalating anti-semitism in Europe and America illustrates the same operating principle of blaming the victim where the perpetrators are being allowed to frame the argument. This is how it works.

Tabitha Korol’s recent article, “Paradise Long-lost,” documents the blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations in Randa Siniora’s October 25, 2018 anti-semitic address to the UN Security Council. So, let’s investigate Ms. Siniora’s odious “blame the victim” presentation.

Ms. Siniora begins her address with a lofty self-aggrandizing introduction to frame the argument:

“Mr. President, Excellencies, Civil Society colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning. Today, I speak in my capacity as the General Director of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC). I also speak on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. I speak to you as a peace leader and as a human rights defender who has witnessed, documented, and spoken out about violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory for three decades.”

The body of Siniora’s 1500 word speech typifies the deliberate worldwide effort to demonize Israel. The incessant repetition of lies, distortions, and blaming Jews for Arab violence defines the current echo chamber that is propagandizing adults on the Internet and indoctrinating children in schools worldwide.

It is Hitler’s old tried and true political strategy – if you tell a lie big enough and long enough it will be believed as the truth.

Propaganda is a far more powerful tool than bullets in Western societies. Ever since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia the greedy West has allowed itself to be propagandized by the anti-semitic Jew hatred of the Arab world. Politicians were bribed, university chairs were bought, Internet behemoths began curating/censoring content, and pro-Arab policies became normative resulting in sharia compliant anti-semites serving in public office.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/first-step-act-trump-embraces-left-wing-racism-rhetoric/African Americans were not disproportionately prosecuted for crack.

President Trump has announced his support for a proposal to ease federal sentencing laws that proponents call the “FIRST STEP Act” — and that Senator Tom Cotton has tartly labeled the “jailbreak” bill. There may not be much time for debate, since the bill’s ideologically eclectic array of champions hope to ram it through the lame-duck session of Congress. For now, though, I want to focus on an absurd assertion the president made Wednesday afternoon, in remarks touting the proposal.

Trump stated that, among other things, FIRST STEP

rolls back some of the provisions of the Clinton crime law that disproportionately harmed the African-American community. And you all saw that and you all know that; everybody in this room knows that. It was very disproportionate and very unfair.

It was not disproportionate or unfair. The argument that it was, commonly made by race-obsessed Democrats, is rooted in the noxious “disparate impact” theory of racial discrimination and a misrepresentation of history.

At issue is the wide disparity between criminal penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine — known, respectively, in the ’80s and ’90s as “cocaine base” and “cocaine hydrochloride.” This policy did not begin with President Clinton. In 1986, President Reagan signed legislation prescribing prison sentences that were much more severe for crack, at a ratio of 100:1 (e.g., a five-year mandatory minimum prison term applied to offenses involving 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack).

Clinton-era crime legislation built on this foundation, enhancing the phenomenon critics call “mass incarceration” (and the rest of us call “felons who prey on society being held in prison”). President Clinton signed into law the “three strikes and you’re out” provision, requiring mandatory life sentences for career criminals who commit a “serious violent felony” after having previously been convicted of at least one other such crime, in addition to another crime (which could include drug felonies). Clinton, moreover, encouraged states to adopt federal “truth in sentencing” provisions that require the sentence served in prison to approximate the sentence imposed in court.

(By the way, you’ll be hearing more about “truth in sentencing” — its demise, that is — in connection with FIRST STEP. Proponents insist the bill is tough on crime, and to give that illusion, the proposal would return us to the fraudulent practice of having Congress enact hefty sentences that judges ostensibly impose in court — only to have prison authorities quietly slash them by half and more. FIRST STEP would pull this off through the application of “time credits” that prisoners earn by participation in “evidence-based recidivism reduction programming.”)

It is fair to contend that some Clinton (and Reagan) sentencing policies were unduly harsh — though doing so is Monday-morning quarterbacking applied to a crime environment very different from today’s. It is the job of legislators to adapt the law to changing circumstances. And we do have changed circumstances: Crime rates have been low for a long time, and policing methods have improved significantly. Certainly, we should hear out thoughtful FIRST STEP advocates, who maintain that we can keep crime low (and even further reduce it) while returning convicts to society more quickly. I don’t see it, but maybe “evidence-based recidivism reduction programming” really can prove itself over time.