RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-never-conservatives-1538608630

Donald Trump didn’t help Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation with his crude mockery of Christine Blasey Ford on Tuesday night in Tennessee, but then this Supreme Court moshpit isn’t about this President. The left’s all-out assault on the judge is clarifying because it shows that the “resistance” is really about anything and everything conservative in America. Mr. Trump is its foil to regain power.

Brett Kavanaugh isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s New York menagerie, or some Steve Bannon insurgent. The judge is the epitome of the GOP legal establishment, a Supreme Court nominee from central casting. He went to the best schools and served his apprenticeship among legal elites including a clerkship with former Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer. He served at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House staff in positions of great trust. On the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, he has written more than 300 opinions and had at least 10 adopted by the Supreme Court. He has taught at Harvard Law School at the invitation of then dean, and now Justice, Elena Kagan.

With these credentials Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. He could have been Jeb Bush’s nominee, or John Kasich’s, though Mr. Kasich in the ambitious ebb of his career now tilts with the anti-conservative left against Mr. Kavanaugh. In 2012 the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh would have been Mitt Romney’s “most likely first nominee” for the High Court. Mr. Toobin, who loathes conservatives, meant it as a warning.

***

Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.

https://www.city-journal.org/cognitive-and-psychological-testing-of-politicians-16209.html

Congress continues to rank dead-last in the most recent Gallup poll of public confidence in institutions. It’s no surprise: when representatives and senators aren’t squabbling, posturing, and at one another’s throats, such as during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, they’re saying and doing things that strain credulity. It’s no coincidence that insulting the intelligence of members of Congress is such a staple of American folk wisdom. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” quipped Mark Twain. “When Congress makes a joke it’s a law, and when they make a law, it’s a joke,” said Will Rogers.

Too often, though, the joke is on us. A friend of mine was seated at a banquet table with the family of a then-congressman from Kansas. Family members expressed relief at the congressman’s career in politics because none of them thought that he was smart enough to enter the family business—processing scrap metal. “When I was debating what became the 2008 Farm Bill,” said Colorado congressman John Salazar, “I had a member of the Agriculture Committee actually ask me if chocolate milk really comes from brown cows. I asked if he was joking and he assured me he wasn’t.” That’s in the same category as the concern of Representative Hank Johnson that stationing 8,000 U.S. military personnel on Guam would cause the island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas once proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution was 400 years old. And as a member of the House Science Committee, Lee, during a visit to the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center, asked a NASA scientist whether the Pathfinder probe had photographed the flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong left behind in 1969. Armstrong had, of course, left the flag on the moon. In 2010, Lee proclaimed on the House floor that “victory had been achieved” by the United States in the Vietnam War and that “today, we have two Vietnams: side-by-side, north and south, exchanging and working.” Lee was a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when she made that statement.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/tolerance_not_really_a_thing_in_islam.html

One of the most salient passages in the Quran is 2:106, which shows us the basis for the doctrine of abrogation: “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except when we bring forth one better than earlier verse or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?”

Abrogation has an impact on the arguments about the true nature of Islam. At endless interfaith dialogues, the early tolerant verses are quoted to show the nature of Islam as peaceful. When both verses are quoted and then abrogation is applied, we see that the later verse trumps the earlier tolerant one. Jihad abrogates tolerance. In general, the Medina Quran abrogates the Meccan Quran. There are several verses of tolerance that are abrogated by jihad against Christians.

But the earlier verse is still acceptable and in use. Abrogation does not negate the early verse. Indeed, the earlier “peaceful” verse that is abrogated is the one most apt to be used in public discourse.

This creates a logical problem, since if two things contradict each other, at least one of them must be false. This is a fundamental element of Western unitary logic. In Quranic logic, two statements can contradict each other, and both are true. This is dualistic logic.

To put it simply, Allah changes revelations as he pleases, and the latter revelations supersede the earlier ones. There are deviations among Muslim theologians as to which verses have been abrogated and replaced, but the overall idea has been clear. When Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should behave peacefully according to the Meccan passages (which reflect the early time, when Muhammad was vulnerable and building his power base), and when strong, they are obligated to wage war according to the later Medina passages.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/gender-quotas-merit-faux-equality/

To reflect the world as it is, let’s put the ratio of women who pursue careers with the uninterrupted vigour that mostly characterises men at, say, four to one. To insist, therefore, on equal representation at each level of management amounts to a demand that women be not equal but privileged.

Since the outbreak of #metoo hashtagging in the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, Peta Credlin (among others) has been promoting targets for Liberal women in Parliament. Simultaneously, she decries quotas as endorsed by, for example, the Labor Party. Women, she says, don’t want a handicapping system for men; women want to win entirely on their own merits. More than that, women don’t want to walk into the party room aware that there were better candidates whose shoes they are not quite filling. Women who are like Ms Credlin only want to get into Parliament by their own honest and honourable efforts.

What’s the difference between a quota and a target? A target has a handbrake. That’s it. The rationale of each is identical. It starts with the unchallengeable premise: the country must have equal numbers of women in the Federal Parliament (and just about everywhere else, to boot.) A target is designed to achieve the same result, but more slowly, and with a little bit of wiggle room.

If the aim is the same, what’s the logic of claiming that targets are better? Your guess is as good as this one of mine. A quota forces the pace, and the women who are injected into Parliament suffer all of the detriments to self-esteem that Ms Credlin has sketched (although they seem to manage it bravely.) A target, on the other hand, can be accompanied by a development program, which will bolster the skills, the confidence, and the network of the participating women. By the time the target dates roll around, they won’t be needed, because the women will be competing on an equal footing with the men.

I don’t know whether the thinking about targets actually ascends to the level of some such theory – any such theory – but looming behind this theory is an out-of-focus vision of the restored state of nature, with the elimination of all the handicaps that have been clamped onto women like so many electronic ankle bracelets to confine them to house arrest. In that wonderful day to come, women will realise their full potential and compete, unimpeded and uninhibited, with men. And if restored womanhood finds that its natural level is to have greater representation than men, well, let the lines fall in such pleasant places. It’s Rousseau in a pantsuit.

Even hardened leftists occasionally stumble on a truth: Jonathan Saul Freedland is a leftist British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest column bashes Kavanaugh and “the insidious force in global politics: toxic masculinity.”

On this he is right:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what ‘s racism; women can define sexism (and harassment); Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something anti-Semitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic-and to treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

Jonathan Freeland (The Guardian- April 29th, 2016)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/30

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939.

The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American legal establishment. And there was no hesitation in doing just that on the part of Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press. And I write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the presidency—a reminder that culture so often is far more powerful than politics.

So, here we were to be left with a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:

The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, once said, if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes truth. The anti-Trump crowd has mastered Goebbels’ advice. We have been told repeatedly, in increasingly shrill voices, that Mr. Trump is incompetent, self-obsessed, destructive, toxic, impulsive, petty, adversarial, ineffective. One U.S. Senator, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a woman who lied about her heritage, has urged Congress to remove him by invoking the 25thAmendment. Another, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a man who lied about his experience in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, called him “an unindicted co-conspirator,” questioning the legitimacy of his presidency. Two reporters from the Financial Times, in an article on Brazil, compared Mr. Trump to Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, claiming him to be anti-gay, anti-women and anti-Black. So, the question is:given his successes:the 2017 tax bill, reducing regulation, lowering unemployment, returning the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, rendering ISIS less dangerous, bringing North Korea to the table, and getting European nations to up their payments for NATO. What would his achievements have been if he had been thoughtful, constructive and competent?

Increasingly, Democrats rely on hate. Hate needs a menace, as Shelby Steele noted in a recent Wall Street Journalop-ed. What started out by Democrats sixty years ago as a fight against injustice – especially racism and segregation – has morphed into fictional enemies, ones necessary for the Left to obtain and retain power. Like Machiavelli, means, no matter how insidious or dishonest, are justified because of the “noble” end sought. Mr. Steele suggests (optimistically?)that “the source of its angst and hatefulness is its own encroaching obsolescence.” I hope so. The use of personal smears to gain political advantage has become endemic to the Left, making imperative the need for at least one prominent Democrat to stand up, using words like those uttered by Joseph Welch in 1954, in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) attacking Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?Have you left no sense of decency?” Democrats are not alone in the willful destruction of people’s character, but they have taken the practice to new levels. Character assassination comes directly from the playbook of Joseph Goebbels.

Partisanship grows deeper. Every time Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) opens his mouth, the gulf widens. In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington warned against what he called the “…baneful effects of the spirit of party…” rooted in “the strongest passions of the human mind.” But, could he have envisioned the priggish hyperbole of those like Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-NY), as they interviewed Judge Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the Supreme Court, or the sullying of his character by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) who withheld until the last minute a letter from a woman alleging Judge Kavanaugh assaulted her as a teenager? Could President Washington have predicted the publication of a letter published in The New York Timesby “Anonymous,” disparaging the White House as an out-of-control fraternity house and the President as an impetuous, tempestuous idiot? Could the man who spoke the words, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports” have predicted a society where religion is disparaged, morality considered relative and students instructed to find their “own” truths? Could the Father of our Country have envisioned a time when his descendants would create a dystopian world where concepts of dignity and respect have become subordinated to victimization and identity politics? Have we fallen so far that rising again is not possible? Has partisanship made our legislative bodies dysfunctional? Do we no longer elect individuals who can think and act independently of party? Have we reached the end of civilization? I don’t think so, but it is easy to become discouraged.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/help-ive-been-chained-to-a-hundred-and-fifty-million-lunatics/

Sophocles is reported to have said that the male libido was like being chained to a lunatic.

I can honestly say, being a woman in 21st-century America, that I have him beat cold. I have somehow been chained to over a hundred and fifty million lunatics.

Okay, not every woman is a lunatic. I even have women friends. But making friends with women is like making friends in the science fiction field. I start by assuming they will be part of a strange form of Marxist victim-group and I look for signs they might, just might, be safe.

Then there’s a whole dance as you reveal yourself to the other as not-a-standard-woman.

At first, I thought American women had a chip on their shoulder, but I didn’t realize it was nearly this bad.

First, so you can understand where I’m coming from – because I have been told the reason I’m not hot for “feminism” is that women won the fight for me. The country I grew up in gave women the vote in the seventies. Further, when I was a child, getting a private passport for a married woman was difficult, and my mom had a “family passport,” which meant dad had to affidavit her every time she wanted to go to Spain to shop. Married women needed to have permission from their husbands to get a job. (Which meant many women worked under the table.) When I was in fifth and sixth grade, both of which were in mixed classes, it was assumed as a matter of course that girls couldn’t outperform boys, and when I did – routinely – the teachers acted like a wondrous thing had happened.

There were a lot of other restrictions, like the fact that no sane woman would go out after dark because there was a very high chance you’d be confused with a prostitute.

But here’s the thing: I don’t remember ever attributing any actual reverses in my life to being a woman. I managed to enter college. Heck, my cousin, who is 14 years older than me, is a chemical engineer. I don’t think she ever attributed any reversals in her life to being a woman either.

My mother ran her own business and out-earned my father for most of her marriage.

Sure, men discriminated against women. But women could still manage to be successful. And didn’t waste their time attributing their failures or their issues to men’s plotting.

Sure as a young woman I snapped off a lot of noses — and hands and… never mind. At fourteen grandma gave me a hat pin with which to discourage men rubbing against me in the bus. It worked too. And sure, I wished I could have more freedom and that people didn’t assume I was an idiot because I was a woman. But very few of them assumed I was an idiot after I had a chance to open my mouth.

And it truly never occurred to me to think that men were sabotaging me. Once you proved yourself, most men treated you fine.

I didn’t hear the phrase “he’s afraid of a strong woman” until I came to the States.

This was the eighties. To me, the U.S. was a wonderful place. No one acted like I was obviously less smart than boys. And no one treated me like I was a child.

And yet, I soon found that women about ten years older than me attributed all my issues or problems to “men are afraid of strong women.”

I’ve had bad bosses of both sexes, with a slight lead for women, mostly because I’ve had more female bosses. But none of those older women ever said, “Your female boss is afraid of strong women,” even though in my experience females are more likely to be afraid of women who are supposed to be their subordinates and whom they can neither intimidate nor control.

In fact, it was always a mystery to me how these male bosses were supposed to know that I was a “strong woman,” since in my twenties I was shy to the point of incoherence and polite to the point of self-effacement.

After a while that started annoying me, but even then, I don’t think I could possibly have guessed how crazy things were going to go.

Nowadays it seems to be an actual crime to be male. From schools to colleges, we are doing our best to make every boy behave like a girl and every man become just like a woman.

And even then, until this year I couldn’t have imagined the spectacle the Kavanaugh hearings have turned into.

How is it possible that Christina Blasey Ford has been asked to testify before the most august body in the land on a ridiculous, unproven and unprovable charge, which – should it prove true – amounts to the fact that a seventeen-year-old boy might have been uncouth and somewhat ridiculous at a drunken party, something that is neither a crime nor, to be fair, unusual. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/trump-derangement-syndrome-spreads-intensifies/

The furious, unhinged and ongoing reaction to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat reveals the extent to which leftist poison has penetrated not just Washington but the whole Western political class. Trump’s task is to lance the abscess while there are healthy parts remaining.

When President Barack Obama began packing the United States of America’s courts, senior appointments in the armed forces and a host of other positions, it looked to the extreme Left as if their long-cherished dream of seizing power—which would in fact mean controlling the world—was coming true at last.

Donald Trump’s election was shattering for them. Trump Derangement Syndrome persists even though, or rather because, he has had both economic and foreign policy successes, which appear to stand a chance of crippling the Left’s project, and which seem to have given Middle America new confidence and purpose.

The intensity of this derangement is fairly new. Even recently, Americans of both parties respected their presidents once elected, and in general did not doubt their presidents’ patriotism and public-spiritedness. Further, politicians’ families were off-limits for attacks.

It was a commonplace amongst journalists that you could not get an ordinary American to criticise his or her country or president when travelling abroad. Election results were respected as an expression of the democratic process. The idea that anyone’s career would have been in danger as a result of voting for the candidate of a mainstream party would have been a scandal. Now, some commentators predict that leftist rhetoric may evolve into a shooting war. In one of his famous paintings celebrating American freedom—in this case free speech—Norman Rockwell depicted a dissenter at a political meeting being heard by the others present with respect and politeness.

It is dismaying for friends of American democracy that the Democrat senators in 2018 were prepared to vote against President Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court no matter who that nominee was, or how qualified and suitable that nominee might be. This showed a willingness to wreck the processes of government without consideration of the national interest—a plain abrogation of the duty attached to the high positions to which they had been elected. Edmund Burke said: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it.” It is a principle of representative democracy so basic that one is taken aback by the need to repeat it. In the twenty-four hours after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Kavanaugh would be “a destructive tool on a generation of progress for workers, women, LGBTQ people, communities of color [and] families” and that he would “radically reverse the course of American justice [and] democracy”.

There is nothing in his previous career to suggest people would die because of Kavanaugh. NBC News journalists spread, as news, a false rumour that Anthony Kennedy had negotiated his retirement contingent on Kavanaugh’s appointment. One report noted: