RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/19/trump-must-navigate-in-a-

So the Straight Arrow has now gone and indicted a dozen members of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, on charges relating to—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—meddling in America’s internal affairs. That such meddling entirely fits their job description, and that Mr. Well Respected has exactly zero chance of ever bringing them to “justice” in an American courtroom is beside the point.

The partisan clown car that is the Robert Mueller investigation into something—anything!— continues to roll along, excreting great columns of smoke behind it in the hope that an even more partisan media can convince the public that it’s the result of fire, instead of hot air.

When the best you can do is bark at the canine for biting the man, you know your “investigation” has descended to a level of self-parody physically embodied by its hangdog front man, the Real Inspector Hound. Mueller has doggedly gone about accomplishing exactly nothing since (follow the bouncing ball): Rod Rosenstein wrote the memo that president Trump used as justification for firing former FBI chief and sanctimonious scold James Comey; who had succeeded his pal Mr. Incorruptible in that office; who then wrote some memos to himself and leaked them to the New York Times, in order to; motivate Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to look into wholly (and still) unsubstantiated charges of Trump’s putative “collusion” (not a statutory crime, by the way) with the Russians; to the cheers of former members of the intelligence community, including Comey, as well as its long-time laughingstock, former CIA director John Brennan, whose antipathy for Trump is daily on display.

In short, the whole mess stinks to high heaven and has since the bumbling Jeff Sessions mysteriously recused himself from anything to do with the Russians and has basically vanished since. This has left the president pretty much at the mercy of his enemies on both sides of the aisle (Rosenstein the butler; Brennan the saboteur) and unable effectively to fight back except via Twitter. For the truth is, the most virulent opposition Trump has faced since his surprise election has come from the Intelligence Community—which, at the top, is largely a left-leaning collection of malignant bureaucrats entirely intent on career advancement.

And how do these left-leaning IC bureaucrats assure their career advancement? By not upsetting the cozy arrangement they’ve long had with … the Russians.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-delivers-on-russia-1531868274?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Robert Mueller did his reputation for nonpartisanship no service by launching his indictment of Russia’s military hackers on the eve of what 99% of the media now say was a disastrous performance by President Trump in his summit with Vladimir Putin.

This is the same Mr. Mueller who, as FBI chief, sat for five years on the indictment of a Russian uranium executive when it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Obama’s own Russia rapprochement—and doubly embarrassing to his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, because of the connection of the Clinton Foundation to the Russian uranium business in question.

Mr. Mueller’s timing on Friday was unnecessary. His indictment is only for show. The Russian culprits will never be seen in a U.S. court.

It raises a question I did not expect to be raised: Should we now see Mr. Mueller as part of the retinue that includes former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and (ambiguously) former FBI chief James Comey ? These men don’t like Mr. Trump or his Russia rapprochement; Mr. Brennan openly calls him a traitor.

One hesitates to draw the comparison, but Truman and Eisenhower were assailed as agents of the Soviet Union by Joseph McCarthy. Reagan was accused (by George Will) of selling out to Gorbachev. Critics of FDR’s foreign policy were actually proved right in the historical archives: The British were seeking to assure his re-election in 1940.

Politics never did stop at the water’s edge. It can’t. All presidents use foreign policy the way they do domestic policy: to create, expand or protect their domestic political capital. That’s how our system works.

And their opponents will always have recourse to the accusation that a president is a dupe or worse of foreign interests.

Mr. Trump’s performance in Helsinki left a great deal to be desired, but he delivered the policy he has promised since the 2016 campaign. It is identical to the policy of his two most recent predecessors.

Mr. Trump has a history of financial relations with Russians. He has a history of statements saying that American leaders were “weak” and relations with Russia would improve if the U.S. had a “strong” leader.

He has sought to expand America’s military power; he has sought to expand its energy power. One senses his walloping of Germany over the Nord Stream pipeline is less aimed at weakening Russia than at expanding U.S. gas sales but it would still weaken Russia.

He has said for 30 years that America’s trade deficits and its military spending on allies are related (as they are, sort of).

The best you can say about all this, there’s a consistency here. Mr. Trump may not know Palmerston, who said countries don’t have permanent friends, only permanent interests, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have seen the quote in a Charles Krauthammer column.

Of course, you can never disprove sinister influences, an impossibility on which certain fellow journalists will be hanging their reputations for years to come. But a reliable assumption that covers all cases is that presidents act in their own interest. Meanwhile, we have a democratic process, not to mention an extensive permanent bureaucracy with its own ideas, to help sort it out.

The hell of our situation is that 2016 created a big incentive for Democrats and others to adopt anti-Russia hysteria, likening Russia’s meddling to “Pearl Harbor,” a risky simile when two countries have enough nuclear weapons aimed at each other to make the world uninhabitable.

The only good news is Mr. Trump’s apparent indifference to the media’s attempt to shame him into adopting the media’s Russia policy. He may have no idea of the pressures and constraints under which Mr. Putin acts, but Mr. Trump is a one-man brake on a non-adroit hostility that doesn’t serve U.S. interests. CONTINUE AT SITE

By the sea…
With the fishies splashing
By the sea
Wouldn’t that be smashing
Down by the sea ……Stephen Sondheim

I will be out of town at the seashore this weekend….
Back on Monday morning…..rsk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/the_racism_of_the_alleged_affronted.html

At the Consortium of Higher Education for LGBT Resource Professionals, one learns that at an upcoming webinar, “queer and trans people of color are welcome to join and engage in or observe the space. However, we do want to provide a content warning that in these spaces we hope white folks will process our thoughts and behaviors in a learning environment so we can address them and discuss and [sic] tactics of decentering whiteness.”

The topic is “How our institutions center whiteness as a dominant narrative and how we can decenter whiteness at an organizational level. Facilitators: Jesse Beal, they/them, Director, Women’s and Gender Center, Amherst College” and “Kayla Lisenby, they/them or she/her, Assistant Director, LGBTQ Center, Wake Forest University.”

Under the social justice rubric, being born white makes one evil, plain and simple. In fact, according to Dr. Kathy Obear, one can either be a good white ally or a bad one. Thus, everything is seen through the prism of race.

If white people ask people of color to teach them how to say things correctly to avoid racism, this actually results in a burden on people of color to constantly educate. Thus, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In fact, calling on someone to check his so-called privilege is an ad hominem attack. In particular, this logical fallacy is guilt by association. Being a part of the Caucasian race automatically makes a person guilty.

In actuality, white privilege is predicated on the idea that there needs to be “universal white guilt on the one hand and universal black innocence on the other.” For example, at the Crunk Feminist Collective, one learns that in 2012 Arizona governor Jan Brewer should have kept her fingers to herself when she confronted President Barack Obama about his immigration policies. Brewer was engaging in white female privilege and was “being disrespectful as hell.” Rather than explaining that she was incensed that a president of the United States could trample over the rights of American citizens, this episode is seen only through the prism of race and gender.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/11/making-american

In his book Why Are Jews Liberals, Norman Podhoretz described a “Torah of Liberalism” as the guiding political philosophy of contemporary American Jews.

Lacking religious devotion to the ancient Biblical text and Rabbinic tradition, or to the ritual observances practiced by “Orthodox” Jewry, Jewish Americans affiliated with liberal denominations, or disaffiliated completely from religious life, not only mimic predominant secular, urban political faith, they often lead it.

For many decades, prominent political movements of the Left—Communism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, statism, welfarism, gay rights activism, and pro-abortionism—have been led by Jewish atheists, academics, and activists replacing God-based religious belief and behavior with a secular “social action” agenda. Podhoretz argued these Jews are religiously passionate, it’s just that their religion is now liberalism (not classical liberalism but modern progressivism).

The common Hebrew term heard at left-wing Jewish seminaries, synagogues, temples, summer camps, and communal organizations is “tikkun olam,” translated as “repairing the world.” The actual historical term, “L’taken olam b’malchut shaddai” was once an idea that served the social order, for example, by endorsing capital punishment to protect the community. Some leaders of the American Jewish establishment now selectively hijack Jewish law to authorize a range of social justice warfare intent on moving objectively nuanced and long-debated Jewish ethical concepts into subjective partisanship.

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1084

At the end of last year on CapX, I documented the constant stream of technological, scientific and medical breakthroughs that are improving the lives of billions of ordinary people. Given all this good news, the real question is why people are so unbelievably pessimistic.

Judging by a 2016 poll of close to 20,000 people in some of the world’s richest countries, you could barely overstate the extent of the gloominess. In response to the question “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”, just 10 per cent in Sweden, 6 per cent in the US, 4 per cent in Germany and 3 per cent in France thought things were getting better. Why? Because, it turns out, we are pessimists by nature.

Over the last 200 years or so, the world has experienced previously unimaginable improvements in standards of living. The process of rapid economic growth started in Europe and America, but today some of the world’s fastest growing countries can be found in Asia and Africa – lifting billions of people from absolute poverty. Historical evidence, therefore, makes a potent case for optimism. Yet, pessimism is everywhere. As the British author Matt Ridley noted in The Rational Optimist:

The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to the implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth. The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went.

Ridley raises a more specific point that general pessimism: Why are we as a species so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialise?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270617/leftist-malice-rabbi-aryeh-spero

There is a never ending blitzkrieg from the media to topple President Trump. Based on what we’ve observed during the last two years, there’s no doubt that the “Separation of Families” barrage that began a couple of weeks ago was an effort orchestrated by the media. It brought together the Four Horsemen for a Trump Apocalypse: the Democrat Party; the Deep State; the Never-Trumpers; and leftwing organizations, especially those purporting to speak in the name of religion.

One: Nancy Pelosi, the face of the Democrat party, accused Jeff Sessions and other conservatives of being “religious hypocrites” for not allowing open borders and easy and swift entry for all families and children wishing to reside in America. I have no doubt that Mr. Sessions and Mr. Trump do care about families. Indeed, as conservatives they are far less inclined than liberals to take children from parents and place them in the custody of the “enlightened” state, as those on the Left often propose.

What about families? Even Nancy Pelosi should know that government’s first duty is to protect and defend America’s existing families. And today that means seriously checking, at the borders, all who may possibly be a member of MS-13, a jihadi terrorist, a criminal or drug dealer, or carrier of infectious diseases, all of which have already threatened American families. We rely on the government to do this for us. Mr. Trump and Sessions are not “religious hypocrites”, but men living up to their oath and doing their duty of keeping Americans safe. They are acting as those who take their responsibility seriously.

In contrast to the prevailing liberal ideology, American families indeed count. That’s all part of what we mean when we proclaim: America First. Compassion is not only for those outside but those within, for those regular, law abiding millions not part of any momentary preference group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270655/will-our-current-political-conflicts-turn-violent-bruce-thornton

President Trump’s recent string of wins ––especially the victories in the Supreme Court decisions and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy–– has incited the Democrat “resistance” to even loonier excesses of rhetoric and rudeness. Celebrities indulging juvenile vulgarities, boorish protestors harassing cabinet members in public spaces, the twitterverse smoldering with calls for violence and a “summer of rage,” and the buffoonish Representative from California Maxine Waters calling for even more public harassment: all have some people worrying that we are on the track of escalating violence that will turn the “cold civil war” hot.

Count me as skeptical for now. As bad as today’s political discord may seem, American history from its beginnings has been filled with worse political conflict and violence, from Shays’ Rebellion to Bleeding Kansas, from the Wall Street bombing to the Haymarket Riot. And having spent more than forty years in the university, the nursery of leftism and today’s parlor pinks, I see few people with the gumption to actually back their blustering threats with risky action.

Any claims that we are living on the brink of civil conflict inflamed by violent political rhetoric must answer the question, compared to when? The Sixties and Seventies saw urban riots that killed hundreds, wounded thousands, and caused millions of dollars in damages. Politically motivated kidnappings and shootouts were endemic. The 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured televised vicious battles between the police on one side, and antiwar protestors and left-wing groups like the Yippies and Students for a Democratic Society on the other. A jumpy national guard contingent killed four student protestors at Kent State. During this same period, thousands of bombings from a plethora of radical groups took place ––according to a 1970 Senate investigation, more than 4,300 just between January 1969 and April 1970, killing 43 and inflicting $22 billion in damage. And presidential primary candidate Robert Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King were assassinated.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/06/historys-bad-ideas-are-an-inspiration

What we now consider stupid and dangerous ideas of the past, progressives see as useful in the present.

Even liberal historians usually label as disastrous two decisions by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration: the adoption of the Earl Warren-McClatchy newspaper inspired plan to intern Japanese-American citizens and the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937—better known as FDR “court-packing scheme.”

The latter was a crazy scheme to remake the Supreme Court, given that Roosevelt wanted no more judicial interference in the implementation of the New Deal. And yet he had no recourse until slow-coach judicial retirements opened up new appointments of compliant progressive justices. In the interim, the convoluted proposal would have allowed Roosevelt to select a new—and additional justice—to the Supreme Court for every sitting judge who had reached 70 years, 6 months, and had not retired. And in theory, he could pack on 6 more judges, creating a 15-member court with a progressive majority.

The embarrassing plan properly died.

But progressives once again are advocating something like it, now that they fear Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee might cement a 5-4 hard conservative majority—and with a possible third appointment opening up in the next 30 months. Democrats nonchalantly talk of the Kennedy slot as a “swing” vote, which in these supposedly dark times must for now be institutionalized.

They are without any self-reflection that they never entertained any such notion that a Democrat-selected justice might “evolve,” “mature,, or “grow” into become a swing Kennedy-like apostate from Left, much less that a Kagan or Sotomayor would ever evolve into a right-wing mirror image version of a Justice Brennan, Souter, Stevens, or Warren.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/07/fascists-faux-real/

We all know about projection and the human inclination to perceive one’s own frailties, flaws and follies in others. These days the concept is reradily observed. Look at those on the Left so loudly denouncing as ‘fascists’ all and sundry who disagree and you will find the genuine lovers of jackboots.

Wikipedia is not always the most reliable of sources, but its definition of fascism is a reasonable starting point for discussion. A fascist is a follower of a political philosophy characterized by authoritarian views, desire for a strong central government, and no tolerance for opposing opinions. All forms of socialism, including Germany’s national socialism, are inherently fascist. They embody the two key identifying factors of fascism; strong central government and no tolerance for opposing views.

So what about the US president the media consistently denounce as a fascist, an idiot, and “literally Hitler”?

The Trump administration has removed red tape as fast as practically possible, repealing twenty-two regulations for every one enacted. This removes the brakes on private effort and enterprise, and shifts power away from government to the people. The opposite of fascism.

One of the first actions of the Trump administration was to reduce taxes. This gives more wealth and more freedom of choice to the people, while reducing the power of government. The opposite of fascism.