RUTHFULLY YOURS

By strange serendipity, Bill Cosby was convicted of three counts of sexual assault on the day Juanita Broaddrick marked the 40th anniversary of her rape by Bill Clinton. Mr Cosby is eighty years old and likely to die in prison; Mr Clinton is still, in every sense, at large.

Mrs Broaddrick has provided a timeline of the events of April 26th 1978. Clinton’s defenders have responded as one has come to expect. Last year, after the sudden, dizzying implosion of Harvey Weinstein, Democrats were briefly distancing themselves from the pathologies of their hero:

Steyn noted how a recent mainstream media headline read “I Believe Juanita,” referring to Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator who says then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton (D) raped her.

He said he wrote the same post in February 1999…

That’s true. I did. From The National Post of Canada over 19 years ago:

He raped her. Old news. Get over it.

He raped her. Or rather (for we must observe the niceties) she alleges he raped her. That’s what Juanita Broaddrick told The Wall Street Journal last Friday. That’s what The Washington Post reported Saturday —on page one. That’s what The New York Times somewhat tardily got around to letting its readers in on yesterday — although the fastidious Times boys forebore to let the word “rape” sully their account, preferring the term “assault” and noting only that “he forced her down to the bed and had intercourse with her,” which would be rape if Mike ‘Tyson did it but with Bill Clinton qualifies merely as a marginally non-consensual relationship.

READ THE REFERENCED ARTICLE BY LOUIE GOHMERT : “ROBERT MUELLER: UNMASKED”
“Robert Mueller has a long and sordid history of illicitly targeting innocent people that is a stain upon the legacy of American jurisprudence. He lacks the judgment and credibility to lead the prosecution of anyone.”
https://www.scribd.com/document/377409983/Gohmert-Mueller-UNMASKED#from_embed

Several weeks ago, FBI agents raided the office of President Donald Trump’s fixer, the New York lawyer Michael Cohen, which set Australian correspondents in the US to doing what they do best: re-writing Washington Post and New York Times reports and transmitting those borrowed insights and lifted quotes to the folks back home. The popular image of your typical foreign correspondent is of an intrepid pursuer of truth, but the fact of the matter is that this applies only if a stroll to the nearest newsstand is regarded as a perilous exercise. Toss in the rather blinkered perspective of reporters operating in newsrooms where everyone shares the same politics and perspectives and, well, you get coverage like that provided by the ABC’s Anne Barker on April 11.

The Cohen raid, she wrote, demonstrates special counsel Robert Mueller (above right) “is prepared to act on information that may be well beyond the brief he was hired for”. As Mueller was engaged to explore Moscow’s alleged patronage of Mr Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, no evidence of which has been found, his interest in the current president’s 12-year-distant roll in the hay with a porn star makes her point rather neatly. Ms Barker appears not to regard Mueller’s new interest in sniffing soiled sheets as anything remarkable, let alone untoward.

What Ms Barker and others might have reported but haven’t is Mueller’s own history, which is checkered to say the least.

When leading the hunt for whoever mailed anthrax-filled letters in the days immediately after 9/11, he focused obsessively on the wrong man. This produced a $5 million settlement when it became apparent that it would take more than a concerted campaign of leaks, smears and whispered fabrications to brand virologist Steven Hatfill as the guilty party and make the label stick.

I pride myself on keeping meticulous financial records. But since my wife died on Jan. 1, I discovered I had made some real rookie mistakes that led to hours of extra work and substantial fees. The transfer of assets between spouses can be fairly simple—if you learn from my mistakes.

Dr. Lisa Jane Krenzel and I shared everything throughout our marriage. Like many couples, we split responsibilities. I paid the bills and made investments. She took care of our health insurance, plus the house. We maintained individual checking and savings accounts, as well as separate retirement accounts from various jobs throughout our careers. What went wrong?

• Issue One: When we opened those checking and savings accounts, we never named beneficiaries. I had assumed, incorrectly, that our accounts would simply transfer to the other in case of death. The banker who opened the accounts never suggested otherwise. With a named beneficiary, her accounts would have simply been folded into mine. Instead, I had to hire a lawyer—at $465 an hour—to petition the court to name me as the executor of her estate. I needed this power to transfer her accounts. Filing costs in New York City for the necessary document was $1,286. The running bill for the lawyer stands at $7,402.00, and I expect it to rise.

I also needed the documents for the companies that managed her retirement accounts and a mutual fund, because, as at the bank, we never named a beneficiary. By the way, this paperwork also required signature guarantees or a notary seal, which can take up an afternoon.

• Issue Two: The highly charged question of funeral and burial. Last summer, when I was told Lisa would not survive this illness, I tried to raise the issue of burial with her. She refused to have the conversation, but I quietly went ahead and purchased a plot of graves in the cemetery in Wisconsin where my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are buried. This was something I actually did right.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Most Americans do not realize that the Federal Reserve is NOT constitutionally part of the United States Government and is not even a bank! The Federal Reserve is a system. International banker Marilyn Barnewall explains that the Federal Reserve System is a privately held corporation owned by bankers and it is most definitely not part of the federal government.

The Federal Reserve Act that created the Federal Reserve System (Fed) was passed in Congress on December 22, 1913 and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson the next day. Barnewall describes the dramatic effects of its passage.

“The Act transferred the right to print currency from the United States Congress to an independent and privately-owned entity calling itself a bank but which is not a bank and changing the Constitution which cannot be changed without Amending it. The Fed is somewhat federal in form, but is very privately owned and operated. President Wilson lived to regret signing The Federal Reserve Act and on his deathbed is quoted as saying:

‘I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.'”

So, who are these men and why was President Wilson so remorseful about signing the Federal Reserve Act? And why is the Federal Reserve System so disingenuously named that the average citizen assumes it is a banking institution and part of the federal government?

Sometimes it is necessary to look back to understand the present and anticipate the future.

Academy award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence recently announced her plan to take a break from her acting career in order to “fix our democracy.” The 27-year-old celebrity told Entertainment Tonight that she will work with an organization, “Represent.US,” to “get young people engaged politically on a local level.” “It doesn’t have anything to do with partisan [politics],” she said of her involvement with the non-profit organization. “It’s just anti-corruption and stuff trying to pass state by state laws that can help prevent corruption.”

Like many celebrities, Lawrence was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2016 election. She justified her support on the grounds of Clinton’s experience and technocratic pedigree. “I’m like, ‘I want a career politician!’ I wouldn’t hire an assistant if they didn’t have experience,” Lawrence explained. “We’re talking about the president of the f—king United States!” But there seems little utility in encouraging young people to engage in politics just to persuade them that “fixing our democracy” means becoming activists for entrenched politicians intent on growing the administrative state.

The American experiment in self-government requires citizens who understand both government’s purpose and their own responsibilities as citizens. We cannot delegate the responsibility of governing to “experts” within the administrative state and remain self-governing citizens in a constitutional republic. If we want to “fix our democracy,” we need better citizens before we can expect better politicians.

Lawrence’s faith in career politicians’ expertise is nothing new. In August 1955 Philadelphia’s progressive Mayor Joseph S. Clark Jr. wrote “Wanted: Better Politicians” for The Atlantic. Clark described the late-19th century as a“relatively uncomplicated” time when “men still quoted with approval Jefferson’s dictum that government is best when governing least.” Progressing past this era required progressing past the ideas which accompanied it. Simple men with simple ideas were ill-equipped to govern themselves in a more complicated and advanced modern time. Clark praised Woodrow Wilson as having been “the country’s leading authority on American government,” which made Wilson uniquely qualified for the role as our lead administrator. Clark’s thesis is indicative of how many progressives think: in order to solve government’s inefficiencies, we need more members from society’s elite and professional class in control.

In his splendid book ” Reflections on a Ravaged Century” Robert Conquest reminds us that in the aftermath of World War 2, the atrocities continued and the century’s monsters -Mao and Stalin enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of people and the media and academic elites gave them a pass. This column is from 2016 and has more detail on the political Left’s abandonment of morality.

Why do we indulge the crimes of the Left? Ed West

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/indulge-crimes-left/

What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm:

Ignatieff: In 1934 … millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a communist?

Hobsbawm: … Probably not.

Ignatieff: Why?

Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing … The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and unnecessarily great. But I’m looking back on it now and I’m saying that is because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure …

Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

Hobsbawm: Yes.

Hobsbawm was an unrepentant supporter of a system that killed millions and, as Nick Cohen has pointed out, surely would have killed him.

Laden with honours throughout his life by the liberal democratic system, he went to his grave believing that all the murder had been worth it in order to achieve this deluded fantasy of a worker’s paradise. So powerful is ideology that a man can be brilliant in his field, which is after all the study of the human condition, and yet at the same time totally blind to one form of evil.

But then he was hardly alone, and many intelligent, well-informed people are still at best ambivalent about the crimes of the Soviet Union, Communist China and the other Marxist states. I hear there may even be one or two in politics today.

It was an unseasonably cold night, but I made the trek from Harlem to a meetup in Brooklyn. The organizers promised a night of big ideas and freethinking; the group thread included a quote from David Bohm about the virtue of free dialogue. But as with many such meetups in New York, I was quickly disappointed.

Instead of open minds and lively debate, I found dogmatic progressive ideology and groupthink. One attendee told me that I, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, am “no better than Roger Ailes” because my company aggregates both liberal and conservative commentaries and thereby is “pushing a right-wing agenda.” Someone else said: “Trump supporters are so stupid . . . they think the tax bill was a good deal because they got back—what, a few thousand a year?”

I don’t claim to have the answers. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite. I went to high school on the Upper East Side, graduated from Bryn Mawr, and once made a six-figure salary at a Big Four accounting firm.

Still, I know that burying our heads in the sand and hoping everyone we disagree with goes away is not an effective solution. TheFlipSide.io has received lots of positive and constructive feedback from liberals and conservatives. But the most unconstructive criticism we’ve received comes from the left:

• “We need to convince the Trump supporters they’ve been duped.”

When I was a young girl and Israel was one year old, my family- parents and my “kid”brother and I traveled to Israel. I confess to callow boredom as my parents met friends and distant relatives from Poland. We tired of the retelling of unending grief and disbelief . The Holocaust was the significant event in our education and our lives. All our relatives- cousins, aunts, grandparents- were all killed – and we were schooled in the horror.

One hot morning on a drive to Beersheba, the car broke down and when we got out there was a whirring sound in the air. As we looked up we saw airplanes in formation….they looked small and tinny but they had the Star of David on the underside of both wings.

My father started to cheer and wave madly and my brother shouted “Jewish planes! Jewish planes!” and that was an epiphany for me. Imagine! Airplanes and an army in our ancient homeland to defend that precious link that started in Hebron with the Patriarchs . Other great civilizations crumbled and Jews survived in spite of unending oppression and genocide and there we were on sacred ground again. My love for Israel has been a lifelong commitment of pride in its accomplishments and outsize contribution to the welfare of the entire world.

As Bret Stevens put it so well on anti-Semitism in our century: “For Jews, it’s a painful, useful reminder that Israel is not their vanity. It’s their safeguard.”

The British philosopher John Gray is not someone to shy away from ‘difficult’ topics. If you are looking for a provocative long read this weekend, his new article in the Times Literary Supplement ought to be a contender. I didn’t agree with all of it (for example, I would argue that the supposedly secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century—essentially millenarian sects, as Gray rightly observes—were even more ‘religious’ than even he would claim), not that that matters.

Above all, Gray’s take on where the arguments of John Stuart Mill, one of the saints of traditional liberalism, have led is, to say the least, intriguing.

An extract:

[Mill’s] assertion that human beings would prefer intellectual freedom over contented conformity was at odds with his empiricist philosophy. Essentially unfalsifiable, it was a matter of faith.

While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.

That may or may not be true, but at least Mill recognized its essentially religious nature, not that that took much doing.