RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/19/america-on-fire/

The Democrat Party agenda has not so much transformed America as set it ablaze.

After a catastrophic debate and backstage power struggle, Joseph Robinette Biden told the American people that the time has come to pass the torch. And as his anointed successor would say, that time is now, in a historic concession speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Torch is apt as a metaphor for the agenda that has been pried from Biden’s grasp and passed to Kamala Harris. As carried out under two presidents over 16 years, the Democratic Party agenda has not so much transformed America as set it ablaze.

Inflation — Financial Insecurity

Massive overspending by the Biden administration unleashed inflation that is crushing the finances of working people and middle-income families. Wages have not kept pace with prices and Americans are struggling to pay for food and gas. They have taken on debt, tapped savings and retirement accounts while living precariously from paycheck to paycheck. High interest rates designed to tame inflation have wreaked further havoc on personal finances. For many, the dream of home ownership has gone up in smoke.

Violence And Crime

ttps://amgreatness.com/2024/08/18/harriss-kamunist-agenda-faces-harsh-reality/

Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Cry for Kamala the Kamunist.

It took them a while, it’s true, but at least Argentina has someone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics in charge.

Indeed, Javier Milei, one of my favorite leaders on the world stage today (along with Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Georgia Meloni, and Nayib Bukele) is a Trump-like dynamo.  If I had a more developed entrepreneurial bent, I would try marketing a line of Milei chainsaws in the United States.  Just as he took a chainsaw (sometimes literally) to excessive spending, regulation, and bureaucracy in Argentina, so my Mielei Chainsaws could be employed against waste, fraud, and abuse here across the fruited plain. Milei’s robust policies have put Argentina on the runway to economic success. They have slashed inflation—some 200% when he took office—and his abolition of rent control—surprise, surprise—has sparked a 195% rise in available housing stock.

Meanwhile, the socialists funneling ideas to Harris have put together an economic plan redolent of Venezuela or, indeed, the Soviet Union.  Its centerpiece revolves around centrally promulgated and enforced wage and price controls—a recipe for shortages and inflation.

The plan itself has been ridiculed across the ideological spectrum, from CNN to The Wall Street Journal.  “Harris’ plan to stop price gouging,” quoth CNN in a masterpiece of understatement,  “could create more problems than it solves.”

The WSJ was a bit franker. For one thing, there is “no evidence that supermarkets or other food retailers are gouging anyone. Food prices are higher than they were before the Biden Presidency, but that is because of inflation.”

And who caused that inflation, Kemo Sabe? The man with the keys to the money duplicating machine, Joe Biden or his handlers.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-dark-money-intimidation-group-attacking-election-lawyers/

Amid last-minute rule changes, widely reported ballot irregularities, and an unprecedented movement away from secure, in-person voting, the 2020 election that installed Joe Biden became one of the most hotly contested in American history.

Given this uncertainty, Donald Trump and his allies, including a number of highly qualified attorneys, raised their concerns in the avenue provided by the Constitution: our court system. For this, Trump’s lawyers have been smeared relentlessly in the media, dragged through costly and damaging professional reviews, and bullied into silence or retreat.

That persecution did not happen organically. The intimidation campaign against Trump’s lawyers, and against any who dissented from the approved narrative, was a highly coordinated effort directed from the very center of the Democratic machine.

And the cabal at the heart of this war on blind justice is The 65 Project — named for the number of lawsuits filed by concerned citizens after the 2020 election — driven by David Brock, the consigliere of the professional left. Brock began his career as a conservative hero who exposed the Democrats’ smear campaign against future Justice Clarence Thomas as well as Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” sex scandal — only to turncoat by becoming an accomplice of Hillary Clinton and disavowing his former career as a “right-wing hit man.”

For his betrayal, Brock was handsomely rewarded by Clinton allies, who helped him architect a constellation of far-left attack groups known as the “Brocktopus”, most notably Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, both of which are closely connected with the 65 Project today.

The partisan bias is obvious. Media Matters is the chief attack dog of the Democratic Party, which smears mainstream Republicans as bigoted racists with funding from George Soros, the Tides Foundation, and the National Education Association. It’s currently facing a defamation lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X which alleges the hit group manufactured a report showing advertiser posts next to neo-Nazi posts to drive away major advertisers such as Disney and Apple from the platform. Missouri has joined in with a separate lawsuit accusing Media Matters of fraudulent business practices for fundraising off its anti-X campaign.

American Bridge is the left’s “gaffe database” created to track and record every word spoken by Republican politicians in the hopes of digging up a juicy line to blast over the airwaves. Its most infamous victim was Todd Akin, a former Missouri congressman and 2012 Senate candidate who used the infelicitous term “legitimate rape” during a radio interview — a flub that killed his political career. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/16/ominous-signs-of-what-us-middle-east-policy-might-be-under-a-harris-presidency/

During his recent discussion with Elon Musk on X, Donald Trump said Kamala Harris would be even worse for Israel and the Jewish community than Joe Biden. Although there are many unknowns about what Kamala Harris’s positions would be as president on Middle East security if she wins the 2024 presidential election, several disturbing signs support President Trump’s belief.

Harris’s foreign policy record has been roundly criticized. She was ridiculed in 2022 for a pollyannish explanation of the Ukraine War when she said, “So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.”

Harris was strongly condemned in Ukraine and the U.S. for laughing and appearing clueless during a 2022 press conference in Poland when a reporter asked her a question about Ukrainian refugees. This response led Senator Marsha Blackburn to tweet, “It seems the only thing Kamala Harris knows how to do is laugh off her responsibilities.”

Harris praised Biden for an “extraordinary amount of courage” concerning his disastrous decision to abruptly withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. She has argued that increasing nuclear deterrence is “dangerous” and called for reducing the defense budget and redirecting military funding to domestic programs. In dealing with Russia, China, Iran, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Harris usually favored appeasement over tough policies and American strength.

These and other indications of Harris’s foreign policy incompetence raise questions as to whether she can handle the complex security issues America faces in the Middle East.

There are already two indicators of this.

The first are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel statements by Harris during her career driven by the thinking of the progressive left. She has consistently portrayed the Palestinians as victims, voted against legislation supporting Israel’s security, and voted in support of the anti-Semitic BDS movement.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/14/kotkin-america-becoming-like-the-eu/

Europe may be fading from global relevance, but its influence is expanding within the US Democratic Party. Today, the party’s core beliefs echo those espoused by the European Union and much of the British establishment – an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews.

With the seamless elevation of Kamala Harris and her ‘white dude’ vice-president pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democratic Party has also embraced the undemocratic methods of the European Commission. The party has turned into a tightly controlled, elite-driven cabal. All this, of course, is justified by Democrats as a way to ‘defend democracy’ against the Trumpian hordes.

Once a truly national presence, the Democratic Party is now almost totally dominated by older, wealthier regions, like the north-east and the West Coast. This parallels establishment politics in Europe, which takes its cues from London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin – places where, as French author Christophe Guilluy notes, there is a ‘hyper-concentration of elites’.

In the not-so-recent past, the Democrats were also a national and sociologically diverse party. It included Catholics, southerners, labour unions, black and Hispanic politicians and oddball entrepreneurs not aligned with the country-club GOP. It was, as humourist Will Rogers pointed out, famously inwardly conflicted. ‘I do not belong to any organised political party’, the Oklahoma native joked, ‘I’m a Democrat’.

Today, Rogers’s chaotic party has achieved a discipline of almost Stalinist proportions. Rather than allow a battle for the presidency, the party rallied around Harris, who has never won a presidential primary. With a speed that would have astounded George Orwell, the Democrats’ media minions took a candidate widely seen as lacklustre and elevated her to mythic status.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/09/the-self-aggrandizement-of-jill-biden/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

On the tenure of Dr. President

President Joe Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he would not run for reelection after all upended an already volatile campaign. As media pivoted to cover the likely nomination of Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic Party’s candidate, attention shifted away from Biden himself, forestalling efforts to unravel what has been going on in the White House as he has physically and cognitively declined. But it shouldn’t. The American people deserve to know what has been happening behind the scenes of this obfuscatory administration — and the role played by one person in particular: First Lady Jill Biden.

Jill Biden has long claimed to be her husband’s fiercest advocate. Immediately after the president’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June, she ushered him off the stage and to a local Waffle House, where the president, glassy-eyed and fatigued, pantomimed the motions of a retail politician. Then, at a debate-watch party, he stood beside the podium as Jill attempted to rally the faithful by telling him, “Joe, you did such a great job. . . . You answered every question!” while he stared vacantly into the crowd. Her words sounded both condescending and chilling given Biden’s alarming, confused debate performance. A week spent by the White House trying to reassure Democratic Party stalwarts and especially important donors that the president remains fit to serve failed to quell doubts. At a Hamptons fundraiser a few days after the debate, the first lady was adamant: “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job.”

Then came the cover of Vogue — not Jill Biden’s first, of course; she has been featured twice before. But this one, published after the debate, pictures her in a $5,000 Ralph Lauren coatdress that several media outlets called “suffragette white.” The first lady looks off into the middle distance with a stoic, expertly airbrushed expression, above an unintentionally revealing headline: “We will decide our future.”

Given the involvement of the first lady in the Biden administration’s promotion of its policies and, until recently, the president’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge his declining condition and popularity, it is worth asking: Who is the “we” in this statement? On social media, critics of the administration often call Jill “Lady MacBiden,” and anyone who does not slavishly follow the mainstream media will have heard Jill compared to Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow, who effectively ran the nation for her husband while hiding the severity of his physical condition from the American people. That comparison may be apt, but her behavior as second lady and first lady is also reminiscent of another wife of a prominent politician, albeit not an American one: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Nationalist Chinese leader.

True, when Jill wants to get out of town, she flees to her house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., with a contingent of family members and Secret Service agents, not to exile in Taiwan with crates full of purloined priceless art, as Madame Chiang did, but the two first ladies have certain similarities. Madame Chiang could be both charming and vicious, as her New York Times obituary noted, and she took the lead in managing policy proposals for her husband, often serving as his translator (she spoke impeccable English). Madame Chiang was also a fierce advocate of her husband and his Nationalist cause, although after meeting her, then–first lady Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “She can talk beautifully about democracy, but she does not know how to live democracy.” She and her husband were, after all, shockingly corrupt.