RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/01/the-weakest-presidential-line-of-succession-ever/

As Vladimir Putin floats terrifying hints of Russia’s willingness to use nuclear weapons against countries that assist in Ukraine’s defense against Moscow’s brutal invasion, the United States is saddled with a president teetering on the brink of senility, and a woman one heartbeat away from the presidency who is as dependably incompetent as she is undependable in prepping herself on national and international issues.

Polling makes clear that the public is fully aware of, and disconcerted by, the alarming shortcomings of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris alike; but at the same time, there is little if any appreciation of the unprecedented vulnerability to the United States due to those further down in the line of succession. Old age, timidity, and lack of qualification abound among those who might be thrust into the job of most powerful individual on earth, charged with leading the free world.

On Saturday in a speech in Warsaw, Biden called for the end to Putin’s “for life” tenure as Kremlin premier, instantly sending the White House into a DEFCON 1 in crisis communications.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” the president exclaimed at the close of his remarks, apparently departing from the prepared text.

What looks weaker on the part of a superpower in the midst of one of the most challenging military crises in decades than to backpeddle a moral pronouncement of illegitimacy against one of its chief adversaries? We are not demanding that Putin go, sundry administration aides assured friend and foe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-strategic-political-petroleum-release-oil-joe-biden-gas-prices-11648762807?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden knows inflation and gasoline prices are killing Democrats in the polls, and he’s scrambling to show he’s doing something about it. Except he still won’t do what would really make a difference: Take his foot off the neck of the U.S. oil and gas industry.

His latest gambit on Thursday was to say he’ll release 180 million barrels from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the next six months. This would be the biggest release in history and reduce the reserve to its lowest level since 1984. But the oil will need to be replaced, which will push up future demand.

This is one reason markets responded with a yawn. Crude prices fell a mere 4.9%. Markets don’t respond only to short-term demand and supply fluctuations. They also take into account long-term expectations and policy signals. And the Administration continues to signal that its goal is to bankrupt oil and gas producers. But before shooting them, Mr. Biden wants their political help.

The White House underscored Thursday that it wants to “immediately increase supply” while accelerating the “clean energy” transition. The President also said he wants to make companies pay fees on wells from leases that they haven’t used in years and on acres of public land that “they are hoarding without producing.” But the law already requires companies to produce oil or gas on leases or return their leases to the government.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-smearing-of-clarence-thomas/

Those demanding recusal over Ginni Thomas’s activism are engaged in transparently partisan politics, nothing more.

D emocrats should not get away with their shameless political gambit to force Justice Clarence Thomas’s recusal from Supreme Court cases based on the political activism of his wife, Ginni Thomas.

Supreme Court justices are not even subject to disqualification over their own activities that bear directly on cases. This never upsets Democrats when the justices have been appointed by Democratic presidents. Consequently, Justice Elena Kagan did not recuse herself from the Obamacare case, providing the critical vote to uphold it despite having served as President Obama’s solicitor general when the administration was formulating the legal strategy to defend the Affordable Care Act. (See Ed Whelan’s analysis, here.)

Justice Stephen Breyer has been aptly described as the primary architect of the federal sentencing guidelines. He steered them through Congress in 1984 as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief counsel before serving, as a federal appeals court judge, on the Sentencing Commission that created the guidelines. Yet, after being appointed to the high court by President Clinton, Breyer declined to recuse himself when the Supreme Court weighed the constitutionality of the guidelines. Indeed, he wrote a 5–4 majority opinion in 2005 that sustained the guidelines scheme, though declaring it advisory rather than mandatory.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/600332-back-in-the-safe-space-of-hollywood-scandal

There’s nothing like a good Hollywood slap in the face to distract us from our looming dystopia. As bombs continue to fall on Ukraine and mothers shepherd their children through mine fields, it took Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to return us to our safe space: the latest Hollywood scandal. Nothing says escapism like two celebrities in a made-for-television brouhaha.

“The slap heard ‘round the world,” as it’s been heralded in the media, smacks of the self-absorption of our popular culture. Heard ‘round the world, really? Heard in Lviv, against the groaning of bulldozers plying through wreckage? Heard in the clatter of refugee camps in Europe? In El Salvador, where 62 people were murdered in gang violence over the weekend?

After the incident, social media erupted, memes formed, newspaper headlines blared and actual crises were, well, upstaged. “BEST SMACKTOR,” snarked the front page of the New York Post. Facebook, the most self-centered communications platform since the mirror, exploded with our completely uninformed but no less authoritative positions and diagnoses: Smith needs anger management therapy…Rock provoked Smith…the whole thing was a conspiracy to hoist the Oscar’s anemic ratings.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/a-sleepwalker-stumbles-on-the-right-answer/

As I write there are signs that Putin may be prepared to limit his ambitions and settle for some portion of east Ukraine.  President Zelensky may be prepared to accept a compromise of this nature simply in order to ease the suffering of his people.  That will ease the immediate human problem but the issue will not be resolved.  Putin’s long-term ambitions will not be assuaged.  Ukrainian resentment will not abate. 

But, more critically, Putin has undoubtedly committed war crimes.  Arguably he has committed them before, but this time the West in its customary impotence cannot credibly turn a blind eye.  Could it allow a Putin dominated Russia to remain on the UN Security Council or any other UN organisation?  Could it refrain from prosecuting Putin in the International Court of Justice?  Could it allow Russia to compete in sporting events?  Can we continue to indulge Putin continuing to thumb his nose at the world?

Putin cannot be allowed even the semblance of a victory – we cannot think that if we allow him a face-saving compromise that will be an end of the matter.

Of course, yes, we tolerate murderous dictators all the time as long as they confine their atrocities to their own people.  But pragmatic indifference can only be stretched so far.  This time Putin has gone beyond his own borders.  Surely this is a red line we cannot compromise. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/28/gop-must-promise-inquisitions-not-meaningless-task-forces/

Using the pretext of the so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021, the long knives are out for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Post-election text exchanges between Mrs. Thomas and Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief-of-staff, recently were leaked by the January 6 select committee to none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who darkly described the communications as proof that “Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election result.”

The small cache of texts—29 total—shows Thomas expressing frustration at the election’s outcome. There is nothing sinister, and certainly nothing criminal, about the messages.

But like everything related to the events of January 6, the truth doesn’t matter. Doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is considered a thoughtcrime and handled as such by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Congress; CNN reported Monday afternoon that the January 6 select committee led by U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) now wants to interview Thomas. If she refuses—as she should—it’s highly likely the committee will issue a subpoena to compel her testimony, which it has done in numerous cases.

The poisonous tree of Thompson’s committee is yielding a bumper crop of political fruit for House Democrats and their useful idiots in the Republican Party such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). With little else to run on and a White House in freefall, Democrats think they can sustain enough outrage over January 6 to stem major electoral losses in November.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18374/ukraine-us-energy-independence

In late 1944, desperate Poles radioed the Allies pleading for weapons to help them stop the Nazis from massacring the citizens of Warsaw.

The Soviet Army was within easy distance of the Polish capital but, for some reason, decided to pause in their deadly offensive against the Third Reich at the exact same time the Poles had risen up against the Nazis. Some historians suggest that the pause was Stalin’s cold-blooded decision to let the Germans destroy the under-armed Polish resistance, whose leaders would have demanded independence when the war was over.

Now, some eighty years later, beleaguered freedom fighters throughout Ukraine are begging for the West to send them more arms so that they may confront and defeat Hitler’s protégé, Russian President Vladimir Putin. If America and NATO fail this test, history will record a craven retreat of democracy that makes our shameful departure from Afghanistan a mere footnote.

There is no room for any equivocation on the part of the Biden White House or members of Congress. We need to face this Russian threat as a united country with a single focus: providing Ukraine with every weapon and every resource this democracy can offer.

US President Joe Biden also needs to hear from those who engineered his political campaign and who still play closeted roles as kitchen cabinet advisors; they have much to say about both domestic and international policy. They too must insist on all available aid to the people of Ukraine.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/will-smith-chris-rock-donald-trump/

Will Smith, a prominent Scientologist and Democratic donor best known for co-writing the hit song “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It,” shocked the civilized world on Sunday by slapping the s—t out of comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Libs were flummoxed. Should they be outraged? Was it racist? A number of Democratic politicians, including “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), initially applauded Smith’s violent outburst, which came in response to Rock making a joke about the actor’s nominal wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) tweeted, then deleted, the following take: “Teachable Moment: Don’t joke about a Black Woman’s hair.”

Doing what comes naturally, a number of libs reacted by denouncing former president Donald Trump for his role in the slapping incident. “So did like anyone walk out after that happened???” wrote Asha Rangappa, the CNN analyst best known for doxxing a Washington Free Beacon intern. “Or are we getting an independent psychological case study on how Trump got normalized?”

Steve Schmidt, the schlubby Lincoln Project cofounder who once compared himself to the soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches on D-Day, offered a similar assessment. “Do you want to understand how Trump happened? Watch the Oscars and the crowd reaction,” he wrote. “Applause for assault in a tuxedo in California is the same as applause for assault while wearing a red hat in Alabama.”

Howard Stern, the former anti-establishment shock jock turned boring liberal scold, suggested (without evidence) that “Will Smith and Trump are the same guy.” The fact that Smith, who would go on to accept the best actor award for his role in King Richard, did not face any meaningful consequences for his actions was an example of “how Trump gets away with shit,” Stern said.

Left-wing radio host Dean Obeidallah used the violent outburst as an opportunity to complain that “Donald Trump [has] still NOT been criminally charged for his attempted coup and his role in the Jan 6 terrorist attack.” It is almost as if America’s libs have developed an unhealthy addiction to the constant outrage and anxiety they felt during Trump’s presidency, and miss him even more than his biggest fans.

Smith and his wife, who have said they are in an open marriage, were among the campaign bundlers who raised at least $500,000 for former president Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, along with disgraced Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/putin-finds-some-unlikely-allies-united-states-robert-spencer-0/

Everyone knows that The Squad in the House of Representatives is so far to the Left as to make Stalin look like a John Bircher, but would they go so far as to cheerlead for a former KGB man’s war of aggression? It looks as if the answer is yes.

“The Democrats,” Stephen Kruiser observed on Feb. 21, “were lurching leftward long before the arrival of AOC and her gang. What they’ve done though is help drag the party so far to the lunatic fringe left that whatever passes for center with them these days is probably somewhere in Cuba.” Or, say, Moscow. Putin, after all, has called the fall of the Soviet Union a “tragedy” for “most citizens,” and said it was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.”

In October 2020, Putin praised the Democrat Party for being “traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to Social Democratic ideas, if compared to Europe. And it was from the Social Democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved.” He went on to reveal: “I still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them? In fact, they are akin to Christian values. Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless.”

What’s for a good Squad member not to like in all that, except maybe the reference to detested “Christian values”? And so the New York Postreported Saturday that “comrades in ‘The Squad’ have bent over backwards in the House of Representatives to defend Vladimir Putin, voting against sanctions on Russian oil and parroting Kremlin talking points.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/biden_denies_saying_every_bad_stupid_scary_thing_he_said_last_week.html

As every media outlet in the world reported last week, Joe Biden said three remarkable things: That America’s military would be heading into Ukraine, that it was possible America would use chemical weapons, and that Putin needed to be removed from power, which presumably either a call for Putin’s assassination or for regime change (which Putin probably wouldn’t survive). In each case, the White House went into emergency damage control. Now, though, Biden denies saying any one of those things. Is this a broken brain or his usual narcissistic dishonesty?

One of the coolest things about malignant narcissism, if you happen to be the narcissist, is that you never tell a lie. It’s possible other people might perceive you as lying or even accuse you of lying, but the fact is that you never lie—and you have the passed lie detector tests to prove it.

You see, the deal about being a malignant narcissist is that there is only one truth: Yours. Whatever you need to say at any given moment, either to achieve an advantage or to protect yourself, instantly becomes the one, the only, the absolute truth.

That’s the world in which Biden, a compulsive liar, has always existed. However, when he was one Senator among many—especially among many who shared the same trait—his chronic lying was less obvious. For most people, it first burst into view during his 1987 run for the presidency, when he told a series of lies about his educational abilities and plagiarized a speech from a British politician.

After that, “Joe Biden lies” was a known fact but most people ignored it.