RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-roosevelt-back-to-the-badlands/91960/

This is the week in which the statue of Theodore Roosevelt begins its journey to the Badlands from its pedestal in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Let us just say that New York’s loss will be North Dakota’s gain. The statue had come under fire as “a racist work of public art,” as a mayoral advisory commission described it. It’s hardly a “Square Deal” for TR, who did more than most in his day for racial equality.

When the statue was unveiled in 1940, a New York Times editorial applauded Roosevelt’s taking “his place in enduring bronze among the monuments of this city that he loved.” The Times predicted “few, passing the newly dedicated statue and noting the firm, up-tilted chin and the eyes fixed on a far distance, will doubt” TR “would have met present problems face-forward, with high courage and clear decision.”

Eighty years later, “present problems” have dictated a change of plans. The museum recently lumped the statue among other “powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism” subjected to scrutiny amid “the movement for racial justice that emerged after the murder of George Floyd.” Evicting Roosevelt is a symbol of “progress toward an inclusive and equitable community,” the museum claimed.

https://www.nysun.com/national/biden-doubles-down-but-the-american-voters-are/91957/

So, no reset or midcourse changes for President Biden. That’s what we learned in the President’s presser. Big government socialist policies are alive and well. He’s doubling down.

According to Mr Biden, the polls are wrong, you see, the country really loves him and his policies. So his job is to travel around and better communicate his achievements and his goals to the American people.

That’s basically how I read yesterday’s performance. Trouble is for Uncle Joe, the public actually knows full well what his so-called achievements and policies are.

Voters are smarter than the radical left thinks. Polling is as much art as science, but seldom have I seen as much unanimity.

From Byron York’s column yesterday, the Gallup poll shows a remarkable swing from a year ago, when 49% considered themselves Democrats against 40% Republicans. Now it’s just 42% Democrats against 47% Republicans. That’s a net 14-point swing over just one year. Unprecedented.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-694114

Less than two hours before a Pakistani-born British Muslim took four Jews hostage at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas last Saturday, African-American Martial Simon pushed a young woman into an oncoming subway at the Times Square station in New York City.

In the first case, only the perpetrator wound up dead. In the second, it was the victim who lost her life.

These two unrelated incidents have more in common than immediately meets the eye. Both involved assailants who were well-known to law enforcement. Each was said by family members to be suffering from “mental illness.”

Let’s start with Malik Faisal Akram. Entering the synagogue during Shabbat-morning services and announcing his affiliation with Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, the armed foreign national held the rabbi and three congregants captive for 11 hours straight. (The rest of the already dwindling flock was participating via Zoom, due to the spike in COVID-19 infection.)

For most of the day, FBI SWAT-team agents negotiated with Akram, whose reference to Siddiqui as his “sister” turned out to be an expression of ideological, rather than literal, kinship. But his emotional attachment to “Lady al-Qaeda” was strong enough for him to travel across the ocean to demand her release from the prison where she is serving an 86-year sentence for the attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan and in connection with a plot to carry out a mass-casualty attack.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/joe-bidens-fractured-fairy-tales-don-feder/

Joe Biden has been called a pathological liar, Pinocchio on steroids, delusional and totally detached from reality.

That’s unfair. Instead, let’s just say the president has a flair for fiction. Think of him as a master storyteller to put Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to shame. Here are a few of my favorite Biden bedtime stories:

The Democrats Freedom to Vote Act will secure the right to vote for millions of Americans the GOP is trying to disenfranchise – Biden said Republicans working for election reform (secure ballots) are on the side of George Wallace not Martin Luther King. So, according to POTUS, to stand with the civil rights icon means supporting ballots mailed out en masse, casting ballots by putting them in drop-boxes, no requirement of signature verification, and no ID of any sort if you vote in person. DC now requires proof of vaccination and a photo ID to enter most indoor venues. That must mean that Mayor Bowser stands with George Wallace.
 
White Supremacy is a threat to democracy – Did white supremacists riot in more than 23 states in 2020, burning whole city blocks? (Actually, that was BLM and Antifa.) Are there hundreds of churches preaching white supremacy? (No, but there are hundreds of mosques preaching jihad.) Are foreign governments supporting white nationalism? (Oh, you must mean the way Iran, Yemen and half a dozen other Islamic states fund jihad here?) White supremacy is the Democrats’ “look-over-here” ploy to distract the credulous from Islamic extremism and leftists subversion.
 
What happened on January 6, 2021 was an insurrection or an attempted coup, if you prefer. – You betcha, struck at the very heart of democracy it did. Except, the only death directly attributable to the riot at the Capitol was an unarmed protestor shot by Capitol police. In fact, none of the rioters had guns. (How do you overthrow a government with supersonic jets by throwing folding chairs?) January 6, 2021 is the Democrats’ Reichstag fire. The goal is to criminalize the conservative movement and the half of the country that agrees with Donald Trump. The real threat to democracy isn’t the non-insurrection of 2021, but using the myth to crush dissent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/bidens-press-conference-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden began his January 19th news conference with scripted remarks boasting about his first-year performance. He continued with an eyebrow-raising, delusional self-assessment for nearly two hours, in which he claimed that he had “probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen” while blaming Republicans and COVID-19 for failing to do even more.

“Can you think of any other President that has done as much in one year?” Biden asked reporters rhetorically. In one sense, he had a strong point: it is a challenge to think of any other U.S. president who has done more damage to the country domestically and globally in his first year in office than Joe Biden has done.

Biden rambled much of the time in responding to questions from the press regarding such topics as Russia’s designs on Ukraine, the economy, COVID-19, his pledges to bring unity to the country, and the fate of his Build Back Better and voting “reform” legislation. Rampant crime in cities across the country and unremitting surges of illegal aliens across the open southern border with Mexico did not come up.

Biden made his usual share of faux pas, most notably seeming to give Russia leeway for a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki quickly released a statement intended to walk back this gaffe. Biden himself followed up with his own “clarifying” statement but it was too late. “We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shot back on Twitter. “Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/20/the-pathetic-and-political-sedition-case-against-the-oath-keepers/

Facing intensifying criticism from Democratic lawmakers, journalists, and even some federal judges for not seeking harsher punishment against January 6 protesters, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally produced charges to appease his detractors. Last week, more than a year after the so-called insurrection, Garland charged 11 members of the Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy.

The star of the new indictment, handed down by a grand jury on January 12, is Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the alleged militia group. (His co-defendants were charged with several other offenses months ago.)

Rhodes, described only as “person one” for nearly a year in numerous criminal indictments related to his organization, has been a free man since January 6, 2021, raising plausible suspicions that he may have been a government informant at the time. After all, the FBI has a longstanding pattern of infiltrating fringe groups such as the Oath Keepers and moving them to commit indictable crimes.

Under the definition of “seditious conspiracy,” prosecutors allege Rhodes and his co-defendants conspired to halt the “lawful transfer of presidential power by force” including not just the Electoral College certification but the inauguration, which was 14 days away.

The flagrantly political move will give the Justice Department a temporary reprieve from its loud chorus of critics on the Left. January 6 propagandists boast that the new charges finally offer some support to the heretofore baseless claim that the events of that day amounted to an “insurrection.” Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the D.C. court handling every January 6 case, recently expressed her dismay at the “petty offenses” sought by prosecutors; she undoubtedly will be thrilled with the news.

Corporate media also commend this apparently sweeping indictment. “It’s hard to underemphasize (sic) how significant this is,” former FBI official and MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi told Nicolle Wallace after the indictment was announced. CNN legal analyst Asha Rangappa concluded that “even if Trump wasn’t directly involved in their ‘plan,’ his [exhortation] to his lunatic mob to head to the Capitol definitely helped them execute their operation.” 

But the real question is whether the government can make the charges stick. As my book, January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right, details, the case against the Oath Keepers is weak. Out of the 20 people tied to the Oath Keepers (three have accepted plea deals), only one is accused of assaulting or impeding a police officer. No Oath Keeper is charged with carrying or using a weapon; the only property charge is “aiding and abetting” the destruction of government property. None are charged with directly inflicting any damage.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/20/a-scandal-for-every-month-the-biggest-botches-failures-and-mess-ups-of-joe-bidens-first-12-months-in-office/

It’s not hard to remember a Biden disaster for every month of his first year at the stern … or in the basement, as the case may be.

Joe Biden has been in the Oval Office (or that weird set in the Eisenhower building’s South Court auditorium with the greenscreen windows) for a year now, and he’s already managed to make his short presidency known for a long line-up of scandals, botches, and slip-ups.

It’s too hard to narrow the list down to one top failure, although his disgracefully handled Afghanistan withdrawal may be the most sobering and inflation may be the one that played the biggest role in Biden’s tanking approval ratings. Even though Biden’s mess-ups tally up to far more than 12, it’s not hard to remember a Biden-enabled disaster for every month of the septuagenarian’s first year at the stern … or in the basement.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/21/is-covid-jobs-recession-about-to-get-worse/

Hand it to President Joe Biden: He sticks to his story no matter what. In this week’s press conference, he again tooted his own horn when it comes to job creation. “We created 6 million new jobs, more jobs in one year than any time before,” Biden said.

True enough, but as even the Associated Press noted: “The economy added 6.4 million jobs in 2021, the most on government records dating back to 1939, but part of that is just a natural rebound from what had been the steepest job loss on record in 2020, when 9.4 million jobs were cut.”

In fact, the U.S. remains in a serious jobs recession, one that’s more different than any in modern history. After nearly two years under government imposed restraints to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, we still remain below the pre-pandemic job levels.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/19/is-america-heading-for-a-systems-collapse/

In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a “systems collapse.” The term describes the sudden inability of once prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it. 

Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities. They feel their streets are unsafe. Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably. Everyday things stop working. The government turns from reliable to capricious if not hostile. 

Consider contemporary Venezuela. By 2010, the once well-off oil-exporting country was mired in a self-created mess. Food became scarce, crime ubiquitous. 

Radical socialism, nationalization, corruption, jailing opponents, and the destruction of constitutional norms were the culprits. 

Between 2009 and 2016, a once relatively stable Greece nearly became a Third World country. So did Great Britain in its socialist days of the 1970s. 

Joe Biden’s young presidency may already be leading the United States into a similar meltdown. 

Hard Left “woke” ideology has all but obliterated the idea of a border. Millions of impoverished foreigners are entering the United States illegally—and during a pandemic without either COVID-19 tests or vaccinations. 

The health bureaucracies have lost credibility as official communiques on masks, herd and acquired immunity, vaccinations, and comorbidities apparently change and adjust to perceived political realities. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/dems-media-turn-biden-bruce-thornton/

The Biden Administrations’ failures are so numerous and egregious, as Jim Geraghty catalogues, that court-scribes like the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN are turning on him. Even DNC heartthrob Stacey Abrams, chronic denier of election results, snubbed Biden when he came to Georgia.

The media’s new-found willingness to fulfill their self-proclaimed sacred charge to “afflict the comfortable” and “speak truth to power,” however, is driven not by a recovered fidelity to fact, evidence-based argument, and objectivity, but by Biden’s record-setting disapproval numbers, especially the declines among Latinos, independents, and young people––constituencies critical for the Democrats’ longed-for “permanent majority.”

So don’t expect the current criticism to signal the media’s return to fact and coherent argument. They’ve just been spooked by the specter of a red midterm tsunami come November. They’re still slaves to the anti-constitutional Leviathan technocracy, growth-killing regulate-tax-redistribute economics,  illiberal racialist identity politics, naïve globalism, and preposterous narratives of “white supremacists,” “systemic racism,” “voter suppression,” and the Trump-led “insurrection” against “our democracy.”

A column from the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle illustrates this reflexive fidelity to ideology and lies in the face of the media’s patent contribution to Biden’s failures. The bulk of her piece chides the Democrats for not taking seriously the possibility of a Republican return to power, because Dems stereotype conservatives as the party of “reactionary whites” condemned by demographic change to wander forever in the political wilderness. This misperception has pushed the current Democrat control of all three branches of government too far to the left, and hence alienates the party’s moderates and white working-class voters, as well as Asians and Hispanics whom Republicans have been siphoning from the Democrat coalition.