RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In 1935, while Nazism and Fascism swept across Europe, Sinclair Lewis published a novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.” The story was based on Huey Long, then governor of Louisiana. It tells the story of how “Buzz” Windrip, running on a populist platform and portraying himself as a champion of traditional values, defeats FDR at the Democratic convention and then goes on to win the 1936 election for President. He soon takes complete control of government and, with a paramilitary force, like that of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s, he imposes totalitarian rule.

Is Lewis’ story a lesson for today? Despite accusations from Democrats, I suspect the threat to democracy is more likely to emerge from left field. As Gerard Baker put it in Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal, regarding Democrats’ desire to preserve political power as we head toward the mid-terms: “…the identification of the domestic opposition as a seditious enemy may be their last, best hope of salvaging something.” After a failed start to his Presidency, it is all Mr. Biden has left.

There is a natural tendency to look to the past as a guide for dealing with today and tomorrow. Professor George Santayana (1863-1952), in his 1905 book Reason in Common Sense, warned: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Wise advice, but perspective is also needed. Politics is a competitive sport, appealing to many who make it their life’s work. Power, prestige and money are on the line. It was unsurprising when outsider Donald Trump, acting as a populist and portraying himself as a patriot and champion of middle-American values, was deemed a threat to democracy. He was narcissistic and loose with facts, and he fed off the resentment of many middle-Americans toward coastal elitists who dominate Washington’s bureaucracies, especially its intelligence agencies, run universities, manage media and entertainment companies, professional sports, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But was Trump a threat to our democratic system? I think not. Too many forces were assembled against him.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/ten_statistics_to_ruin_your_day.html

Over the past few years, I’ve encountered various statistics that ruined my day, so to spread the pain, I’ve collected a few here.  Let’s start with:

The nuclear family fades in the USA:

According to a Pew Research study, the United States has the highest number of children living in single-parent households.  Almost one-fourth (23%) of children in the U.S. under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adult, which is the highest in the world.

Astronomical debt:

Our national debt in 2021 was over 28 trillion dollars.  This was 122% of GDP.  That ratio is important because investors worry about default when the debt-to-GDP ratio is greater than 77% — that’s the tipping point.  To give you an idea of how big a trillion is, the sun is less than half a trillion feet away from the Earth.

Tens of millions can’t read:

More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level.

But our competitors can read:

China in 2015 awarded 1.2 million bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering, according to the National Science Foundation, six times the number in the United States, and the absolute number of Chinese graduates, as well as the ratio of Chinese to American graduates, have grown since then.

We’re not having kids:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/10/disgraced-fbi-no-2-andrew-mccabe-calls-for-feds-to-treat-mainstream-conservatives-like-domestic-terrorists/

To Andrew McCabe, January 6 is the key to implementing frighteningly despotic policies that target conservatives.

Have you ever wondered what disgraced former deputy FBI directors do after trying to stage a coup and lying under oath? Apparently, they give talks about “protecting democracy” at top-rated institutions of higher learning. Indeed, this last Thursday the University of Chicago invited former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to join a panel of partisans to discuss the Jan 6 “insurrection.” 

McCabe was fired as the deputy FBI director for leaking sensitive information about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation and then lying about it under oath. He also took part in spying on the Donald Trump campaign through a secret warrant granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The dossier he used to obtain the surveillance warrant was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, in an ironic twist, was itself the product of Russian disinformation. McCabe and his allies in corporate media justified all sorts of similar illegal and undemocratic tactics to discredit and attempt to unseat President Trump. 

Of course, neither the University of Chicago nor McCabe acknowledged the irony in him discussing the integrity of “democracy” in America on Thursday evening. In fact, what McCabe said at the University of Chicago event on Jan. 6, 2022 is even more shocking than his invitation to speak in the first place. Below are four of the most appalling assertions and policy proposals McCabe made at the public event.

1. Conservatives Are in The Same Category As Islamic Terrorists 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/12/joe-bidens-approval-rating-sinks-to-new-low-of-33-percent-in-shock-poll/

Joe Biden has reached a new low in popularity according to a new poll released on Wednesday.

Despite the corporate media’s liberal bias, only 33 percent of voters approve of Joe Biden’s job performance, according to a Quinnipiac University survey.

Spelling doom for Democrats, only 25 percent of independent voters approve of Biden. Congressional Democrats have uniformly supported Biden’s radical agenda.

Among Democrats in the poll, 75 percent approve, 14 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion, down 11 points from two months ago.

The poll also showed that Biden is deeply unpopular with white men and women, young voters and with Hispanics.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/12/politicizing-covid-19-from-the-start/

From the moment COVID-19 appeared, the pandemic became inseparable from politics. 

Political frenzy was inevitable since the SARS-CoV-2 virus likely escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. 

The rapid-fire spread soon threatened to indict the communist Chinese government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions. 

Western elites, in response, feared that their own lucrative investments in China would be jeopardized by such disclosures—and so acted accordingly in defending Beijing. 

Nonetheless, the most likely scenario remains that the escaped virus was birthed by gain-of-function research scientists—overseen by elements of the Chinese communist military. Worse, the lab was given subsidies by U.S. health authorities, routed through third parties. Hiding all of that damaging information warped government policy and media coverage. 

Belatedly, a panicked China shut down all domestic travel in and out of Wuhan—but not flights abroad to Western Europe and the United States. 

The rest is history. 

From the outset, the World Health Organization simply spread false talking points about the outbreak from the Chinese government, delaying a robust global response. 

Donald Trump’s political opponents initially told Americans to shop and travel as usual—only to pivot as cases mounted and they blamed the president. 

The U.S. 2020 ban on travel from China was met with charges of racism and xenophobia from presidential candidates. Ironically, many were simply channeling racist and xenophobic China’s propaganda. 

Many doctors kept hammering the need for therapeutics, including taboo off-label use of cheap generic drugs. The use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin was widely ridiculed—despite continuing studies from abroad attesting to their usefulness. 

Trump’s Operation Warp Speed project to develop vaccinations was also pilloried. Candidates Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did their best to talk down the safety of the impending inoculations. But once in power, they projected their own prior harmful rhetoric onto so-called “anti-vaxxers.”

Then they claimed credit for the initial success of the Trump vaccinations. 

The Pfizer corporation had promised a major pre-election announcement about its likely rollout of a vaccine in October, just days before the 2020 election. 

Then, mysteriously, Pfizer claimed the vaccine, in fact, would not be ready before November 3. A few days after the election of Joe Biden, the company reversed course and announced the vaccinations would soon be available. 

Then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo obstructed most all federal help with Trump’s fingerprints on it. That way Cuomo became a media, Emmy-winning darling—before resigning in disgrace. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/joe_biden_is_yelling_at_americans_again.html

The senile old fool over at the White House, supposedly a man of moderation and experience, sure has a way of persuading voters. 

He made one colossal dog of a speech on Jan. 6, screaming about President Trump and his supporters.  He’s since decided to encore himself, with a new round of yelling at the public.

According to the Newsweek transcript of the speech, which was the only one I could find, he began with this tripe, appropriating the cadences of the Declaration of Independence and President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address both of which were gravity-laden calls to war

In our lives and the lives of our nation — the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before from everything that followed. They stop time. They rip away the trivial from the essential. And they force us to confront hard truths about ourselves, about our institutions, and about our democracy.

In the words of Scripture, they remind us to “hate evil, love good, and establish justice in the gate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/old-man-yells-at-cloud/

The more Biden shouted and sputtered yesterday in Georgia, the more America went ‘Huh?’

Y ou know you’re about as useful as an anvil on a life raft when a prominent member of your own party won’t come out when you visit her state to talk about the issue closest to her heart. Why did Stacey Abrams suddenly discover she had other commitments when President Biden went down to Atlanta to yammer and squawk about the made-up threat of voter suppression? Did her nephew have a hockey game or something? Ordinarily, you’d guess that a sucking chest wound wouldn’t have stopped Abrams from banging a voting-rights gong beside Biden. Instead, “Sorry, Mr. Leader of the Free World, Ms. Abrams has a scheduling conflict.”

Abrams was wise to stay away; on the same day that the entire state of Georgia was in a state of rapture following the Bulldogs’ National Championship win the night before, Biden shuffled in like the character in Encanto who has a rain cloud over her head, to tell everyone they’re living in 1963 and the Klan is about to ride through whipping everyone with rusty chains if they go near a voting booth in November. The more Biden coughed and shouted and sputtered, the more America went “Huh?” and pictured the president screaming the exact same balderdash at the nearest CNN-spewing monitor while wearing a tattered bathrobe and scruffy slippers at a Sunset Acres facility in Wilmington.

What on earth was the old man shouting about this time? Voter suppression? Voter subversion? Voting in Georgia is easier now than it was ten years ago, much less in 1963. It has more early voting than Delaware. Its electioneering policies forbidding the buying of voters with Happy Meals and Dr Peppers are so not-Jim-Crow that New York and New Jersey have the same rules.

The big news in the speech is that Biden wants to nuke the filibuster he backed throughout his career, up to as recently as six months ago when he warned, “You will throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” Doing so would also likely cost several vulnerable Democrats their seats in that body, which is why Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan are starting to act like they’re clay pigeons who have just been invited to a shooting party. “I support changing the Senate rules,” said Biden, “WHICHEVER WAY THEY NEED TO BE CHANGED TO PREVENT A MINORITY OF SENATORS from blocking action on voting rights. Cough.” Yeah, but Mr. President, maybe consider that the reason this monumentally dumb idea is dead is that “YOUR OWN PARTY DOESN’T BACK YOU.” Also, there’s no constitutional provision that says CONGRESS SHALL DEFER TO THE PRESIDENT WHENEVER HE SHOUTS.

It seems clear enough that Biden’s is going to be the second straight presidency destroyed by Twitter; Biden actually thinks that the activist obsessions of political alcoholics on social media are an important indicator of where the country is heading. Poll after poll shows that Americans rate the economy, inflation, the ongoing Covid crisis, and (the void of) leadership as their main issues of concern, and the alleged end of democracy and the voter-rights crisis are down there in the lint trap of issues alongside “Do something about the entry fees at the national parks.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/three-leftist-supreme-court-judges-and-fear-porn-matthew-vadum/

The bewildering array of false statements offered by the three left-leaning Supreme Court justices at the special Jan. 7 hearing on President Joe Biden’s unprecedented vaccination diktats for private-sector and health care workers is now a matter of public record.

It took just a few hours of people tuning into the live broadcast of oral arguments to open a window into why the federal government – filled as it is with ignoramuses, posterior-osculators, charlatans, and grifters – doesn’t work.

All across social media Americans quite properly ridiculed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan for their fear porn and astonishing ignorance about COVID-19, as if these jurists got all their news from the professional misinformers at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC.

Sometimes it seemed like the liberal law lords got their professional degrees from arguing on social media comment threads as they amplified COVID-19 hysteria.

The at-times abysmal quality of the justices’ colloquys prompted the satirical Babylon Bee to publish a piece titled “Nation’s Fate Now In The Hands Of 8 Dummies And Clarence Thomas.”

Hyperbolic? A little, maybe.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/12/bareshelvesbiden-saved-christmas-but-not-the-new-year/

Just before the holiday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki took to the press room podium to laughably brag about how “we’ve saved Christmas” because President Joe Biden supposedly fixed the nation’s supply chain crisis. She said that “President Biden recognized this challenge early, acted as an honest broker to bring key stakeholders together, and focused on addressing practical problems across the global supply chain.”

That was good enough for the mainstream media, which had turned a blind eye to the supply chain problems once Biden claimed he had a plan to fix it.

Except, less than three weeks later, #BareShelvesBiden is trending on Twitter, shoppers are sharing pictures of empty store shelves, and the media are being forced – however reluctantly – to report that shortages are actually a worsening problem.

Shortages are everywhere. Whether it’s goods, food, people, COVID tests, you name it. The CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain is warning of meat and egg shortages. The Daily Beast reports that “shortages of glass and other materials continue, coupled with extensive shipping delays and skyrocketing freight costs.” One site asked readers to send examples of shortages, and cold medicine was in the top five.

A newspaper in Cape Cod finds “empty grocery shelves and downsized restaurant menus rising amid supply chain struggles.”

A Chicago news station reports that “as an ongoing computer chip shortage continues to affect the auto industry among many others, a shortage of used cars has led to a shortage of used semi-trucks as well, further affecting the supply chain.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/13/bidens-empty-shelf-america-is-a-country-boris-yeltsin-wouldnt-recognize/

In 1989, Boris Yeltsin visited a Randalls supermarket in Texas. He was astonished at what he saw: shelves, coolers, and freezers bursting with groceries. Were the late Russian president to visit today, he would find many of America’s stores having a lot in common with those of the centrally planned Soviet Union, where the inventory was chronically low, the customers morose.

According to reports of the day, Yeltsin, then still a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “roamed the aisles of Randalls nodding his head in amazement,” declaring that “even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.”

“He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution,’” the Houston Chronicle said in a sort of “remember when” article a few years back.

Yeltsin’s biographer said that afterward he “was despondent” and “couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.”

“​​For a long time, on the plane to Miami,” after the visit, “he sat motionless, his head in his hands,” Leon Aron wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life.” 

“What have they done to our poor people?” Yeltsin asked. 

“On his return to Moscow,” Aron wrote, “Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’”