RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/impeachment_snoozer_what_kind_of_trial_is_this.html

For Democrats, their impeachment and trial of President Trump is a bust.

All their their pious — “democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and precarious and transitory thing” flapdoodle — and hopes for a grande finale Getting Trump … isn’t drawing an audience. It’s a dud. A re-run. And almost nobody’s watching.

Voice of America, citing Nielsen, noted how bad it was, citing the House-side 3-million viewer fiasco:

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump couldn’t have higher stakes, but as an historic two-week-long televised event, it has been something of a ratings bust.

The third impeachment trial in the history of the United States Senate hasn’t come close to toppling viewership records, according to the Nielsen rating agency.

So far, the live coverage of President Trump’s Senate impeachment hearings has garnered fewer television viewers than the audiences that tuned in to see other historic congressional hearings, including appearances by James Comey, Brett Kavanaugh, Michael Cohen and Robert Mueller.

The Senate trial isn’t much better. Day one drew 12 million viewers, with the bulk concentrated on left-wing CNN and MSNBC. Fox News roped in just 1.4 million. 

In contrast, James Comey in 2017 drew 19.5 million viewers. Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 packed in 21 million. A non-entity, Michael Cohen, in 2019 got 13.8 million watchers.

These guys? 12 million at best. For sure it’s a bust. Even Joe Biden is trying to distance himself from this bloviating crap, claiming: “I have a job.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/cuomos-grim-reaping/

Andrew Cuomo successfully covered up more than 5,000 deaths tied to nursing homes.

T wo weeks ago, a Democratic attorney general of New York who had enjoyed Andrew Cuomo’s backing released a tentative preliminary report that gingerly suggested the actual death toll from COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes was “approximately 50 percent” higher than Cuomo’s numbers had all led us to believe.

Experienced Cuomo watchers scoffed: Despite being labeled a “bombshell” in the media, the AG report was obviously soft-pedaling the reality. Attorney General Letitia James is well aware of the potential hazards of incurring Cuomo’s wrath and seemed to be at pains to make the report as bland as possible. It sampled only 10 percent of state nursing homes.

The actual numbers keep rising, and now the estimated death toll from COVID in nursing homes is 62 percent higher than Cuomo was claiming just last month. Cuomo’s disastrous March 25, 2020, order that nursing homes must accept COVID-infected individuals, which was not rescinded until May 10, may have been the single worst policy blunder made by any American official during the pandemic.Making matters worse, Cuomo has worked furiously to cover up the facts for nearly a year. His own aide, Melissa DeRosa, acknowledged as much in a call to state Democratic lawmakers in which she blatantly admitted hiding the truth for fear of political repercussions. “We froze” out of fear that the truth would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, DeRosa said in the call, whose details were reported by the New York Post, one of the few news outlets that has declined to put on a cheerleader skirt and shake its pom-poms at every Cuomo press conference.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-icons-of-the-left-collapse/

On the menu today: You would have to look far and wide to find a person more celebrated by progressives and most of the national media in 2020 than Andrew Cuomo. You would have to look far and wide to find a political group more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than the Lincoln Project. And you would have to look far and wide to find a place more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than California. And in the last 24 hours, all three fell from their high pedestals and landed with a hard “thud.”

New York State Admits Cover-up of Virus Deaths among Nursing-Home Residents

If you have been reading National Review for the past year, you have known that Andrew Cuomo was an egomaniacal, blustering, bullying charlatan who made catastrophic errors in judgment but whose reputation was protected by CNN’s prime-time programming and national media who desperately needed a heroic Democratic figure to contrast against President Trump. Over the past eleven months, you read about various details of the contrast between the grand illusion of Cuomo and reality from David Harsanyi, Pradheep Shanker, Kyle Smith, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Mairead McArdle, Zach Evans, Tobias Hoonhout, Brittany Bernstein, The Editors, a bunch of others I’m forgetting, and, ahem, me, multiple times. I would argue no other national publication did more to showcase how New York State’s government kept failing its citizens, with deadly consequences, during this pandemic.

And now we get the cherry on top, as the New York Post reports that the state government deliberately hid the figures on the number of nursing-home residents killed by the coronavirus, because they didn’t want the U.S. Department of Justice investigating them:

Governor Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.

The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/trump-defense-impeachment-political-vengeance

Former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyer Michael van der Veen started his defense at Friday’s Senate impeachment trial arguing Democrats objected to Trump’s 2016 election win and engaged in their own behavior aimed at incitement.

“The article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance,” van der Veen told Republicans and Democrats gathered for the fourth day of Trump’s impeachment trial.

After days of dramatic video footage Democratic impeachment managers presented to show the severity of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters, the defense team played their own montage that showed prominent Democrats making incendiary comments.

President Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. John Tester and Cory Booker, and Rep. Maxine Waters, were among the Democrats the defense team portrayed on video making arguably inflammatory statements about Trump and in support of the violent and deadly social justice protests last summer.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/12/the-persecution-of-gina-carano/

“This is why the Gina Carano story matters. It points to the ruthlessness with which the new elites will police dissenting thought, punish heretics, and remind everyone who is in charge of policing the parameters of acceptable thought in the 21st century — us.”

It’s official: only liberals are allowed to talk shit about the Holocaust. That’s the take-home message of the Gina Carano scandal. For here we have a right-wing woman being shamed and sacked for doing what luvvies and leftish types have been doing for years: comparing the early 21st century to Nazi Germany.

The double standards are mind-blowing. Carano has been dumped by Disney, from her starring role in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, for suggesting that the political hatreds of the 2020s echo the nastiness of the Holocaust era. In an ill-advised Instagram story, she compared the flak that right-wingers like her get with the contempt visited upon Jews in 1930s Germany. ‘Hating someone for their political views’ is not that different to when the Nazis turned on Jewish people, she said.

This is really dumb, of course. It is a classic example of a problem spiked has written about many times: Holocaust Relativism. This is when people plunder the past suffering of Jews in search of metaphors with which they might describe and condemn something they don’t like about today.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/impeachment-blunder-author-tweet-introduced-trial-says-it-was

he author of a tweet introduced by Democrats at the Senate impeachment trial said Thursday her statement “we are bringing the Calvary” was a clear reference to a prayer vigil organized by churchgoers supporting Trump and not a call for military-like violence at the Capitol riot as portrayed by Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Jennifer Lynn Lawrence also said she believes the California Democrat and House impeachment manager falsified her tweet, adding a blue check mark to the version he introduced at the trial suggesting she was a verified Twitter user with more clout when in fact her Twitter account never had a blue check and has never been verified.

“I noticed when they put my tweet on the screen that all of a sudden my tweet had a blue checkmark next to it,” she said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “… This way, if he entered that into congressional testimony, it’s a verified account, and it has, it could be applicable in law. Secondly, he wanted to show that my Twitter account had more gravitas than it actually did. He wanted to show that the president was trying to use me to bring in the cavalry.”

A check of Lawrence’s Twitter account shows she does not have a blue check verification. Swalwell’s version of her tweet introduced at the trial did.

Swalwell’s office did not immediately return a call Thursday seeking reaction.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/impeaching-the-voters/91418/

At the heart of the case against President Trump levied this week by House prosecutors lies the violence itself — what it looked like up close, inside the Capitol. Video conveyed the intensity, danger, coarseness of language, and scent of blood that seethed through the vast premises. The House used shocking footage never before seen by the public, making clear that things were far worse than Americans had so far appreciated. Powerful.

Then again, too, if this footage was able to shock the nation four weeks after January 6, why must one assume that President Trump himself grasped what was happening at the time of the events? He was more than a mile away. He had expressed confidence that everyone at his rally would be marching to the Capitol building to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Then he’d returned to the White House.

The House would have the Senate believe that Mr. Trump was apprised, during a phone call with Senator Tuberville, of how dangerous the situation had become. By the senator’s own account, though, it was a glancing exchange in which the Alabaman informed the President that Vice President Pence had just been rushed from the chamber. Did the President, did anyone, fully grasp then what the House disclosed this week?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/impeachment-trap-joseph-hippolito/

President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, which began Tuesday, could provide the turning point for his and his opponents’ legacies — though not in the way many might think.

Trump and his lawyers could use the trial to prove conclusively the existence of nationwide fraud in last year’s Presidential election. Trump thus not only would ensure acquittal in the Senate and begin his second term. He would disgrace and destroy his enemies for all time.

Ironically and unwittingly, the House of Representatives put itself in such an untenable position. The impeachment resolutionstated that for two months, Trump “repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials.”

The resolution also stated that on Jan. 6, during a rally while Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s ostensible election, Trump “reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.’ ”

In demanding impeachment, the resolution claimed Trump incited protesters to breach Capitol security — despite evidence to the contrary, as FrontPage Magazine reported in “The Ultimate Betrayal” and “Capturing the False Flag.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/cuomo_aide_admits_to_hiding_data_about_nursing_home_deaths.html

At the end of January, we learned that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Wuhan virus policies when the disease first hit his state killed approximately 50% more elderly people than his administration had first acknowledged. That information just got worse with word that one of his top aides apologized to the state’s Democrat legislators for deliberately lying about the nursing home death toll. They had to lie, she explained, because President Trump was after them for killing “everyone in nursing homes.”

Within a very short time of the Wuhan virus’s accelerated appearance in America last year, it was obvious that the elderly were the most likely to die from the virus. Nevertheless, Andrew Cuomo mandated that group homes housing the elderly (retirement communities, long-term care facilities, etc.), accept from hospitals patients diagnosed with the Wuhan virus.

He did this even though President Trump moved with incredible rapidity to bring a hospital ship to New York City and to build temporary hospitals in the city. It’s tempting to speculate about Cuomo’s decision-making, which was sure to kill the elderly in his state, but I won’t. I’ll just say that there is no scenario that makes him look anything other than grossly negligent or actively malignant.

By July, the data that New York state released showed that the virus had killed 6,400 elderly people. That’s why, in August, the Department of Justice began investigating New York, along with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Said the DOJ, “New York has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, with 32,592 victims, many of them elderly.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/11/the-callous-covid-cruelty-of-our-ruling-class/

The cruelty, Donald Trump’s foes often claimed, is the point.

Whether in response to a mean tweet or childish name-calling or the infamous “kids in cages” episode, the president’s critics collectively wailed in performative grief about Trump’s self-gratifying “cruelty” toward others.

But Trump’s outbursts pale in comparison to the level of cruelty inflicted on the country’s most vulnerable by those in power. As I wrote in April, coronavirus hysteria has unleashed the inner tyrant in anyone with a modicum of authority, from fame-seeking aged bureaucrats down to the local homeowners’ association president. The only upside, if one can be found in an otherwise catastrophic period of unnecessary human misery, is that the ruling class’ depravity now is fully exposed; the face mask, so to speak, has slipped, and slipped for good.

More horrifying, however, is that no one in power shows the slightest hint of regret. They are, by all indications, actually enjoying it. They are sadists.

In her briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki glibly moved the goalposts on school reopenings. Joe Biden weaponized school shutdowns during the campaign as more evidence that Trump mishandled the pandemic. “If President Trump and his administration had done their jobs early on with this crisis, American schools would be open and be opened safely,” Biden said during a speech explaining his school reopening plan in October. “Instead . . . American families are paying the price for his failures.”

Biden referred to prolonged school shutdowns as a “national emergency” and accurately lamented that millions of children, particularly those with special needs and from poor communities, were falling behind. He pledged to reopen most schools within the first 100 days of his presidency; the plan, of course, was contingent on at least a few hundred billion dollars in no-strings-attached goodies for public school systems.

Now that he occupies the Oval Office, the “national emergency” apparently has been downgraded to a political nuisance for Biden. 

“His goal he set is to have the majority of schools, so more than 50 percent, open by day one hundred of his presidency and that means some teaching in classrooms,” Psaki said Tuesday. “So at least one day a week, hopefully it’s more. Teaching one day a week in the majority of schools by day 100.”