RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/22/the-coming-dethronement-of-joe-biden/

It’s not often that I agree with Joe Biden, but he said something in his nasty, brutish, and long press conference last week with which, if properly understood, I agree. 

Don’t get me wrong. The press conference as a whole was a “total disaster.” Notwithstanding the sycophantic performance of the court eunuchs in the regime media, everybody understands this. (But speaking of “court eunuchs,” what’s the female equivalent? It was Jennifer Rubin, who actually gave Biden an “A-” for the presser, that prompts this vital question and I hope some enterprising savant will contribute the answer.) 

At one point, a reporter, noting a few of the multifarious failures of Biden’s first year in office—runaway inflation; his failure to “shut down the virus”; the smoldering ruin of his legislative agenda; the sharp, persistent partisan divisions that he came to office promising to heal—given all that, the scribe suggested, perhaps Biden had “overpromised.” 

No, no, Biden replied, “I didn’t overpromise, but I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.” 

Delicious, isn’t it? Peel off and discard the first bit. Biden clearly overpromised. Just utter the word “normalcy” anywhere near the name “Biden” and watch the reaction. But many people jumped all over the second bit. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for example, quoted the word “outperformed” and tweeted: “I’m not sure what planet he’s inhabiting but on planet earth his record is a record of failure.” 

That is true. It’s a dismal record of failure, and we’ve only made it through one year. Biden’s even outdone his master, Barack Obama, who before Biden held the world record for worst president in the history of the United States. Biden is far worse, in part, granted, because he continues to follow the blueprint set forth by his clean, elegantly clad predecessor.

But I have to cavil with the idea that Biden has not “outperformed” expectations. He certainly outperformed mine. I didn’t think he would make it through his first year in the White House. But here it is, January 20-something, and the old guy is still in office. Amazing. 

True, there is something of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the whole thing. Presented with the spectacle of female preachers, Samuel Johnson marveled: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

My feelings about Biden are somewhat similar. I have accordingly revised my prediction. I was wrong that Joe Biden wouldn’t make it through his first year. I continue to cling to the conviction he will not remain the occupant of the White House through to the morning of January 20, 2025. The prospect of a second Biden term is, I am convinced, not worth speaking about. In tragedy, Aristotle said, we should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, but a second Biden term is so improbable as to be well-nigh impossible, and I am not forgetting about what a tragedy such an eventuality would entail for the country and the world. Even CNN seems to be coming around to this realization.

If I am even remotely correct about this, Biden’s situation presents the unnamed committee who actually runs the presidency with a huge and delicate problem. Biden’s behavior long ago passed from embarrassing to dangerous. We can see that all around us. 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/george-orwells-1984-gets-trigger-warning-daniel-greenfield/

Irony is not only dead, it was beaten to death in a back alley by a woke mob.

The Left is not only trying to usher in the very Ministry of Information that George Orwell was satirizing in 1984 in order to fight “disinformation”, it’s actually slapping a trigger warning on 1984.

Staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

No doubt. That’s probably the point.

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.”

What would Orwell have made of this?

After 1984 became so influential, everyone tried to appropriate Orwell. And 1984 regularly featured in the lists of celebrated ‘Banned Books’ though, invariably, these were books that were rarely actually banned. Unlike Animal Farm, whose specific historical analogies to the Soviet Union and the betrayal of the revolution were explosive at the time, 1984’s dystopia appears more generic and open to political appropriation even though it is once again a restatement of the betrayal of leftists who embraced Soviet totalitarianism with doublethink.

But the metaphorical power of 1984 has always been greater than its grounding in the struggle between liberals and Communists during the dawn of the Cold War.

Now, 1984 is getting its own trigger warnings because it’s “offensive and upsetting”. The new variant of leftism is more ideologically concerned with emotion and the hunt for heresy than with anything else. It doesn’t find tyranny problematic, but it hates having its feelings hurt.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/joe-biden-doesnt-know-what-youre-talking-about/

No U-turns for President Biden ahead of midterms

President Biden begins his second year in office with a 42 percent average job-approval rating. Republicans hold a one-point lead over Democrats in the congressional generic ballot (and the generic-ballot question often underestimates GOP support). The Gallup organization reports that in the final quarter of 2021 Republicans took a five-point lead in party identification for the first time since 1995. As of this writing, 28 House Democrats have announced their retirements, with more expected to follow. Biden’s agenda is stalled in Congress, the Supreme Court blocked his employer vaccine mandate, the coronavirus pandemic continues, and inflation is higher than at any point in the last 39 years. The country — not to mention the president — could use a reset.

We’re not getting one. Instead, on January 19, we got Biden’s combative, discursive, and delusional mess of a one-hour-and-51-minute press conference. Among the reasons the occasion was notable — and notorious — was that it forced the White House to clarify later Biden’s comments on not one but two issues: Biden’s ambiguity over America’s response if Russia launches a “minor incursion” into Ukraine, and Biden’s repeated assertion that the Senate’s failure to pass his election-takeover bills throws the legitimacy of the midterm elections into doubt. To watch Biden at the lectern was to experience shock and dismay interspersed with moments of alarm and dark humor. No wonder he hides from the media. It was the worst presidential press conference since Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

Biden’s message to the 64 percent of the public that says the country is headed in the wrong direction: Everything is fine. Biden’s message to the 42 percent of the public that says economic conditions are poor: You must be joking. “We created six million new jobs — more jobs in one year than at any time before,” Biden said. “Unemployment dropped — the unemployment dropped to 3.9 percent.” Yes, Biden conceded, there is “frustration and fatigue in this country.” But that is due to the pandemic. As for inflation, Biden went on, it will subside when the Federal Reserve tightens the money supply (true), when Congress passes “my Build Back Better plan” (false), and when his anti-monopoly executive orders take effect (also false). “I didn’t overpromise,” Biden said. “But I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/how-progressive-prosecutors-are-betraying-the-constitution/

They’re perverting the principle of prosecutorial discretion to mutilate the laws.

T he job of a judge is to apply the law as it has been written by the legislature. For the last half-century, that has been the most effective argument mounted by constitutional conservatives against activist courts. The judge is not at liberty to legislate. That is, the judge may not revise the laws, under the guise of clearing up nonexistent ambiguities, or filling in nonexistent gaps, or — if we may be blunt about what activist judges actually do — distorting the law to fit the jurist’s subjective sense of fairness and justice.

In a democracy, what is fair and just is left to the judgment of the legislature — the representatives answerable to the people whose lives are directly affected by the laws the legislature enacts. Legislatures are limited only by the Constitution, not by judicial sensibilities.

These principles have been so energetically touted that lawyers can recite them from memory. More importantly, they resonate with the public — to the point that, at confirmation hearings, even progressive judicial candidates pretend to be bound by the law as written. Indeed, it is the historical achievement of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia that seventies-style judicial freewheeling is no longer de rigueur. Judges must at least go through the motions of wrestling with the text of statutes and constitutional clauses. If they fail to acknowledge the binding law (even if only as a pretext for trying to circumvent it), higher courts are virtually certain to reverse their rulings.

So here is the question: Why do we not demand that prosecutors meet this same standard?

In big cities all across the country, criminals are running amok due to the derelictions of the hard Left’s “Progressive Prosecutor Project” (a label I am proud to have had a hand in). But what are these derelictions? To hear critics tell it, they won’t enforce the laws. That’s true, but doesn’t quite nail it.

It’s not like these folks don’t show up for work every day — these anti-prosecution district attorneys, such as Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and, newly added to the cabal, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. To the contrary, progressive prosecutors work very hard. They have to. Like activist judges, they seek to legitimize their machinations by masquerading them as law.

When we look at what the statutes actually say, however, we find that progressive prosecutors are not applying the laws enacted by the people’s representatives. They are unilaterally decreeing new laws — the same mischief over which activist judges endure ridicule and reversal.

No, no, progressives counter, there’s a big difference: Unlike judges, our prosecutors have been elected. Some, in fact, such as Krasner, have been reelected. They are politically accountable. If the people who live under a prosecutor’s nonenforcement policies do not approve of the inevitable surges in crime, they can oust that prosecutor in the next election.

There is some force to that argument. Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and say, “If Philadelphians want Larry Krasner, then they deserve Larry Krasner . . . good and hard.” But ballot box aside, many people in Philadelphia and other Democrat-dominated crime sanctuaries are voting with their feet. They are moving to communities that, because the rule of law still holds sway, are strong and stable. Shouldn’t that rush to the exits be part of the “elections have consequences” ledger?

In any event, the main flaw in the “they’re elected” defense of progressive prosecutors is constitutional. Executive officials are not elected to make the laws but to enforce them. In this regard, separation of powers is not merely a legal technicality. The Framers understood that the quickest path to a democratic republic’s destruction would be the accumulation, in a single set of hands, of the powers to legislate and to enforce the laws. To have ordered liberty, the two must be kept apart. The alternative is despotism, in which the rulers either repress their opposition or, as we are seeing with progressive prosecutors, foster a modified anarchy where the laws go unenforced except to the extent they can be weaponized against political foes.

It is no answer to unconstitutional action that the offending official has been elected. Among the Constitution’s main purposes is to stave off tyranny of the majority. If a prosecutor, mayor, or governor acts lawlessly, it is not a defense that if the people don’t like it they can oust him or her next time around.

Progressives and the prosecutors they’ve heavily invested in are well aware of this. That’s why they usually resist the urge to claim that being elected is a license to mutilate the laws. Rather, in their exquisite chutzpah, they insist that the mutilation is really just the upholding of a foundational constitutional principle: prosecutorial discretion.

This is exactly what Alvin Bragg has just done.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/01/20/the_tension_over_truth_and_consequences_gripping_the_fbis_trump-russia_reckoning_812321.html

As he documents the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in generating false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham has also previewed a challenge to the FBI’s claims about how and why its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began. At stake is the completeness of the official reckoning within the U.S. government over the Russiagate scandal – and whether there will be an accounting commensurate with the offense: the abuse of the nation’s highest law enforcement and intelligence powers to damage an opposition presidential candidate turned president, at the behest of his opponent from the governing party he defeated.

The drama is playing out against the clashing approaches of the two Justice Department officials tasked with scrutinizing the Russia probe’s origins and unearthing any misconduct: Durham, the Sphinx-like prosecutor with a reputation for toughness whose work continues; and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, whose December 2019 report faulted the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe but nonetheless concluded that it was launched in good faith.

The bureau’s defenders point to Horowitz’s report to argue that the FBI’s Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, is untainted despite its extensive use of the discredited Clinton-funded Steele dossier. Though highly critical of the bureau’s use of Christopher Steele’s reports, Horowitz concluded that they “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening,” which he said had met the department’s “low threshold” for opening an investigation.

But Durham has made plain his dissent. In response to Horowitz’s report, the special counsel announced that his office had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” Durham stressed that, unlike Horowitz, his “investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department” and has instead obtained “information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”