RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/why-wont-the-white-house-take-inflation-seriously/

Why won’t the White House take inflation seriously?

As has been clear for some time now, the fortunes of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and the state of the US economy are inextricably linked. With every bit of economic bad news, such as the worse-in-40-years inflation figures announced on Friday, the chances of the president securing fifty votes for his monster spending bill seem to fade.

Today, Biden will meet Joe Manchin and try to win the West Virginia holdout round. But one suspects nothing the president says to Manchin would be as persuasive as some good economic news — in particular, an easing of the price rises that Manchin has long said are a major reason why he cannot support the bill.

And for all that the Biden White House now claims to take the inflation threat seriously, one cannot help but feel the administration basically views the problem as one of messaging and spin, rather than anything more serious. Consider, for example, the insincere way in which Build Back Better has been rebranded as an urgently needed inflation-busting measure. The economic picture is radically different to when Build Back Better was first introduced. And yet we are supposed to believe that the legislation remains the perfect set of measures for the moment.

The White House has officially dropped talk of “transitory” inflation, but they clearly still think of it as a temporary problem. On Friday, Biden called price rises a “real bump in the road.”

Biden has assembled a handful of inflation-busting measures, but they feel designed so that he has an answer to the inflation question rather than as an earnest attempt to bring prices down. A government that was serious about the inflation threat would take an all-of-government approach. It would decide that now was not the time to double tariffs on lumber, for instance.

Rather than actually tackling inflation, officials are more interested in explaining why those prices aren’t the full story. Biden chief of staff Ron Klain decided that the best response was a flip chart explaining that everything was actually great. It is one thing to tout your economic achievements, it is another to deny the existence of any problems. On inflation, the White House too often finds itself telling voters not to believe their lying eyes.

To some economists, frustration among Americans at the state of the economy is a head-scratcher. GDP is surging, why aren’t people feeling better, they ask themselves.

But as the New York Times’s David Leonhardt explained on Friday, this really isn’t as much of a paradox as these economists seem to think. In his blunt assessment, “Americans think the economy is in rough shape because the economy is in rough shape.”

As Obama economic adviser Jason Furman told the Washington Post recently, “The typical family is spending an extra $4,000 this year because of excess inflation. It does not seem like much of a mystery why people are upset when they have to spend thousands of additional dollars more because of inflation.”

Not long ago, Klain called inflation a “quality problem.” He has learned not to say something like that again in public. But one can’t help but feel that, privately at least, that is still the White House view.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/the-new-misogyny/

A new form of misogyny is taking hold in contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be. And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.

Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone, regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a woman.

The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to the forward march of greater rights for all.

This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it means to be a woman. And it is not being understood as such by its advocates and their fellow travelers because of a potent combination of two factors: First, people’s fears of being labeled bigots, and second, a genuine and commendable effort to extend compassion and care to a very small minority.

That compassion has largely been met with hostility. It is becoming increasingly clear that the new misogyny shares one feature with the old: contempt for women. The difference is that the contempt is now coming from the radical extremes of the trans movement. As the signs carried by trans activists who recently protested a women’s conference in the UK read, “Suck my dick you transphobic cunt.” This is not progress. This is misogyny.

These radicals insist on redefining women in masculine terms. Women are as tough as men; they are not biologically different from men; indeed, many of them were born men, came of age as men, and, despite having lived in the guise of women for but a scant portion of their lives, feel entitled to take positions of power away from women. Even motherhood must be acknowledged as something men should be allowed to claim as their own.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/eli-lake/trump-russia-fbi-russiagate/

In November, U.S. attorney John Durham indicted the primary source for the so-called Steele dossier—a document that supposedly offered proof of a conspiracy between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Igor Danchenko, a Russian national living in the United States, has been charged with five counts of perjuring himself to the FBI. The indictment alleges that a major source of information for the Steele dossier was an unregistered American lobbyist for Russia named Charles Dolan, who has been a close associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton for years.

This revelation has compelled some observers to look back critically on the behavior of the media these past five years. Erik Wemple, the media columnist of the Washington Post, said that “key claims in the indictment…[raise] specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and ABC News—as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story.”

Even so, the Paul Reveres of the Trump-Russia scandal are digging in. Even if former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was fake, they tell us, Russiagate was real.

“The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question ‘What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?’” David Frum writes in the Atlantic. “But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.” Indeed, he claims, Durham was actually appointed in 2019 by Trump-administration attorney general William Barr with the specific intention of silencing that question.

Max Boot, Jonathan Chait, David Corn, and Charlie Savage have offered similar arguments, contending that the recent focus on the fraudulence of the Steele dossier only plays into Trump’s effort to discredit the broader investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia. There’s a kernel of truth to this argument. As I wrote in the January 2021 issue of Commentary, when it comes to Russia, Trump was both framed and guilty. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did uncover impressive details about Russia’s operation to hack and publicize the emails of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Furthermore, a 2020 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee confirms that one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s relationship to a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report says is a Russian intelligence officer, presented a major counterintelligence threat.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/12/cracked-icons/

With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.

Jussieopath

From the moment details emerged surrounding Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax, any sane, non-woke person could have recognized he was more than just a pathological liar. Smollett was also a conniving, mean-spirited egoist. He was intent on rescuing his fading acting career by libeling the Chicago police, smearing white Trump supporters as violent racists, and self-servingly advancing the lie of a purported hate crime epidemic against blacks.

To believe Jussie, as so many of the liberal establishment were eager to do, one had to believe from the get-go the utterly unbelievable: MAGA-hatted white racists (and fans of the fading Empire no less) routinely roam liberal Chicago in subfreezing temperatures at 2:00 a.m.. They typically go out, ready for victims, equipped with requisite bleach and representational hangman’s nooses.

You see, before such devils bumped into Jussie Smollett, they had been characteristically on the lookout in their late night and early morning patrols for heroic gay black actors to take out—all unbeknownst to us

The two large white ragers were easily driven off by diminutive Jussie. The black Achilles, sandwich in one hand, cell phone in the other, battled his white Trojan brutes in Homeric fashion. But at a cost: his dueling earned him heroic wounds, real and spiritual. 

The hateful Hectors managed to put a noose around poor Jussie’s neck, as he later showed police. They inflicted a supposedly career-threatening small cut below his eye. And as superhuman demons, they even splattered him with bleach that somehow defied the laws of chemistry and did not freeze in that subzero early morning. 

Once the con unraveled, and given the media myth that there are millions of racist Trump supporters eager to harm black gays, one wonders why Jussie did not, from the outset, just hire on the cheap any two of the supposed millions of available deplorables, rather than unlikely Nigerian Americans, to better fake his crime?

No matter. Would-be candidate Joe Biden immediately leveraged Smollett to virtue signal his racial bona fides. Kamala Harris claimed it was a modern “lynching.” Everyone from Nancy Pelosi to the CNN/MSNBC crowd treated us to performance-art demonstrations of their outrage. No one has apologized, given the virtual truth of the age that, while fake, “it could have happened.” 

Smollett whetted his beak in the overflow of sympathy and adulation. Michelle Obama’s former assistant was a conduit to the highest levels of anguish over Jussie’s victimization. And on and on. 

In the end, there was only the beginning: a fraud and faker, who was as obnoxious on the witness stand as he had been over the last three years in siccing the leftwing victimization industry on America.

Cuomo Duo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/kamala-conundrum-larry-elder/

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll placed Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval ratings at 28%, 10 points below that of President Joe Biden. The U.K. Telegraph tweeted: “With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option. Whispers in Washington suggest Joe Biden’s camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 battle.”

When Harris ran for president, she dropped out before the Iowa caucus, the first contest in the primary. She garnered little support from her home state, California. Harris got called out for hypocrisy during a debate by rival Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, for — among other things — prosecuting marijuana crimes only to make light in an interview about smoking marijuana.

When Harris quit the race, she said: “I’ve taken stock and I’ve looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days I have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”

But the party’s presidential nominee picked her as his running mate. When Harris became vice president, Biden announced her role as a border czar and also asked her to be his point person to push the passage of a proposed “voting rights” law. The border remains a mess, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was stalled in the Senate. Her staff grumbled off the record, calling these two jobs lose-lose, and even suggested “racism” at play given the growing stature of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And then there is the cackle. Critics say Harris resorts to this kind of phony, uncomfortable laughter when she struggles to answer questions for which she is not prepared.

All of this raises the question: Why did Biden choose her in the first place?

The answer is simple. The woke/identity Democratic Party could not and would not abide another presidential and vice-presidential ticket with two white males.