RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times often acts as the spin cycle for the Democrats’ dirty laundry. For years, Times reporters have helped get ahead of damning news, especially when it’s related to the Russian collusion hoax, in an attempt to establish the narrative early.

A recent example is the Times article downplaying the pending indictment against Michael Sussman, the Clinton campaign lawyer who acted in cahoots with the FBI to seed the collusion tale before the 2016 election. The article was published the day before Sussman pleaded not guilty of lying to the FBI.

On Saturday, the Times published a carefully constructed bombshell intended to soften the blow of an explosive scandal in the making: the FBI had at least one informant among the group of Proud Boys who marched on the Capitol on January 6. The informant, according to “confidential documents” furnished to the paper, started working with the FBI in July 2020 and was in close contact with his FBI handler before, during, and after the Capitol protest. 

“After meeting his fellow Proud Boys at the Washington Monument that morning, the informant described his path to the Capitol grounds where he saw barriers knocked down and Trump supporters streaming into the building, the records show,” reporters Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman (the Times reporter most responsible for priming the ground for news that was unfavorable to the Russia collusion narrative) wrote on September 25. “In a detailed account of his activities contained in the records, the informant, who was part of a group chat of other Proud Boys, described meeting up with scores of men from chapters around the country at 10 a.m. on Jan. 6 at the Washington Monument and eventually marching to the Capitol. He said that when he arrived, throngs of people were already streaming past the first barrier outside the building, which, he later learned, was taken down by one of his Proud Boy acquaintances and a young woman with him.”

In other words, one of the informant’s Proud Boy “acquaintances” was removing temporary barriers to allow a crowd to enter the restricted grounds around the building.

Sounds legit.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/25/how-it-might-end-act-i/ 

It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them. 

A couple of years ago, I had the honor of publishing American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by Frank Buckley, a prolific author and law professor at George Mason University. Buckley began by noting the obvious: that we in America are more divided now than at any time since the 1850s. We know how that Disunited States of America worked out, and the horror of the Civil War—what Buckley calls Secession 1.0—has led many of us to conclude that we’d put up with almost anything rather than risk a repeat of that disaster. 

“Almost” anything. 

Buckley does not predict a second American secession, exactly, but he shows, convincingly, I think, how it might come about. “The bitterness” of our life together, “the contempt for opponents, the growing tolerance of violence, all invite us to think that we’d all be happier were we two different countries.” There is something to that. And something to Buckley’s admonitory conclusion: “In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations, just as much as in 1861.”

I hesitate to spoil the ending, but it is probably worth noting that in the end, despite his warnings and various scenarios of how the divorce might happen, Buckley turns out, again like most (but not all of us) to be a unionist. The United States may be too big and too powerful for its own or anyone else’s good, but might, while it doesn’t make right, does or at least conduce to stability. 

And consider the alternative world orders on offer: Communist China? Islamic fundamentalism? European socialism? 

No thank you. 

At the same time, some current events lead me to suspect that some of the scenarios Buckley imagines have a lot of divisive life left in them. At one point, he observes, “A state that uses every means at its disposal to neuter a federal law might render it unenforceable within its jurisdiction, at least until the Supreme Court is able to rule on the matter. That might be years later, however, and that may be all it takes, if during the interim a new president has been elected and the new administration takes the state’s view of the question.” 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/24/biden-isnt-facing-challenges-biden-is-the-challenge/

Well-known Washington creature Amy Walters wrote this week on the “challenge” that Joe Biden is facing early in his presidency: “The former senator and vice president looks more like a helpless bystander than an experienced Capitol Hill deal maker…”

That, in a nutshell, is the national media’s preferred framing of the absolute breakdown we’re witnessing under Biden. A collapse that he created and is wholly responsible for.

The media want Biden to look like a “helpless bystander,” a victim of circumstances out of his control. He’s not. He’s the perpetrator of nearly every disaster anyone with eyes can see, from the obscenity at the southern border, to the loss of 13 service members (not fighting, but leaving a war zone), to the stratospheric inflation of household necessities.

We’re led to believe these are simply “challenges” Biden is facing rather than the results of his own deliberate screw-ups.

These are things happening to Biden.

CNN did a remarkable job handicapping Biden’s presidency earlier this week. In a Sept. 20 segment on Jake Tapper’s show, correspondent Phil Mattingly said Biden was “grappl[ing] with one of the most consequential weeks of his first year in office.” The graphic on screen noted that Biden was “faced with foreign policy turmoil…” Mattingly later said Biden was in “a key moment, particularly in the wake of a bumpy last several weeks.”

Let’s take stock of what’s happened during those “bumpy last several weeks”: On Sep. 20, there had been a total of 676,718 COVID-related deaths. Roughly 270,000 of those happened under Biden.

Pretty bumpy!

Also, on Aug. 26, 13 members of the U.S. military were killed during a suicide bombing attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, where operations were underway to withdraw from our decades-long effort in that sandpit. Eleven of the brave men and women were under the age of 24.

That feels bumpy, too.