RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-isnt-john-brennan-in-prison/

John Brennan is giving moral lectures about what good liberals should do. This is like Jeffrey Epstein giving a lecture on the virtues of chastity and poverty.

John O. Brennan
@JohnBrennan
I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged.

This is John Brennan tweeting about Israel and Palestinian statehood. Now, I’m not an uncritical observer of Israel. But this tweet is a breathtaking expression of an attitude that is quite common in European circles and among Arabists at the State Department. It breezily takes the view that the Holocaust is a crime of ethnonationalism against the Jews, and therefore the response of Jews of building their own ethnostate is perverse in some way. The speaker thinks: Why can’t you be better liberals? But the thinking Zionist wonders: Why do you want Jews to be defenseless?

It’s also historically illiterate, as Zionism predates the Holocaust by several decades, and was part of a flowering of European nationalisms — German, Polish, Hungarian, Irish — as some nation-states consolidated and some traditional Empires began to break apart. Sometimes this phenomenon was interrelated in perverse ways. Polish nationalists often encouraged Zionism — peacefully, and violently — in order to make the new Polish state more Polish.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-dishonest-sales-pitch/

President Biden’s address to Congress connected only intermittently with reality.

On his telling, every good thing that has happened in America since he took office — from vaccination to job creation — is a tribute to his wisdom, rather than a continuation of a trajectory set beforehand. All presidents say such stuff, and they all get away with it, although Senator Tim Scott made a valiant attempt to correct the record. Worse was the dishonesty of Biden’s sales pitch for his policies. 

He insinuated that the ten-year ban on assault weapons had reduced the murder rate in the U.S. — something neither careful studies nor a casual look at the trends supports. He pretended that the Trump administration had ended successful efforts to control migration across our southern border, a brazen inversion of the truth. He claimed that the country supports federal legislation that would, among other things, ban states from verifying voters are who they say they are. Poll after poll says otherwise. He promised that Medicare could save hundreds of billions of dollars by cracking down on drugmakers. Not according to the Congressional Budget Office, it can’t.

Biden conjured a world in which there was no danger from unprecedented deficit spending, no possible adverse consequences from raising taxes on corporations and rich people, no spike in violent crime that needs attending, and no foreign threats that demand of us more than platitudes about leadership.

Even as he proposed one of the most radically Left policy agendas in American history, he continued to feign an eagerness to work with Republicans. 

The press, which has invested absurd importance in every president’s first 100 days, is hardly bothering to conceal its excitement at the low-fifties approval rating Biden has at this marker. It is simultaneously hyping his left-wing legislative agenda. Those same polls show, however, that a plurality of Americans disapproves of how he is handling taxes and spending — and that his numbers on guns and on border security are abysmal. The implication is that a COVID recovery he has done little to cause is buoying him, while his agenda threatens to pull him down. Biden is providing Republicans plenty of material to work with, and nothing to intimidate them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-cradle-to-grave-government-11619650937?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.

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We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt.

But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.

The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-is-systemic-racism?token=eyJ1c2V

The longtime Democratic operative James Carville gives good quote, and yesterday was no different. In a conversation with Vox about Biden’s first 100 days he ended up mostly sounding off about the problem of what he calls “faculty lounge” politics:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in . . . neighborhoods.

If you have a few minutes, read the whole thing. But Carville’s bottom line is that “there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.”

One bit of that jargon — much like “equity” and “social justice” — is the phrase “systemic racism.”

All of a sudden, it was everywhere. We were supposed to say it. We were supposed to root it out. But what did it actually mean?

Is systemic racism merely legal discrimination? Or does it capture the legacy of slavery and segregation? Is it meant to describe ill-conceived policies, like the response to the crack epidemic? Or is it something far more expansive, sweeping up any kind of racial disparity as evidence of its existence?

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

A problem endemic to successful countries is the need to create issues that get people excited when things are going relatively well. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, except for a few years following 9/11, the United States has not faced a major crisis that galvanized and unified the nation. In 2008, we faced a credit crisis. It could have undone the global financial system but, truth be told, the crisis was over by the end of calendar year 2008 when the TED spread – a calculation used to measure risk in financial markets – narrowed sharply from its October-November highs, and high-yield bonds began to rally. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 last year was seized by politicians and called a crisis. A (deliberate?) confusion of correlation with causation regarding reported deaths was used as an excuse to expand governmental power and curtail individual rights. Despite conventional opinion, however, we do not know if shutting down the economy did more harm than good.

The United States has achieved high living standards and diminished poverty because of capitalism and individual freedom. Is everything perfect? No. Should we rest on our laurels? Of course not. There is always more to be done. But the world, and especially the West, is richer and more at peace than at any time in history, which is a problem for politicians whose campaigns are all about needed change.

It is true that external problems lurk. China threatens peace in the western Pacific. Russia is flexing its muscles along borders of its old empire in Ukraine. Iran, an impoverished state with little to risk and much to gain, is disrupting the Middle East with a revival of its nuclear program. North Korea, another state so impoverished it has little to lose, is led by a man who in a normal country would be committed.

However, in this time of relative prosperity and peace, Progressives convert addressable issues into partisan crises. While there are several, two, in my opinion, are forefront: race and climate. Others include policing, guns and immigration, with the latter having become a serious problem on our southern border. Methods used to create and promote crises are insidious: claim the moral high ground, censor speech, disallow gender-specific pronouns and cancel history. A consequence is the intimidation (and worse) of those in academia, corporate offices, entertainment, and professional sports who do not hew to an approved narrative.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17317/hunter-biden-laptop

The book’s [Secret Empires] conclusions were based on reconstructions of timelines, records obtained through hard work done on location in foreign countries. Yet, some in the media still accused us of engaging in a “witch hunt” designed simply to embarrass the family of now-President Joe Biden.

Law enforcement sources have since confirmed a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes, but that actually means they are looking not just at his taxes, but at the money he made that he may or may not have declared on his taxes. That investigation continues.

What emerges from all of this clearly shows what I call the “Biden business model,” in which the Biden family seems to trade off the Biden name, Biden connections, and the Biden access.

Recently, Hunter Biden has sat for several interviews to discuss his new memoir about his struggles with drug addiction. The investigative reporter in me cannot resist pointing out these interviews were done by CBS News, owned by ViacomCBS, which also owns Simon & Schuster, the publisher of his new book. He mostly dodged questions about the laptop.

[T]he deeper question that should concern us more… is whether he is covering for his father. Emails reviewed by Sen. Ron Johnson’s committee during its investigation referenced a consultant writing to Hunter Biden about a proposed partnership with Chinese businessmen. The email says Hunter will receive a 20% equity in the partnership, plus a 10% stake “held by H for the big guy?”

The identity of “the big guy” has not been established. But… [t]he modern model of corruption in politics is rarely done in a straight line, but along the branches of a family tree. As foreign governments and other interested parties have learned, the way to a politician’s heart is through his family. There is circumstantial evidence in the collection of materials now possessed by the FBI and journalists that Hunter Biden was acting as a cover for business dealings that would benefit his father or at a minimum the Biden family estate, which includes his father.

Investigative journalism mostly reconstructs events and exchanges from hidden scraps, obscure records, and third-party documents. Often the best we can do is to show that something bad must have happened based on the coincidences we find in these records. Because reporters are not prosecutors, they cannot issue subpoenas or compel testimony. It is exceedingly rare for a reporter to obtain that “smoking gun.”