RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/poonfang-pushover-eric-swalwell-still-on-intel-committee/

Democrats last week tabled a GOP resolution to remove Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans have been pushing for Swalwell’s removal since Axios exposed the Democrat’s capers with Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, a spy from Communist China.

As Debra Saunders noted, Fang raised money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office. That was actual collusion, from someone who falsely accused Trump of collusion with the Kremlin. Swalwell suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there’s more to the California Democrat who fell for the honey trap, the oldest espionage trick in the book. 

Swalwell faithfully repeated Chinese Communist propaganda practically word for word, and it’s hard to find a case where Swalwell disagrees with China or criticizes their human rights record. The PRC is in fact a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, a reality Democrats and Republicans alike these days tend to ignore. 

Swalwell blamed the Axios report on President Trump, and that was not his first shot in the blame game. The former prosecutor, who ran for president of the United States, specializes in guilt by accusation. 

In a March 26, 2019 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no evidence of collusion. Swalwell drew a blank. MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous Steele dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

For Swalwell, Trump’s firing of FBI boss James Comey was prima facie evidence of the president’s guilt. Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, and no guilt. Swalwell made repeated claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce and, like the establishment media, he has no second thoughts. 

The California Democrat was the biggest haul in Fang Fang’s operations between 2011 and 2015. That year the FBI warned Swalwell, who supposedly was unaware, that Fang worked for Beijing. The case is strong that Swalwell should not hold office, let alone occupy a place on the intelligence committee, where he is privy to the most sensitive information. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/christopher-lasch-vs-the-elites-of-our-time/

Several friends who have been reading the work of Christopher Lasch prompted me to return to the work of this historian and cultural critic. What follows is an adaptation and expansion of some earlier thoughts about Lasch.

***

“No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate.”

“. . .  the bad news goes on and on.”

—Christopher Lasch

With the untimely death of Christopher Lasch in 1994 at the age of 61, America was deprived of one of her most articulate and earnestly plangent social critics. By training, Lasch was an historian of 19th- and 20th-century American culture. For some 30- years, he specialized in anatomizing—exaggerating, some would say—certain “odious facts” about American culture. 

Already in 1965, in his widely admired book The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, Lasch deplored the “decline of the sense of community” in American society. Subtitled “The Intellectual as Social Type,” this collection of biographical vignettes was meant to register the “peculiarly fragmented character of modern society” by examining the lives and works of social reformers and pontificators from Jane Addams and Randolph Bourne through Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann. It ended with a polemical chapter called “The Anti-intellectualism of the Intellectuals,” in which prominent writers and activists such as Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and—speaking of odious facts about American culture—Norman Mailer were taken to task for failing to develop any politically effective criticism of American society.

As the 1960s devolved, so did the tenor of Lasch’s complaints. In The Agony of the American Left (1969), he informed us that we now faced “an unprecedented crisis” wrought by capitalism, “giant corporations,” and other familiar villains. Co-opted by such nefarious forces, the American intellectual Left was in “agony” because it had become politically ineffective. He concluded that “It is clearer than ever that radicalism”—which he went on to identify with socialism—“is the only long-term hope for America.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-case-for-prosecuting-hunter-biden/

 C harles C. W. Cooke had a post this week that said everything that ought to be said about why it would be fitting to prosecute Hunter Biden’s apparent making of a false statement on the required firearms application form. I want to add a few points about prosecutorial discretion, the potential of an additional gun crime, and our two-tiered justice system.

The Politico story Charlie cites stresses that prosecutions arising out of false statements on Form 4473 are rare. As Charlie rightly observes, that in itself is a problem (a point Kevin D. Williamson also made a few days ago). Still, it is worth widening the lens beyond the narrow false-statements provision in the gun laws because the government actually prosecutes false statements all the time.

There is a general false-statements statute (Section 1001 of the penal code) which can be applied any time someone makes a false statement, including a material omission, to some branch, department, or agency of the federal government. Then there are false statements charges that apply to particular subject-matter areas, such as firearms or taxes. Hence, we have Section 922(a)(6), which, as Charlie explained, applies to false statements made in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of a firearm.

The fact that these narrowly tailored false-statements statutes are invoked more rarely should not be taken to mean that false-statements prosecutions are infrequent. They are not. And a good many false statements that result in indictments involve situations markedly less serious than lying to conceal a disqualification from firearms possession — especially under circumstances where, due to the lie, the disqualified person succeeded in obtaining a gun (and then was lax in safeguarding it).

In the Mueller investigation, for instance, Michael Flynn was prosecuted for misdescribing a conversation, indicative of no misconduct, of which the FBI had a recording and therefore no need to question him. George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan were prosecuted for false statements about the dates of meetings, and in neither situation was an investigation impeded — much less were the prevaricators, thereby, able to acquire dangerous weapons.