RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/298592/the-russia-scare

When a poorly designed app thwarted the tallying of results in last week’s Iowa Democratic caucus, it was only a matter of time before somebody blamed the chaos on Russian machinations. That somebody was Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight on Feb. 5. Lee told FBI Director Christopher Wray: “I hope that the Iowa Democrats will ask for an FBI investigation on the app. I believe that Russia has been engaged in and interfering with a number of our elections …”

The United States today is in the midst of a full-blown moral panic, which without exaggeration can be called the “Russia Scare.” After Al Gore won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college to George W. Bush in 2000, he and the Democratic Party did not spend years claiming that the election was stolen by American traitors working with a foreign power. But that is exactly the claim that Hillary Clinton and most Democratic leaders have made since Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016. The assertion that Trump is an illegitimate president who was installed thanks to Russian interference has been the underlying theme behind the Mueller investigation and the subsequent impeachment of Trump by the Democrats in the House.

According to the Russia Scare narrative that is accepted by many if not most Democrats today, Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime altered the outcome of the 2016 election in one or more ways. That Russian trolls and hackers engaged in online mischief in 2016 is a fact. What has not been established is that their activities changed or suppressed a single vote in the 2016 election.

Russia, it is claimed, hacked Democratic National Committee files and released damaging emails to the news media that showed the Clinton campaign working with the DNC to rig the 2016 Democratic primary against Clinton’s opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. As a result, many angry former Sanders supporters either refused to vote for Clinton in the general election or cast a protest vote for third-party candidate Jill Stein, thus depriving the Democrats of the White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/12/coup-plotters-fear-the-quickening/

The mood on the set of MSNBC was grim.

Rachel Maddow fought back tears of rage. Brian Williams struggled to make sense of it all. A former U.S. senator flailed her arms in frustration and indignation.

Their collective panic attack, however, was not caused by the results of the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night. The electoral tie between an aged socialist and a sinister small-town mayor did not alarm the panelists assembled around the colorful set, shoulders stooped in despair, eyes ablaze.

The humiliating fifth-place finish of the former vice president who claimed he would beat Donald Trump “like a drum,” the aviator sunglasses-clad bestie of Barack Obama who allegedly would stomp the president in the Heartland, did not at all concern the network’s gobsmacked hosts.

No, Maddow and company’s hysterics centered around the news that Attorney General William Barr had intervened to reduce an egregious sentencing recommendation against Roger Stone, a former Trump confidant convicted of five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness-tampering, and one count of obstruction of justice. (Otherwise known as a day at the office for California congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.)

Federal prosecutors, continuing their work from the now-concluded Mueller investigation, told a judge that Stone, who is 67 years old with no prior criminal record, should serve seven to nine years in jail. When Barr heard the news, he appropriately intervened. (Some news outlets reported that the Stone prosecutors had misled the attorney general’s office about their intentions.) The four government lawyers, including two alums from Team Mueller, subsequently resigned from the case.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-democrats-february-blues/

All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February.

On Feb. 3, the Iowa caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting the very idea of caucusing in general.

The winner — Pete Buttigieg by two delegates over Bernie Sanders — was not known for days. The mess was ironic in a number of ways.

The Democrats are the party of the Silicon Valley. They pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of youthful computer culture. But the inability to count simple votes was a bitter reminder that they understand the cyber world no better than their Republican opponents.

Voters might remember the 2013 meltdown of the Obamacare website, the abject failure of Hillary Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated 2016 campaign analytics, and the incompetence of supposedly tech-driven 2016 polling.

Four years ago, the Democratic Party found ways to thwart socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary bid. Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile leaked CNN debate questions to Hillary Clinton, and the party used superdelegates to nullify Sanders’ grassroots surge.

Pelosi’s Biggest SOTU Mistake Wasn’t Tearing Up the Speech

This time around, the release of a pre-caucus Des Moines Register poll was canceled for the first time ever. Rumors swirled that the Democratic establishment was embarrassed over the likely strong showing of Sanders. Such conspiracy theories were only further fueled when it was not known for days who actually won the caucuses.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/5-times-barack-obama-protected-his-allies-from-justice/

EXCERPT

5. The New Black Panther Party

You may remember images and video from Election Day 2008, with members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a Philadelphia polling place wearing military garb making racial remarks and discouraging people from voting. A voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers began weeks before Obama took office. It was an open-and-shut case, and the New Black Panthers didn’t even show up in court to defend themselves, assuring the government’s victory in the case. Then in May 2009, the case was inexplicably dropped by Attorney General Eric Holder.

By the summer of 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department in the New Black Panther Party case. It was quite clear that under Obama and Holder, civil rights cases against minorities discriminating against whites were being systematically ignored. Holder still denied there was a racial motivation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in March 2011, justifying the decision not to prosecute the NBPP by bizarrely citing the roadblocks African Americans endured when trying to vote in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws.

4. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder took part in a scandalous, incompetent gun-running project known as “Fast and Furious” from 2009 to 2011, and did everything in his power to protect his boss, Barack Obama, during that investigation. In return for his steadfast loyalty, Obama protected Holder, who was aggressively stonewalling the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee investigation into Fast and Furious. Obama’s asserting of executive privilege was not only to protect himself but also to protect Holder ahead of the Oversight Committee’s vote to declare Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents from the committee. Ultimately it didn’t save Holder from being held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan vote.

3. Senator Robert Menendez

In 2012, just days before the November election, ICE agents were ready to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender, but were ordered by the Department of Homeland Security to wait until after the election. Why? The suspect was a volunteer intern for Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and there would be “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations about the arrest. Menendez was seen as vulnerable in the 2012 election, and the delay of the arrest saved him from a potentially politically damaging scandal on the eve of voting. All the while letting a sexual offender avoid justice for six weeks.

2. Sexual Predator Kevin Johnson

In 2009, Barack Obama illegally fired Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Walpin’s only crime was that he was investigating Obama’s friend and donor, Kevin Johnson. Johnson had misused federal grant money for AmeriCorps by funneling it to his personal nonprofit group, paying for political activity, and using it to pay hush money to underage girls he’d sexually abused. When Walpin recommended charges against Johnson, Obama, in violation of federal law, fired him.

An investigation by Congress into the illegal firing was met with stonewalling by the Obama White House, and the withholding of documents. The Obama White House also deliberately misled Congress about the reasons for the firing.

1. Hillary Clinton

It’s hard to think of anyone who has managed to avoid accountability more than Hillary Clinton, and her response to the Stone sentencing story was her latest example of a lack of self-awareness.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/trump-battles-progressive-fear-society-bruce-thornton/

“Fear Society” is Natan Sharansky’s term for a socio-political order that flunks the “town square” test: People are too frightened to speak their mind in public spaces because they fear retribution. A victim of Soviet tyranny before emigrating to Israel, for Sharansky the consequences of free expression could be arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death. For us, the regime of political correctness, “cancel culture,” “microaggressions,” and “woke” commissars reinforces a similar repression, a “softer” one, as Tocqueville called it, but effective nonetheless in silencing dissent and promoting an illiberal progressive ideology.

Sharansky goes on to describe the consequences of living in a fear society, which typically comprises three groups: “true believers,” those who sincerely believe in the regime’s ideology; “dissidents,” those who oppose the regime and speak out against it; and “doublethinkers,” the majority who oppose the regime yet do not publicly express their opposition, particularly to outsiders.

Donald Trump’s political success has emboldened the conservative and Republican “doublethinkers” to express their opinions in the “town square” and challenge the domination that for several decades the progressives have enjoyed over political speech.

In Europe, hate speech laws and the absence of the legally recognized natural right to free speech that we enjoy allow the state to legally sanction or punish speech the EU doesn’t like. In contrast, here in the U.S. indirect methods of enforcement are more typically used. One method is to discredit and ostracize any alternative to progressive doctrine: “The most successful tyranny,” Harold Bloom wrote, “is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable.”