RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifteen months into his administration, Donald Trump remains the object of a dedicated attempt by the Democratic Party, the media, NeverTrump Republicans, and rogue members of the deep state to take him down. From the night he was elected, lifelong members of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and the embedded bureaucracy have refused to accept the results of a national election, and have instead waged a campaign of “lawfare” against a man they consider an interloper—a situation unique in the annals of American democracy.

From Hillary Clinton to James Comey to Robert Mueller to Stormy Daniels, to various minor federal judges, to CNN and MSNBC, the list of Trump’s enemies continues to grow.

Their tactics are breathtakingly simple—and amazingly brazen. As the past year-plus of Robert Mueller’s tedious investigation has proven, there is no very great crime behind Trump’s very great fortune of having been elected the 45th president of the United States. The entire notion of Russian “collusion” (not in itself actionable in the first place) was cooked up in the witches’ cauldron that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The resulting brew was liberally dispensed to the cadres of media operatives pretending to be dispassionate reporters in order to assuage the failed candidate’s rage over losing what she thought—what she was assured by her friends at the CIA and the FBI—was a fixed fight.

And so the Big Lie—that Trump had collaborated with Vladimir Putin to change the course of an American election—was born.

There was and is nothing to it, of course. But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats, whose sterling moral history of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has prepared them for just this moment. After all, they had managed to drive Richard Nixon from office in 1974, less than two years after a 49-1 state electoral landslide, turning a minor, botched burglary—with the help of the Washington Post—into a constitutional crisis.

In the case of Trump, they didn’t even have the fig leaf of the “Plumbers” at the Watergate on which to hang their “conspiracy so vast” McCarthyism, but that didn’t matter. Sure, to believe the “Russian” narrative, one would have to credit multiple impossible things simultaneously: that Trump and Putin were even capable of pulling it off; that the Russians somehow changed vote totals in states where Hillary barely deigned to campaign; that they stole John Podesta’s emails from a DNC server and handed them over to Julian Assange and Wikileaks; and that they bought ads on Facebook that changed credulous minds on the spot. Still, two generations of reporters—those raised on James Bond/supervillain movies and those who, thanks to Marvel comics, think people really can fly—regurgitated it proof-free.

The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

In one direction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.

The oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves congressional investigations, Department of Justice referrals and inspector general’s reports—mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and Department of Justice behavior during the 2016 election.

Why are the two now about to collide?

By charging former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, Mueller emphasized that even the appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior.

If that is so, then the Justice Department will likely have to charge former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with perjury or related offenses. A report from the Office of the Inspector General indicates that McCabe lied at least four times to federal investigators.

Former FBI Director James Comey may also have lied to Congress when he testified that he had not written his report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal before interviewing Clinton. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan lied under oath to Congress on matters related to surveillance.

Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin likely lied when they told FBI investigators they had no idea that their then-boss, Hillary Clinton, was using an illegal private email server. Both had communicated with Clinton about it.

Mueller is said to be investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by requesting that Comey go easy on Flynn.

If so, then the Justice Department will have to look at Comey himself and DOJ officials who obstructed a federal court. On at least four occasions, they were not honest about the deeply flawed Christopher Steele dossier being the source of information used in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

When Kanye West again declared himself a Trump supporter on Twitter, going so far as to publish a photo of his POTUS-autographed MAGA hat, literally millions of Americans immediately got the vapors. (Either that or the Twitter gestapo got their revenge — unless the sudden disappearance of huge numbers of the rapper’s followers is merely an “inconsistency”?)

Many declared West had “gone off the deep end,” gone crazy, although the man was demonstrably more brilliant and more creative than 99.9% of his decriers.

That these same people are the most slavish and pathetic conformists is the least of this. What these attacks on Kanye demonstrate in bold face is what has lurked beneath the surface for a long time — liberals and progressives are the reactionaries of our time.

It is also a further demonstration of a near complete lack of intellectual curiosity or emotional imagination, an inability to grasp the “remote” possibility that a highly intelligent black man could possibly think differently from them. Something must be wrong with him. (Could anything possibly be wrong with them? Nah!)

But why reactionaries?

When I was a young fellow traveler with the New Left (circa 1965), it was the worst accusation you could make. A reactionary was someone who was living in the past, taking us backwards, what the Trotskyites called the Stalinists — and vice-versa.

Back then, a group of people, Tom Hayden and others, anxious to breathe new life into a Marxist ideology seriously tarnished by Stalin’s supposedly-accidental”excesses,” promulgated, in the Port Huron Statement, a socialism “with a human face.”

It was propaganda, of course, aimed at themselves as much as others, but this Generation of 1968 product was remarkably successful, beyond their wildest dreams, I would guess. Over the decades and into today, they were able to infiltrate just about every aspect of our culture, creating an atmosphere where — in nearly every aspect of our society — nothing was good as is or even relatively satisfactory. Therefore, the fight must always go on. Perpetually. CONTINUE AT SITE

If ever there was a bipartisan cause in this country, shouldn’t it be banning female genital mutilation? Well, a bill banning FGM in the state of Maine was just voted down — along party lines.

As Townhall’s Elizabeth Yore reports, “69 GOP (and 1 Dem) [voted] for the bill and 77 Dems and Independents [voted[ against an FGM bill that would criminalize female genital mutilation.”

Yore continues: “The Democratic House legislators who voted against this FGM bill curiously argued that ‘FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,’ despite the fact that Maine is one of only eight federal pilot programs to address the exponential growth of FGM in America. If little girls in Maine are not at risk for FGM, then why is Maine receiving more than $200,000 a year from the federal government to help prevent FGM?”

Even if the Democrats’ claim, that “FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,” was true, what is the objection to banning the practice before it arrives there? In reality, this common practice in the Muslim world is being committed in the United States by immigrant populations.

Keep in mind that Democrats are supposedly the “party of women.” They’re the party that likes to pretend all women think as a monolithic block. Why, then, would Democrats vote unanimously against a bill that outlaws a horrific practice which only victimizes women?

Honestly, I have no answer. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump has promised us to drain the swamp – not to drown in it!

The ongoing Mueller “investigation” is not a legal matter. It’s a continuation of abuse of power by the Obama administration, which behaved as if Democrats were going to reign forever. The extent of their abuse started to come to light only after the elections.

After the 2016 elections, the culprits should have relied on traditional American forgiveness. President-Elect Trump fully demonstrated it when he graciously offered Hillary Clinton an opportunity to heal instead of being prosecuted. Unfortunately, the mainstream Democratic Party and its allies allowed the far-left elements to drag them into the “resistance” and escalation. Instead of a smooth transition of power, which has been an unbroken tradition since the founding of this country, they grabbed as much power as they could and directed it against Trump and his supporters. Thus, they have burnt their bridges.

The president and his trusted advisers are either being investigated or threatened with investigation. The best public servants appointed are flooded with death threats, and neither the FBI nor the DOJ does anything about that. Scott Pruitt and Ajit Pai are the first names that come to mind. These threats are backed by actions, such as the mass murder attempt in which Representative Scalise was injured. Violence against lesser known persons standing in the way of the Democratic Party agenda is not reported by the mainstream media. In a few days, it will be the anniversary of the shooting of the offices of Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, two outstanding climatologists whose research debunks climate alarmist claims.

We know who incited these crimes. We know who covered these crimes. We don’t know all connections between the instigators and the triggermen. And we will never know if the FBI and DOJ will continue investigating and prosecuting people for being Trump-supporters while turning a blind eye to the Democratic seditionists, oath-breakers, and other miscreants emboldened under Obama’s administration. Not to mention blackmail – a federal crime that is routinely ignored in the current political atmosphere and has been perfected by groups linked to the Democratic Party and used against businessmen, judges, and other men deemed Trump-supporters or potential supporters in their war against the elected government. The new Democratic Party and its allies openly collude with foreign governments and political parties against the U.S., as clearly shown by their behavior related to the Paris climate “accord.”

The 50 American states have long competed for people and business, and the 2017 tax reform raises the stakes by limiting the state and local tax deduction on federal returns. The results of bad policy will be harder to disguise.

A case in point is Connecticut’s continuing economic decline, and now we have even more statistical evidence as a warning to other states. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis recently rolled out its annual report on personal income growth in the 50 states, and for 2017 the Nutmeg State came in a miserable 44th.

The progressive paragon’s performance is even worse when you look at the details. The nearby chart shows that the state’s personal income grew at the slowest pace among all New England states, and not by a little. Governor Dannel Malloy’s eight-year experiment in public-union governance saw income grow by a meager 1.5% for the year, well below Vermont (2.1%). The state even trailed Maine (2.7%) and Rhode Island (2.4%), which are usually the New England laggards.

The only states to do worse than Connecticut were Alaska (0.4%), which is heavily dependent on oil and gas production, and Kansas (1%), Nebraska (1.4%), Iowa (0.3%) and North (-0.3%) and South Dakota (1.4%), all farm states that struggled with low commodity prices. National income growth was 3.1%.

The data are even more depressing if you strip out dividends and government transfer payments and consider only wages and salaries. Connecticut had essentially no growth (0.1%), which was worse than every state save Alaska (-1.6%). The figure for the U.S. was 3.3%. Total nonfarm earnings in Connecticut were also the second worst in the country after Alaska.

Lest you think this was a one-year anomaly, we looked at the personal income figures for every year since 2011. That’s the year Mr. Malloy took office, and the state rebounded well from the recession with 4.9% income growth, the best in New England.