RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/woodward_s_war_deeply_damning_but_not_to_trump.html

Bob Woodward, a past master at the art of marketing bestsellers by reflecting the Democrat zeitgeist, tries his best in his latest offering, War, to put a good face on Biden-Harris incompetence in the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel conflicts. Although Donald Trump was not a government actor during these events, War inserts vignettes purporting, unsuccessfully, to contrast Trump’s unfitness with Biden’s putative steadiness.

Woodward tries but fails to claim that it is Trump’s alleged instability that threatens our fragile world, and not the ineptitude of the senile, perpetually unintelligent Biden. But to his great credit, the dogged reporter in Woodward overcomes the mediocre polemicist. He simply cannot hide Biden’s abject, foolish incompetence in these conflicts, nor can he conceal, try though he might, Trump’s commonsense assessments of the same events. While hoping to help Biden’s political fortunes, his book is a thinly-veiled but strangely ineffective diatribe against the “fascist” former President he awkwardly stumbles to depict.

Before delving into Biden’s actions, we should recall the wise assessment of the well-respected Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration. Biden, Gates wrote in his 2015 book, had been consistently wrong on every national security and foreign policy issue throughout his long tenure in D.C. Moreover, Biden had long been reputed by his colleagues to have been the least intelligent legislator in Congress.

Given Biden’s recently acknowledged mental incompetence, Woodward tries to contextualize it as a recently-developed condition, with only isolated “early markers” in preceding years. But, again, Woodward’s solid factual recitations are far more skillful than his partisan shadings of them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/the-campaign-against-justice-gorsuchs-new-book-is-an-embarrassment/

An effort to discredit Justice Gorsuch is overhyped and misleading.

The patently coordinated progressive campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court by personal attacks on the six conservative justices never sleeps. It’s Justice Neil Gorsuch’s turn again in the barrel. Progressives have tried out a number of themes against Gorsuch over the past seven years, to little effect: that he’s arrogant, that he talks too much, that he’s a bad writer, that he’s a plagiarist, or that he did something wrong by selling a house to a Democratic lawyer through an anonymous LLC at below the price he was asking before he joined the Court. Those attacks having gotten nowhere, one of the themes they are still pushing is that Gorsuch misrepresents facts in his opinions.

Given little to work with on this front, they have settled on Gorsuch’s new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, which he co-wrote with a former law clerk, Janie Nitze. Gorsuch and Nitze argue that the explosive growth of federal law has costs not only for liberty and small government in general, but for the individual people who find themselves on the business end of all these rules and the people who enforce them.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post branded it “Justice Gorsuch’s book of fish tales.” An attempted smackdown by Ankush Khardori of Politico was headlined “Neil Gorsuch’s New Book Is an Embarrassment.” Their primary charge is that Gorsuch left out important facts from the stories he tells in the book, chiefly the story of fisherman John Yates. But Marcus and especially Khardori are the ones who should be embarrassed. They are straining to miss the point — and Khardori’s piece is full of its own distortions. I’ll discuss below why Khardori and Marcus are off base on the Yates case. In a second part, I’ll cover the other scraps that they throw at the wall and why Khardori’s past record and his behavior in this episode make him an especially unconvincing advocate against Gorsuch on this score.

Facts and Figures