RUTHFULLY YOURS

Never has one man broken more leftist hearts than James Brien Comey Jr.

The 6’8 former FBI director is once again the object of the left’s adoration. “A Beltway dreamboat, handsome as a movie star,” Salon gushes. “Our handsome young FBI director,” Gizmodo flutters its eyelashes. “How tall is James Comey? Tall. Like, really tall,” the Boston Globe coos.

Now the Beltway dreamboat will be appearing live and in person in the Senate. It’s the biggest show in a big government town. Teenage girls hunting for Justin Bieber tickets have nothing on the media frenzy.

“The Comey Testimony: When, Where and How to Follow,” the New York Times breathlessly posts. As if it’s the World Series instead of awkward exchanges between a resentful lifer government man, Senate Democrats trying to prove that President Trump didn’t win the election and the moon landing was faked, and Senate Republicans trying to get on with the business of running the country.

And the left shouldn’t get too caught up in its new romance with James Comey. Not when his on and off again relationship with the media is Washington’s biggest soap opera. Comey saved Hillary. Then he got the blame for costing her the election. He was a hero for supposedly investigating Trump. Then his Hillary testimony led to media outrage. Trump fired him and he became a hero again.

The Washington Post went from “James Comey just stepped in it, big time” to “James Comey, is this man bothering you?”, “20 questions senators should ask James Comey” and “James Comey’s written testimony inspired this playlist” in one month. Tomorrow it might be, “James Comey, we baked this cake for you.” Or it might be, “James Comey, we hate you and never want to see you again.”

It was Admiral James Lyons who warned us about jihadist infiltration into the U.S. government and media. Every American with a non-P.C. brain should reread his words.

Jihad infiltration is not a new thing. The Soviet KGB infiltrated the United States in the 1940s and ’50s, using the smiling propaganda image of Uncle Joe Stalin during the brief U.S.-Soviet alliance against Hitler. Once that war was won, at the cost of immense bloodshed and treasure, Stalin turned against us and had the CPUSA steal the Manhattan Project plants. The Democrats, who had committed treason in time of war (the standard for treason in the U.S. Constitution, Article 3), put up such a loud scream-fest that most Republicans and ordinary Americans were intimidated. In the 1960s, the radical left conducted a classical March through the Institutions, inspired by Italian Communist Arturo Gramsci, covered up with love and peace propaganda. Americans fell for the sucker play, and we allowed the totalitarian left to rewrite the history of the 1940s and ’50s. Today, you can’t find a single self-confessed Stalinist anymore, just as you can’t find any self-confessed Nazis in Germany. History has been erased.

Just as Stalin made an alliance with Hitler before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the radical left has made common cause with jihad. If anything is obvious beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s that jihad long ago infiltrated the British Labor Party, which ran Islamophile Sadiq Khan as mayor of London, a man who is now smearing Donald Trump with all the others. Just as Nixon was the lynch mob target for the CIA’s Ben Bradlee and the FBI’s Mark Felt in the 1970s because he had outed the CPUSA’s Helen Gahagan Douglas and other Stalin agents, today Donald Trump is screamed at by an organized chorus of jihadophiles of the left. They are not difficult to spot, being exactly the same people who rationalize and minimize any fresh massacre of innocents anywhere in the world. The left has always been incredibly cruel and murderous, as in Marx’s infamous endorsement of “revolutionary terror” to create a global Worker’s Paradise. In the outcome, they murdered 100 million innocent people over the course of Soviet dominance, and the Kim dynasty is still doing it in North Korea. There simply is no rational justification for the totalitarian left, and if you scratch a nice liberal, you’re more than likely to find a totalitarian. Evil is evil, even if it comes packaged in pink vagina hats.

Marxism has nothing in common with jihad except a common enemy. When Khomeini took power in Iran, with the quiet help of Jimmy Carter and his spooky Gray Eminence Zbig Brzezinski, the first thing Khomeini did was to destroy the Communist Party of the Shah’s Iran, the Mujahedeen Khalq. They probably deserved each other, but the point is that jihad, when it comes to power, hates nobody more than Marxist atheists, who are their real competition for totalitarian cred. In Syria, Assad is a mass murderer fighting jihadists like al-Qaeda, Hezb’allah and ISIS, and in the best imaginable scenario they would just knock each other off and leave the rest of us alone. Unfortunately, such precise and cosmic justice is limited to cartoons.

In his latest jet-setting travels, this time to Canada, President Obama warned of ‘authoritarianism’ taking hold, in what his media ally, CNN, helpfully revealed was a veiled attack on President Trump. Politics for Obama, doesn’t seem to stop at the water’s edge. In his frustrated ex-presidency, it appears he really is determined to be The Backseat Driver in Chief, and is about as useful.

Obama said that everyday people who felt left behind by government and a changing world could find authoritarians alluring. He said people who felt at a loss with the democratic process could “try anything,” but that liberal values would win out over time.
“I am convinced that the future does not belong to strongmen,” Obama said.

He can take a look in the mirror on that one.

Obama’s sudden, newfound claim to be a champion of liberty rings hollow, given that he spent most of his presidency issuing executive orders instead of working democratically with Congress to enact actual laws. He prefered to follow the Hugo Chavez model and rule by decree, justifying it with ‘I won.’ His Obamacare ‘legacy’ came about by strongarming his own party base with thuggish Chicago-style tactics and garnered not a single Republican vote, rendering it a house of cards with the inevitable reaction. Like Chavez, he also politicized the state and made it a one-party operation now known as the swamp. He targeted political dissidents through the good offices of the Internal Revenue Service and spied on reporters and world leaders. And the damage he did to homeland security, the military, and intelligence services, pretty well assured that the U.S. had neither borders nor secrets, given his administration’s hiring of the likes of Ed Snowden, Bradley Manning, Reality Winner, and come to think of it, Hillary Clinton with her illegal, unsecured private server. All of these Obama hires were leftists who used their state offices to advance their politics, not safeguard the state — and on his watch all of them got away with it.

So spare us when he puts his claims in as a champion of democracy with newfound great concerns about authoritarianism. He never cared about that when he was in power.

Obama gave a laundry list of all the beliefs and acts he had, all of which drove U.S. voters to elect President Trump.

He said low-civic engagement and a lack of belief in the average person’s ability to affect change in government weaken democratic institutions and are responsible for the advance of “reactionary” politicians.

As if such ‘lack of belief’ is baseless for people whose coal-industry jobs and industry were something he vowed to destroy and did a good deal of damage to. Any talk of ‘average persons’ from his storied jet-set bubble come off as pathetic, too — both out of touch and dripping of contempt — and voters know it.

Obama called on people, in the face of uncertainty, to stand by some of the very post-World War II economic and political institutions Trump has repeatedly called into question.

Notice that he doesn’t seem to think anything is wrong with these institutions — unelected eurotrash bureaucrats calling the shots in the United Nations, at the World Bank, in the European Union, at the World Court and other international institutions, ruling over peoples’ lives living high on the hog, often tax-free, with zero accountability. He just defends them for the sake of defending them, because they share his left-elitist views. It’s all about the rice bowl, it’s all about the Chicago Way writ large.

Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the now-controversial chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is a bit different from what Washington expects in its politicians.

He grew up in the agricultural cornucopia of the Central Valley of California — fruits, vegetables, beef, dairy products, and fibers — the concrete expression of a myriad of hard-working ethnic groups. Their diverse ancestors fled poverty and occasional horrors in Armenia, Basque Country, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, the Punjab, Southeast Asia, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

Central to this mix of immigrants, farmers, and ranchers is a valley culture of pragmatism, bluntness, and tenacity.

Of all these groups, none are more unabashedly patriotic and outspoken than Portuguese-immigrant dairy farmers, most from the islands of the Azores.

I live in rural Fresno County at the juncture of three congressional districts. All three are currently represented by Portuguese-Americans from farming families and from both parties: Nunes (22nd district); my own representative, David Valadao (R., 21st district); and Representative Jim Costa (D., 16th district). All three keep getting re-elected for their accessibility, informality, and commitment to the traditional values of their districts.

Nunes became a controversial public figure nationally when he revealed that the surveillance of foreign governments by American intelligence agencies may have resulted in the inappropriate monitoring of members of the Trump transition team — and perhaps some private citizens, too — and the unmasking of their identities.

What followed this disclosure could have mirror-imaged the script of director Frank Capra’s classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

It all started when Nunes said he had received unsolicited information of wrongdoing from one or more whistleblowers. Unfortunately for Nunes, he approached complaints of improper surveillance in a Central Valley sort of way (but a most un-Washington manner).

I visited Montpelier last fall in the company of a Professor of History and I was dismayed that the entire tour was devoted to his ownership of slaves and virtually nothing to his contribution to our enduring democracy …rsk

“The effect is a bit like dismissing the Magna Carta because it catered to distasteful 13th-century English barons. But Madison is, in many ways, the least understood founder. In his work in the Continental Congress and on the Constitution, he served as philosopher, negotiator, deal-maker. After being thoroughly upset by how his ideas were altered, he remained a passionate advocate of the Constitution. He wrote much of it, along with the Bill of Rights. He nudged and argued and lobbied. He gave in, rebelled, waged war, celebrated democracy and abhorred it. He was, in short, this nation’s first brilliant politician. And he is remembered, surely, not because of the slaves he owned but because of the mechanisms he helped establish that ultimately led to their slow and pained liberation. But we, like Madison, are creatures of our time, so that idea might have to wait.”

If you stand on an upper-level patio of James Madison’s finely restored home at his Virginia plantation, Montpelier, and look westward, you see a sweep of open lawn leading to fields and the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance; one of Madison’s visitors noted that the setting sun’s rays were cast into the home with great effect.
If, in contrast, you turn toward the mansion’s “South Yard,” you see something that, for 150 years or so, had all but disappeared into shadow, leaving traces only in an old map and in archaeological relics: modest buildings, now reconstructed, in which once dwelled some of the more than 100 slaves who made Montpelier lovely and profitable for three generations of Madisons.
These quarters reflect a jarring fact, once sidelined but now made central: Many architects of the world’s most enduring representative government—the first dedicated to universal liberty—also held vast numbers of slaves. In recent years, that fact has led to exhibitions at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Now Madison’s Montpelier (mont-PEEL-yer) offers an exhibition that begins in the home’s basement and extends into the imagined interiors of these out-buildings: “The Mere Distinction of Colour.”

Madison (1751-1836), who became the nation’s fourth president, was aware that something was awry. In the early 1780s, we learn, Madison believed one of his slaves was “thoroughly tainted” by exposure to free blacks in Philadelphia, but Madison affirmed that he would not punish him for “coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.” That tension would not lessen over time; nor would Madison’s irresolute hope to wash away this “original sin.”

In this, Madison was, unfortunately, a man of his time. This 5,300-square-foot exhibition—created under the oversight of Christian Cotz , Montepelier’s director of education, with designs by Proun Design and Northern Light Productions—begins with reminders of slavery’s centrality. In a panel showing American presidents we are asked to push a button to see which presidents owned slaves. Thirteen of the first 18 light up. George Washington, we are told, owned 318 slaves. Zachary Taylor was “the last president to enslave people while in office.” Ulysses S. Grant, who freed his only slave in 1859, was the last president to have ever owned any.