RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/born_for_this_moment.html

It’s almost comical how Donald Trump makes the Left stumble and snort in frustration. Right when they think they’ve finally got him in another of their traps, he turns the tables and then rubs their faces in it. He has been handing the leftist monster its head for going on four years and you’d think they’d learn.

Trump is far smarter than the idiot liberal segment of the population wants to acknowledge — perhaps because their narcissism can’t handle the fact that he’s smarter than they are. And it’s real-world smarts across the broad swath of human behavior.

Trump understands people at levels few ever attain. That’s why he was able to calm down the North Koreans after nobody else had gotten anywhere with them for 70 years. That was a foreign policy triumph. Domestically, the Left knew that they’d nail him at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner which he wouldn’t dare to dodge because it was so prestigious. He did dodge it, and rubbed their faces in it by staging a rally that obligated many of those same snotty correspondents to go to the despised Rubeland on the night of the dinner. He hit them squarely where it hurt most, in their prestige.

Trump restored the situation in Syria by withdrawing our troops when everybody screamed that that would ignite WWIII. It didn’t. Then he wedded foreign with domestic policy by completely defusing the marching caravans out of Central America when the Idiot Left was just sure they finally had him snookered. In a domestic policy triumph with significant foreign policy implications, he supercharged the economy when the Left was certain they had hobbled it so thoroughly that “new normal” was their byword for how things now had to be.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-downgrade-for-foreign-policy-11603236203?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The 2020 presidential election won’t be remembered for its lucid debate and elevated discourse. The candidates themselves bear part of the blame, but the Commission on Presidential Debates hasn’t helped.

We argued on Oct. 17 that the commission has outlived its usefulness (see the response nearby from commission board member Newton Minow). Debate moderators’ longwinded and leftward-slating questions make the show about the moderators themselves and leave viewers none the wiser.

The next debate, scheduled for Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., also isn’t promising based on the subjects the commission says will be covered: fighting Covid-19, race in America, climate change, American families, national security, leadership. The first two were part of the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Climate change is loaded with progressive assumptions (how will you raise taxes, further empower the federal government, and generally do what Democrats want to do anyway?).

We’re not sure what “American families” and “leadership” might entail, but why should a commission get to decide what subjects are crucial to debate and the public to hear?It’s especially outrageous to limit national security—we assume that means foreign policy—to one sixth of one debate. President Trump has a reasonable case that his Administration has achieved a major breakthrough between Gulf Arab nations and Israel, brought about by rejecting the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus opinions. The Trump Administration defenestrated consensus opinion by moving the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and leaving the Iran nuclear deal. The dire consequences predicted by think-tank poobahs never came about.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-china-business-11603236651?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most of the media is ignoring the emails found in Hunter Biden’s laptop, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t news. Joe Biden has an obligation to answer questions about his son’s influence-peddling and his own financial dealings—notably regarding China.

The New York Post last week obtainedthe contents of a laptop purported to belong to Hunter. The Post has been transparent that it obtained its copy of the hard drive from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who says he received it from the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop, where it was abandoned in 2019. Mr. Biden derides this as a “smear campaign,” while House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff calls it without evidence “Russian disinformation.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the government has no intelligence to support the disinformation claim. A repair-shop order from April 2019 contains Hunter’s name and what appears to be his signature. The shop owner supplied a subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019. And the Biden campaign hasn’t said the emails are phony.

The emails regarding Hunter’s business in Ukraine have been widely reported. But as intriguing is a May 2017 email thread that includes a discussion about “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a now-defunct Chinese energy titan, CEFC China Energy. The Chinese company was international news a few years ago, after the U.S. government charged a CEFC-funded organization with money laundering, and its CEO was detained by Chinese authorities. CNN reported in 2018 that “at its height” CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government.