RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/murder-of-officer-diller-a-wake-up-call-for-nyc

New York City was shaken Monday by the shooting death of NYPD officer Jonathan Diller, 31, during a car stop in Far Rockaway, Queens. Diller reportedly sensed something was off about the Kia illegally parked, blocking a bus stop, and approached. After Diller repeatedly asked Guy Rivera, 34, to step out of the passenger seat, Rivera shot the officer through the door, fatally hitting him below his bulletproof vest.

Known as a selfless, already-decorated public servant, Diller lived on Long Island with his young bride and one-year-old son. His cold-blooded murder resonated with New Yorkers’ growing personal fears of crime and lawlessness. In a recent Citizens Budget Commission poll, barely a third of New Yorkers report happiness with their neighborhood’s safety. Less than half feel even somewhat secure riding the subway during the day, down from over 80 percent across recent decades; at night, that figure drops to 22 percent. And no wonder: Monday’s 6 p.m. gunfire sent those at the nearby Rockaway–Mott Avenue station scattering in terror.

The nightmare of such violence and of Officer Diller’s death should be understood as a referendum on New York’s current elected leadership, which takes every opportunity to undercut basic solutions to danger. Despite overwhelming evidence that police, prosecution, and incarceration are how cities keep citizens safe, New York’s clueless progressive leaders continue to demand laws barring these tools, advocating instead for magically curing crime’s “root causes.”

This hubristic approach was epitomized at last week’s city council hearings by New York City Public Advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams. After helpfully invoking “peace and blessings,” Williams insisted that crime is just a misperception, and that, since New York State enacted bail reform in 2019, “recidivism rates are pretty similar and some points have even gone down.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/potemkin-feminism/

Remember Christine Blasey-Ford? She is the psychologist whom former California Senator Dianne Feinstein discovered and groomed to be a hostile witness in the 2018 Supreme Court hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Her appearance was carefully timed for the end of the hearings for more impact. But her story describing Kavanagh’s alleged sexual assault of her at a high school party decades earlier was full holes and lacked credible evidence.

Now, just in time for the November election, she’s on a book-tour, garnering screen-time and specious praise for her “bravery.” So far, all the tour has accomplished is to publicize one of her own witnesses, Mark Judge, who she claimed was also at the party. But Judge told Fox News that he wasn’t there. And at the time of the hearings, in a letter to Senators he also said, “I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”

These tactics, replete with hoaxes lacking confirmable empirical evidence, are sadly all too familiar. For example, in 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team, three of whom were charged by an incompetent or unscrupulous District Attorney with kidnapping, rape, and first-degree sexual offenses against an exotic dancer. Many corporate media outlets rushed to judgement, wielding stale politically correct clichés that libeled the team––“The Real Face of Duke University,” “Spoiled Sports,” “Jocks and Prejudice,” “Wolves in Blazers and Khakis,” and “Will Duke Take a Look at Itself?” are a few.

By the way, does anyone believe that in this age of radical “woke” prosecutors, those Duke students would have been exculpated because the state bar filed ethics charges against the District Attorney for “withholding exculpatory evidence and making inflammatory statements about the case”?

These politically weaponized tactics have sprung from the hijacking of feminism that was obvious in the Nineties. A movement that had begun in order to ensure the integrity of women’s Constitutional rights, has now become a political weapon for pushing progressivism’s technocratic ambitions for expanding the reach and power both of the government, and of the factions sharing that aim to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/no-one-is-above-the-law-that-means-a-trump-doj-must-indict-joe-biden/

Let’s apply the new Trump standard.

Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.

As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.

If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.

The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?

After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.

After getting her fraud judgment against Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James said, “No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-lieberman-dies-age-82-7488ccf3?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Joe Lieberman, who died Wednesday at age 82, was the kind of Democrat who can’t be found much these days, and there aren’t many like him in the Republican Party either. He was a foreign policy hawk who believed in the necessity of American military power and diplomacy to expand the zone of freedom in the world.

Lieberman rose in Connecticut politics as a moderate Democrat in a more moderate age. We first met him in 1988 when he ran for the Senate against the liberal Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker. He ran to Weicker’s right and won in an upset.

That set him on a 24-year Senate career notable for promoting pro-growth economic policies and a strong national defense, in addition to Democratic domestic priorities such as gay and abortion rights. He supported a low tax rate on capital gains, and his opposition to the “public option” was crucial to its removal from ObamaCare in 2010.

Lieberman was the rare Democratic office holder to criticize President Bill Clinton’s ethical misadventures in the 1990s, which made him a logical choice as a running mate in 2000 as Al Gore tried to move out of Mr. Clinton’s moral shadow. He was the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party.

As a Senator, Lieberman supported Presidents regardless of party in promoting U.S. interests abroad. He backed George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War, in contrast to most other Democrats at the time, including then Sen. Joe Biden. The Vietnam syndrome was still prominent on the left, and the authorization to use force passed only 52-47.

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.