RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270615/sex-lies-and-deep-state-daniel-greenfield

At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs. Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.

And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.

The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe. They also betrayed the duties of the two men and two women.

The affairs were not private matters. The two illicit sexual relationships were also illicit political arrangements. As the Inspector General’s report noted, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Clinton ally who has since been fired, used Page as his liaison with Strzok to circumvent the chain of command on the investigation. McCabe used Page as his conduit and Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.

BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/guilt_by_inadvertent_association.html
“Should we never cite a wise word from someone who also said things we disagree with – even if it’s sympathizing with a loathsome political movement?”

The propensity to condemn others, usually writers, for what we might call guilt by inadvertent association is a method of abuse or disparagement often used by those who are incapable of intelligent rebuttal. It is a technique favored by the left and its legion of trolls, who like to point out that an author quoted in a conservative argument has dubious affiliations or, analogously, that the founder of a political organization is responsible for some of the suspicious characters who gravitate around his banner.

In my own case, for example, I have been excoriated for citing passages from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who are certainly contestable philosophers, Heidegger in particular. Yet Hannah Arendt, a much beloved political writer among the left and Jewish to boot, was Heidegger’s student and lover and never disavowed him despite his Nazi sympathies. I detest Heidegger and have no truck with his indigestible philosophical tomes, but many of his occasional essays are valuable contributions to modern thought. They should not be readily junked.

More recently, I have been gleefully informed that authors whose insights I have referred to, such as Kerry Bolton and Vilifredo Pareto, among others, were conscripted by fascists. This may be true, but it does not negate the substance of their arguments. Tommy Robinson is another case in point. He is routinely condemned for the outlying circle of mental asteroids – hooligans, Nazi sympathizers – attracted for reasons of their own to his laudable mission protesting the violence and social disruption perpetrated by the U.K.’s growing Muslim community.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/as-trump-builds-the-resistance-shouts-destroy/

“To every thing,” observed the sage of Ecclesiastes, “there is a season…. A time to be born, and a time to die; … A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up,” et cetera. What this estimable observer of human life omitted from his bracing catalogue of oppositions is the fact that one side of these partnerships tends to be much easier to accomplish than the other.

To the eye of experience, this is obvious. How much time, labor, and inherited expertise go into building an automobile, a house, a city, a civilization. How quickly they can be destroyed by disaster or neglect.

Our house on Long Island Sound was built in 1924 as a summer cottage. Over the years, various owners added this and that, until it was a modest suburban home. Over the course of a few hours in October 2012, it was all but destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. It took more than a year, much labor and a lot of money, to put everything back together.

Look at Venezuela. With the world’s largest proven oil reserves, the South American country emerged from military rule in 1959 and became a bastion of prosperity in the Southern hemisphere. Then came the socialist Hugo Chavez in 1999. His policies pushed the country into decline, slowly at first, and then rapidly. Today, under the rule of Chavez’s hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the country is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is running at 40,000 percent, there are widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities, looting and corruption are rampant, people and capital are fleeing the country.

It did not take long to destroy Venezuela. It will take many years, much heartache and suffering, and enormous resources to put it back together.

There is a lesson here for the loud and unseemly American Leftists and their unlikely brethren, the soi-disant “conservative” Never Trumpers, who are trampling on civility, rejecting the processes of democratic governance, and encouraging violence. “There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith observed to a disconsolate Brit during the American Revolution, especially a nation as prosperous and stable as the United States.

But even here there is a ne plus ultra, a threshold of destructiveness beyond which “things fall apart,” as Yeats put in it in The Second Coming, and “the centre cannot hold”: CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/04/trump_the_founders_and_independence_day_137428.html

Independence Day is, or should be, a time to reflect on the great gifts bequeathed to us by the American founders, and to judge ourselves by their standards. How well are we maintaining the country they built for us, and the principles which helped to make it great?

The answer is at once not so well—we have drifted far from the founders’ vision, mostly to our detriment—but also better than we have done in many years. That’s because Donald Trump’s political philosophy is closer to the founders’ than was that of any president since at least Reagan.

This assertion will no doubt occasion some sniggering. But Trump’s approach to politics addresses many of the American founders’ central concerns, in ways they would likely recognize and approve.

For the founders, government has one fundamental purpose: to protect person and property from conquest, violence, theft and other dangers foreign and domestic. The secure enjoyment of life, liberty and property enables the “pursuit of happiness.” Government cannot make us happy, but it can give us the safety we need as the condition for happiness. It does so by securing our rights, which nature grants but leaves to us to enforce, through the establishment of just government, limited in its powers and focused on its core responsibility.