RUTHFULLY YOURS

 https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/12/biden-bribe-scheme-is-a-three-part-scandal-saga/

The recent and credible bribe allegations against the president could reveal the truth about the ties between the Biden family and the FBI.

FBI Director Christopher Wray narrowly avoided contempt of Congress proceedings last week over his refusal to provide the House Oversight Committee with an unclassified document memorializing a trusted informant’s allegation that then-Vice President Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy oligarch Burisma.

Dramatic as the near-rebuke may have appeared, and as explosive as the contents of the FBI’s concealed FD-1023 form seem to be, the trio of apparent scandals this saga touches on transcends its immediate significance.

Influence Peddling

The first scandal — hiding in plain sight for years yet never fully exposed, let alone prosecuted — concerns the Biden family’s potentially criminal, national security-imperiling, public trust-eroding influence peddling. The reality of this influence peddling makes the stunning allegation of a Joe Biden bribe seem infinitely more plausible than it might otherwise appear.

The House Oversight Committee’s recent review of thousands of records from subpoenas to four banks — which preceded its pursuit of the FD-1023 — shows that “Biden family members and business associates created a web of over 20 companies,” the majority of which were formed during Biden’s vice presidency. Through this web, “the Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies” [emphasis original] during and after the then-vice president’s tenure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/whos_destroying_civic_norms_again_trump.html

It’s hard to believe how many high-ranking government officials have been serving time behind bars these last couple decades.  Bill Clinton got caught selling military secrets and influence to communist China in return for campaign contributions.  Hillary Clinton got caught storing top-secret materials on an unsecured email server in a bathroom closet.  Lois Lerner got caught using the IRS as a weapon for targeting conservatives and influencing the 2012 election.  Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents concerning the Obama administration’s transnational gunrunning racket.  Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper were all thrown in the clink for spying on a political opponent’s campaign and then covering up their illegal activities by framing the victim as a covert Russian agent.

The saddest thing was watching Dementia Joe Biden stumble out of the White House in cuffs, as remaining federal agents finally arrested him for decades of corruption involving quid-pro-quo schemes that enriched his family by selling the powers of his various offices to the highest foreign bidders.  

Oh, right — none of that happened, because the Deep State and those in bed with the Deep State protect their own.  At this point, anybody not being attacked or politically persecuted should be presumed as secretly working for some shady enterprise hostile to the best interest of the United States.

Yet somehow special counsel Jack Smith has the temerity to stand before the American people, announce the federal government’s continuing crusade to keep President Trump from office, and shamelessly declare, “We have one set of laws in this country.”  Right.  What he really means is, “The Deep State controls America, and if you mess with those gangsters, we’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”  Jack Smith — like Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, so many inspectors general who ignore crimes under their purview, and too many partisan political operatives posing as judges — is just another thug enforcer sent out to protect the ruling regime.  Well done, Jack!  Collect your thirty pieces of silver and career advancement as your reward!

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/11/the-pandemic-of-nuclear-trash-talk/

After the world escaped a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, it has been generally understood that nuclear-armed nations did not publicly threaten their rivals and enemies with thermonuclear weapons.

Of course, there were occasional lunatic exceptions to the rule. Since 2006, when the unhinged North Korean regime acquired nuclear weapons, the world has periodically dismissed the zany threats from the Kim dynasty. Kim Jong Un has sporadically warned he might strike Japan, South Korea, and the United States—usually in an outrageous and outlandish fashion.

Kim finally was warned of the consequences of his brinkmanship rhetoric, most famously by Donald Trump in 2018. He reminded Kim that the American nuclear button was bigger than North Korea’s—an eerie counter-warning that for a time led to the cooling of North Korean rhetoric.

Pakistan went nuclear in 1998. From time to time, its prime ministers have warned India that in any confrontation, what Pakistan lacked in numbers and arms would be made up by the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. But again, Pakistan’s threats, like those of Kim Jong Un’s, were dismissed as the rantings of the insecure and blustering, who were otherwise deterred by much larger nuclear arsenals.

But the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine opened a new chapter in nuclear trash-talking. The Ukrainian war has proved dangerously unique in a variety of ways. True, there have been prior large land wars involving nuclear powers. The first Gulf War of 1991 saw Britain, France, and the United States combine to help crush Iraq without mention of nuclear arms. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 without such threats. Neither did China mention a nuclear option in 1979, despite a less-than-successful short invasion of Vietnam. Nor did Great Britain, in its 1982 retaking of the Falkland Islands, talk of the bomb, although recently declassified documents revealed that the Royal Navy carried 31 nuclear weapons on its expeditionary fleet—presumably depth charges, bombs, and missiles—to the chagrin of the current Argentine government.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/06/seeing-our-adversaries-with-clear-eyes
Middle-aged men finish their work for the day, overseeing exterminations at Auschwitz, and retire to the comfort of their homes, wives, and children. Young female telephone, telegraph, and radio operators who send and receive messages about who shall live and who shall die take a break to relax in the sun.

It was all part of life in and around history’s largest killing factory, as showcased in a set of jarring photos that are housed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and that come to life in a moving new play, “Here There Are Blueberries” – which premiered in La Jolla and just passed through the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington.

The photos and play call to mind “the banality of evil,” the phrase that philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She concluded that Eichmann, who helped spearhead Hitler’s “final solution,” was less a monster than a normal person, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” He was a former day laborer who could perform the evilest of deeds with nary a moral concern, a cog in a machine of ordinary people, living otherwise ordinary lives, in a country renowned for its advanced culture.

We see Auschwitz’s worker bees, but we also see top Nazi leaders – including Rudolf Hoss, who was most responsible for building Auschwitz and was its longest-serving commandant, and Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed the vilest of medical experiments on its prisoners.

Thus, the play offers lessons not just about the multifaceted drives of average people, but about those of individual leaders.

The play centers around 116 pictures and captions in an album that was assembled in meticulous fashion by Karl Hocker, a top aide to Auschwitz’s last commandant, Richard Baer.

https://victorhanson.com

We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. 

I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and in most of the major capitals and large cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, etc., as well as the first-, second-, and third-world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.

Over the last 40 years, I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in “bad areas,” lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to their hinterlands. I have been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006–07, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and 1974 war in Cyprus, and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur War. I have seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Khadafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe.

And yet, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo or in the worst environs of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square were routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse. Were these scenes being filmed for The Last of Us?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-nation-two-sets-of-laws/

When Barack Obama announced that he was unilaterally legalizing millions of illegal aliens while further opening the border, he described it as using “discretion about whom to prosecute”.

In the years since, pro-crime prosecutors have virtually dismantled the justice system in some jurisdictions by using their “discretion” not to prosecute thieves, drug dealers and violent criminals. Some prosecutors announced that they wouldn’t prosecute rioters and looters, others that they would stop prosecuting prostitution, public urination or thefts of under $1,000.

In the decade since Obama announced his exercise in prosecutorial discretion, the country has been overrun with criminals and illegal aliens who benefited from that “discretion”.

But prosecutorial discretion, like most leftist policies, works both ways.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg issued a ‘zero day’ memo on taking office that told prosecutors not to seek prison sentences for armed robbers. Bragg then labored to indict former President Trump while bypassing such niceties as the statute of limitations and the actual nature of the crime.

Such prosecutorial discretion has become routine in New York where Attorney General Letita James has championed criminal justice reform while targeting not only Trump, but the NRA. Bragg’s predecessor, DA Cyrus Vance, gave Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein a pass. He announced that he wouldn’t charge former Mayor Bill de Blasio, but pursued Trump. After refusing to charge BLM rioters or prostitutes, he made a point of dragging a woman featured in a viral video into court because she had called the police during a dispute with a black man.

But it’s also become normal at the federal level.

Hillary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information on a massive scale. The indictment of President Trump contrasts sharply with the treatment of Hillary, not to mention Biden who left classified documents lying around his garbage. The Trump team will argue selective prosecution, but the prosecution will argue that it can charge whom it pleases.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/06/11/tulsi-gabbard-trump-indictment-undermines-democracy-n1702331

“[The] Trump indictment undermines democracy because if a law is going to be enforced, it should be enforced equally and fairly across the board. The selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement to go after political or personal opponents, undermines the very essence of the rule of law, which is the foundation for our democracy,” ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard posted to her Locals account recently.

What Tulsi is touching on with the “selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement” is a phenomenon called anarcho-tyranny, in which politically favored individuals in the in-group are permitted to violate the letter of the law with impunity (a good example being the “mostly peaceful” “Summer of Love” 2020 BLM riots).

Meanwhile, under anarcho-tyranny, a robust enforcement regime is foisted upon members of the out-group (in the modern context consisting mostly of alt-right MAGA “domestic terrorists”). Law enforcement, in short, is entirely politicized.

While both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have admitted to housing classified documents illegally — neither of them even having a theoretical defense, as they were never president (at the time) and therefore have no authority to declassify anything — the DOJ has declined to pursue charges against either man because they are favored members of the ruling class in good standing.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/watch-trump-attorney-turns-tables-obliterates-sniveling-clinton/

Far-left ABC “News” anchor George Stephanopoulos’ attempt to corner Trump attorney Jim Trusty during their interview Friday went horribly wrong and the host went into meltdown mode as reported by the Daily Caller.

As Gateway Pundit readers know, Stephanopoulos is a former Democrat advisor who once served as Bill Clinton’s communications director before entering the media. He has carried water for his favored party since.

Stephanopoulos started his inquisition by trying to get Trusty to agree that Trump committed crimes. Trusty did not fall for the host’s trap, though, and completely turned the tables on him by pointing the actual serious crimes committed by Joe Biden.

Stephanopoulos lost his temper after getting hit with truth bombs. Trusty then finished him off in epic style.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

Stephanopoulos: Don’t you believe in the principle that no person is above the law?

Trusty: No person is below the law, that’s really the issue here. You’ve got these investigations in Delaware that are 1,000 times more serious by a sitting president who has authorized his DOJ to try to sink the candidacy of his prime opposition while that guy has unsecured documents that he stole out of a skiff dozens of years ago. Look, we’re not talking…

Stephanopoulos (melting down): What are you talking about? “What are you talking about? That is a ridiculous statement!

https://www.dailywire.com/news/time-to-just-say-no-to-george-soross-campaign-to-legalize-drugs

Eight of the nine 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls presented their vision for America in Iowa last Saturday. Yet, none proposed a policy that could stop or reverse the terrible effects caused by George Soros’s “compassionate” initiative of decriminalizing and legalizing drugs, which began with marijuana.

In his 2004 book “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” Soros stated: “When I decided to extend the operations of my Open Society Foundation to the United States, I chose drug policy as one of the first fields of engagement. I felt that drug policy was the area in which the United States was in the greatest danger of violating the principles of open society.”

Following Soros’s lead, marijuana campaigners claim that legalizing the drug is “a necessary social justice initiative” because, they say, marijuana use led to the mass incarceration of black and brown people. Thus, in addition to changing state laws to allow the use, possession, production, and selling of marijuana, provisions have been added to expunge and vacate low-level marijuana convictions.

Some states, like New Jersey, issued regulations to increase the number of cannabis businesses run by people with prior convictions for marijuana offenses, who were “most harmed by the failed war on drugs,” emphasizing that “social equity” does not necessarily include businesses owned by women, minorities, or disabled veterans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/enough_is_enough__defend_trump.html

Throughout most of my life my attitude toward politics has been this: Don’t get involved. People who get wrapped up in politics gain nothing from it and often ruin their own lives. Live life as best as you can, ignore politics, and enjoy the sweet gifts life has to offer with some of God’s plenty. Usually, this philosophy works, but at a certain point, like all philosophies, it breaks down. Then this philosophy becomes willful ignorance, sticking your head in the sand, and maybe even cowardice.

It is a waste of time to say the latest round of indictments against Trump are politically motivated, and it is a waste of time to say we now have a banana republic Department of Justice. You already know this.

The purpose of all these indictments is to wear Trump down, exhaust him, and convince the general public that he certainly must be guilty of something. The law of averages is not on Trump’s side.

The question now for Trump supporters is what to do about it? No, I am not suggesting in any way that you consider an act of terror. However, the time has come to become much more politically active — like the anti-Trump activists in the summer of 2020. This will also involve, most likely, a cost. Most of you reading this are probably a lot like me — average middle Americans who go to work every day, pay their bills and taxes, and play by the rules.

The rules are being abused to get Trump.

I also believe the reason the elites have used every speck of their power against him is because he is an outsider and dared to support the views of average Allan and average Anne. He also dared to challenge permanent Washington and the complicit press: the swamp and the swamp thing. They could not allow this to go unpunished, and they intend to send a message to all future presidential candidates: Never stand against the one party, the uniparty, the Republicrats, the revolting Republicans and the disgusting Democrats, or we will annihilate you.

The cumulative effect of all these indictments is to sway the undecideds and deny Trump the election in 2024. So the will of the people, the vote, has already been compromised. George Soros funded both Alvin Bragg and Letitia James. Special Council Jack Smith is a Democrat.