RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Greek myth of the Augean Stables has rarely been more pertinent than today. In penance for his sins, the Greek hero Hercules (Heracles in original Greek) was ordered to scour the stables in which King Augeas kept 3,000 herd of cattle and which had not been cleaned in 30 years. The Labor was accomplished by diverting the river Alpheus through the structure, in itself no mean feat, even for a mythological hero.

The slogan “drain the swamp,” restored to our political discourse by Donald Trump, serves as the contemporary description and political purpose of the Herculean Labor undertaken by the former president, the nemesis of the fetid Washington quagmire. Regrettably, Trump had less luck than Hercules, but his attempt was no less heroic. Three-thousand oxen are nothing compared to the uncountable and unaccountable swamp dwellers thronging the offices, precincts, fields, and fens of American politics, and 30 years is an eyeblink in the history of political and moral corruption. Even Hercules might have quailed before the task, realizing that diverting the Potomac through the halls of power would have amounted to a mere trickle, by comparison, leaving the offal intact.

Something in the magnitude of Noah’s Flood would be needed to rinse and fumigate the grime and crud and sewage that has accumulated over the generations of grift and venality in the realms of authority, possibly never more feculent than at present under the reprobate administration of Joe Biden, a lawless DOJ, an unscrupulous FBI, a weaponized IRS, a tainted NIH, NIAID, and CDC, all operating in the debauched atmosphere of corporate socialism and generally associated with banana republics.

Nonetheless, some sort of housecleaning must be attempted, which may at least leave two or three stalls of the Washington Stables in reasonably decent shape, and Donald Trump is the only protagonist on the scene who is capable of performing even so truncated a mission. The objective is clear. MAGA Republicans must capture House and Senate. Biden will have to be impeached. The marsh of Democrat imbeciles and embarrassments who desecrate every department and agency must be disciplined or sent packing. Rogue civil service bureaucrats must be purged en masse via Schedule F. The military must once more be set upon its proper foundation as a fighting force second to none rather than a community center for intersectional clowns and incompetents.

Obviously, there are discrepancies in the analogy. Trump, for example, was not, like Hercules, punished for his sins, but undertook his Labor voluntarily. He was beholden neither to the gods nor subject to some Eurysthean wager. Neither would his quest be guaranteed of success. He might be defeated — arrested on false accusations, or worse — or otherwise thwarted by a vast machinery of special interests, Party traitors, an army of media sutlers and assorted public mercenaries, and a thick emulsion of establishment cronies and powerful adversaries resistant to political antiseptic.

But the effort must be undertaken, and Trump is the one to do it. His first sortie was an unexpected, if partial, success. He has now learned the extent of the stables and the enormous quantities of manure he has to deal with. Hercules was assigned Twelve Labors, but it is the Fifth that requires attention. The stables are rank and must be hosed out, so far as possible. But the task is immense, and I can’t see anyone else who has the thews and the gumption capable of mounting so prodigious an operation that even the gods might have spared him.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3647056-who-is-raymond-j-dearie-the-special-master-in-trump-case/

A federal judge on Thursday appointed Judge Raymond J. Dearie to serve as special master in the case involving documents the FBI seized from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last month.

The decision to install Dearie — a 78-year-old New York native and semi-retired judge from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York — came in response to Trump’s request for an independent mediator to determine what, if any, materials recovered by authorities are protected by attorney-client or executive privileges.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the Trump documents case, granted Trump’s request for a special master and directed both his legal team and the Justice Department to provide a list of contenders for the job. Dearie was the only individual both sides agreed upon.

The longtime judge is now tasked with examining the more than 11,000 documents the FBI seized by Nov. 30.

Here are five things to know about Dearie.

Dearie is a former Reagan nominee

Dearie received a bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University in 1966 before earning his juris doctor from St. John’s University School of Law in 1969.

After working in private practice for two years, Dearie moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in 1971.

Starting out as an assistant U.S. attorney, the New York native moved up the ladder at the office, leading the appeals division, general crimes section and criminal division before assuming the role of chief assistant U.S. attorney in 1980 and, in 1982, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/16/bidens-fuzzy-math-fuels-racial-division/

The Biden administration’s race war continued this week with the president’s deceptively named “United We Stand” summit to expose the supposed widespread threat of violent extremism and White supremacy in America. The government website stokes fear and division in stark terms. “Americans cannot participate in the basic activities of everyday life—like shopping at the grocery store or praying at their house of worship—without the fear of being targeted and killed for who they are, our democracy… is at risk.”

In an effort to convince Americans that we don’t have a crime wave, a mental health crisis or rampant societal rot due to welfare’s broken promises, President Joe Biden is again manipulating and demonizing the population. As we saw with pandemic reporting, there’s fuzzy math and deliberate information management being utilized to drive the narrative that White supremacists are somehow a significant threat to society. The contrived hysteria will be used to target the administration’s opponents like the dictators of some third-world Banana Republic or fascist regime.

Like the left’s anti-cop narrative about indiscriminate killings of Black men, the facts about extremism decisively expose the left’s subterfuge.

According to the FBI, in 2019 there were more than 10 million arrests in the United States, excluding traffic infractions. There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes and more than 6.9 million property crimes with the remainder being other miscellaneous offenses.

That same year there were 6,455 hate crimes reported against persons and property. If all of those led to an arrest, that amounted to only .06% of all arrests in 2019. In 2020, the number from the FBI was 8,263. The year-over-year increase amounted to two, one hundredths of a percent of all arrests.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3647706-why-has-fact-checking-disappeared-under-biden/

Fact-checking under President Trump was a bustling business. Seemingly every day, and sometimes by the hour, the 45th president’s every word was scrutinized, which all comes with the job.

But under President Biden, fact checkers are enjoying what feels like extended vacations or have simply checked out in terms of scrutinizing the many ways that he is misleading the public.

Take CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale as a prime example of apathy around holding the current president accountable.

From June 2019 until November 2020, Dale appeared or was mentioned on CNN more than once per day, on average, according to Mediaite. Estimating conservatively,

that’s more than 500 appearances or mentions on a national network in the span of just 16 months.

But Dale has become the fact-checker version of Edward Snowden under Biden. He’s almost impossible to find these days. In fact, Dale has not conducted even one fact-check of the president since June.

Of course, Biden supporters will insist that Dale simply doesn’t have any material to work with. But that’s not true. In August, Biden declared that inflation in July was zero, despite the number being near a 40-year high at 8.3 percent.

Last week, Biden claimed the Inflation Reduction Act, which numerous studies have concluded will do almost nothing to reduce inflation, had already “helped reduce inflation at the kitchen table.” In a related story, food prices rose again in August, with the Consumer Price Index up 10.6 percent year-over-year.

There are many other examples from the summer, but you get the point: The most powerful man in the country needs to be held accountable for his words and actions, particularly in an election year, when each side is attempting to shape the narrative through the press. But fact-checkers at mainstream outlets refuse to do it.

The situation is worse when it comes to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. She has been fact-checked only once by Politifact since June.

This is the same press secretary who claimed earlier this month that people aren’t just walking into this country across the U.S. Southern border, when in fact it’s happening daily, per border agents and reporting on the ground.

She also claimed the Biden administration is “doing a lot more [than the Trump administration] to secure the border.”

Yup. She claimed that the administration that halted border wall construction and ended the effective “Remain in Mexico” policy is doing more than the previous administration to secure the border.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/17/wish-you-werent-here/

It is curious how deeply the comic and the sinister are woven together in the woke dramas of our time. 

Consider, to take the latest example, the embarrassing little panic to which the well-pressed and affluent denizens of Martha’s Vineyard treated the public. 

Our agents are still out there counting the number of nauseating “Hate has no place here” and “No human being is illegal” signs on the front yards of posh Vineyard estates. To a man, woman, and everything in between, the neighbors of Barack and Michelle Obama in their 12 million seaside compound are echt correct. All of them, within the limits of statistical probability, hate Donald Trump. They all voted for Joe Biden. They support windmills (so long as they are not visible from the Vineyard), carbon-neutral energy policies, and a “woman’s right to choose” (though not of course if the female is yet-to-be-born: she gets no choice), etc., etc. 

It would be easy to draw up a menu of things the pampered people of Martha’s Vineyard support and deplore. 

One of the things they support is greater “diversity” and its primary motor, vastly increased immigration. They think Joe Biden was right when he said that the United States could very easily accommodate two million immigrants from Central America. 

They pooh-pooh reports of chaos on our Southern border. Neither Kamala Harris, in whose portfolio the border was originally placed, nor Joe Biden has even bothered to visit the border. Why should they care? They like it when thousands of poor migrants huddle into places like Brownsville, Texas. When journalists such as the New York Post’s Miranda Devine began revealing that the Biden Administration was secretly shipping planeloads of illegal immigrants around the country, including into tony venues like the Westchester, New York, airport in the dead of night, their bored reaction was to pour themselves another chardonnay. 

But then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to attract their attention. He rounded up 50 illegal immigrants, mostly from Venezuela, who had made their way to Florida and put them on a plane to Edgartown, Massachusetts, the beating heart of Martha’s Vineyard. (And that’s just the beginning.)

The reaction of the loving, open, soft-palmed, Democrat-voting residents? “The horror, the horror”: Mr. Kurtz’s expostulation at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about sums it up. 

Floundering Florida pol Charlie Crist said that DeSantis’ action “shocks the conscience of any fair-minded human being.” Hillary Clinton said that it was an example of “human trafficking,” while other talking heads decried it as pure “evil.” Documentary filmmaker and anti-American propagandist Ken Burns has just made a film about the Holocaust that explains how the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis was, at bottom, if you look at it the right (i.e., the Left) way, the fault of America. Interviewed just as the story about the migrants-come-to-Martha’s-Vineyard was breaking, Burns said that DeSantis, by sending illegal immigrant to Martha’s Vineyard, had taken a page from that “authoritarian playbook” and was “weaponizing human beings for a political purpose” just as you-know-who had done in World War II. 

Surreal, isn’t it?

https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-american-medias-racism-fantasy/

It was the kind of correction you love to see. The story that originally broke in the final days of August, about a young black athlete being racially heckled in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah’s Brigham Young University, was not just exaggerated but completely false. The n-word was not shouted, let alone repeatedly, at Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson when she went up to serve. A crowd of more than 5,000 people did not stand idly by during an act of malignant racism. The United States is not, apparently, a socially backwards hellscape where people openly scream slurs at packed sporting events without compunction or shame.

Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/marknuckols/2022/09/15/liberal-double-standards-and-fascism-n2613141

Mehdi Hasan is one of MSNBC’s most popular hosts. For American liberals, he’s a dream come true. Muslim, check. Raised in the United Kingdom, he went to an exclusive prep school in London, founded in 1561, check. He speaks like an English aristocrat, check. He despises America, check. And he has publicly referred to Christians and other non-Muslims as “animals” and “people of no intelligence.” Double check. And he’s always angry.

He did a show this week about how “Fascism is on the Rise in Europe, Not Just in the U.S.” You see, for MSNBC viewers, Europe is the Land of Enlightenment and Progress, except for those vicious right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary. But Hasan had a Yale professor and an Italian Muslim to warn us, you can’t escape fascism in America by moving to Europe, fascism is on the march everywhere these days.

“Fascists” have done well in this week’s elections in Sweden and will be part of a new coalition government. And “Fascists” are poised to do well in upcoming Italian elections. And you only see “fascism” in white-majority countries, like the U.S. or in Europe.

And what is fascism? According to Hasan and his guests, you can see several key elements in the “fascist” Swedish Democrats party and its members. They are against unlimited immigration. Check, fascism. They support traditional family values. They support gay rights, but some members find Gay Pride parades a bit boring, annoying even. Fascism, double check. They respect religious rights, but believe that Muslim immigrants should obey the laws of Sweden and should learn Swedish language, in return for generous social benefits. Fascism, triple check.

And yet, somehow Hasan seems incapable of recognizing simple facts. Now, his audience doesn’t know anything about Islam, the Middle East, Africa, or Europe. But Hasan does, so his ignorance is really just willful blindness.

There are no countries in Africa or the Middle East that welcome immigrants. In South Africa, the only country in Africa wealthy enough to attract immigrants, immigrants from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe are beaten and sometimes murdered. They are certainly not offered social benefit packages and citizenship. In Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, there are millions of immigrants, mostly from India and the Philippines. They have only “guest worker” status, they can never be accorded citizenship, and they have basically no rights in the courts.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/15/the-unidentified-and-uncharged-instigator-in-oath-keepers-case/

The long-awaited trial of the most high-profile January 6 case will begin later this month. Five members of the Oath Keepers, an alleged “militia” group involved in the Capitol protest, face charges of seditious conspiracy and other serious felonies. It is the first trial in a multi-defendant prosecution that has dominated the attention of the Department of Justice, the January 6 select committee, and the national news media.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the group, along with Thomas Caldwell, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, and Jessica Watkins will face a highly biased D.C. jury pool—the government so far has an undefeated record in January 6 trials composed of Washington, D.C. residents—as they attempt to avoid life in prison for the seditious conspiracy count. (Meggs, Harrelson, and Watkins have been detained in the D.C. gulag denied bail since spring 2021.)

At least a dozen other members of the Oath Keepers currently await trial for their nonviolent participation in the events of January 6. But one person won’t face trial. In fact, it appears this chief instigator isn’t even charged despite a trove of evidence showing how he incited at least one member of the group to engage in criminal behavior that day.

Someone identified only as “1%Watchdog” started a group chat on an encrypted application called Zello, which mimics a walkie-talkie. The channel, named “Stop the Steal J6,” was created on January 1, 2021; by noon on January 6, 2021, the channel had about 170 subscribers including Watkins, prosecutors allege.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/16/the-bidenomics-sham-is-collapsing/

With red lights flashing nearly everywhere, the economy’s prospects look grim. Soaring inflation, crashing home sales, plunging GDP, falling real incomes. No question, the economy is a mess. So why is the Biden administration saying things are going better?

It’s not just this week’s “unexpected” 8.3% inflation jump. Or the scary plunge in stock prices, destroying trillions of dollars in household wealth in just days. It’s that the ruling party, the Democratic Party, seems utterly oblivious to the damage it’s done.

This week, President Joe Biden touted the “progress” made by his administration against inflation, just a day after the report that prices had risen 8.3% overall, and food prices by 11.4%, the fastest since 1979.

“Today’s data show more progress in bringing global inflation down in the U.S. economy,” Biden bragged. “Overall, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months: that is welcome news for American families, with more work still to do.”

Prices have not been “essentially flat.” They’re rising sharply, as the data clearly and unequivocally show.