RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sheep-during-reset-lions-now/

I have written frequently about the dangers Vladimir Putin poses to U.S. interests. Yet when we prune all the rhetoric away, we are still left with two antithetical Obama–Trump administration policies.

The Obama reset, in reaction to the Bush pushback against Putin’s aggression in South Ossetia, inaugurated a bewildering policy of appeasement — summed up in a 2012 debate by Obama’s weird attack on Mitt Romney who warned of Russian threats (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”).

The list of Obama’s Russian appeasement is long: watering down sanctions, not arming the Ukrainians, inviting Putin into the Middle East after a near 40-year hiatus, defense cuts, dismantling plans to cooperate with Eastern Europeans to install missile defense, the Obama/Medvedev hot mic incident, whose terms (reelection “space” for Obama in a exchange for “flexibility” on Eastern European missile defense) were carried out, high-level U.S. intelligence and FBI operatives trafficking in a “dossier” drawing on purchased Russian disinformation sources, anemic responses to the Russian absorption of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and wet-noodle reactions to Russian cyber interference in the U.S. (“cut it out”, Vladimir?).

All of this naivete was based on the mythical assumptions that Russia was in transition to a civil society and should no longer be alienated as it had been in the last years of the derided Bush administration, and that Putin would interpret such restraint as magnanimity to be reciprocated rather than as timidity to be exploited.

Trump’s rhetoric was certainly not as eloquent on questions of Russian human-rights abuses as we heard in the twilight of the Obama administration in 2016, when the reset was in ruins.

But Trump’s 2017–19 record stands in stark contrast to all of the above: Pulling out of an asymmetrical anti-missile deal, arming the Ukrainians with lethal aid, defeating and killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefing up U.S. defense, jawboning NATO to rearm, opposing energy deals between Germany and Russia, and pushing for more U.S. gas and oil production and exports that stabilized or lowered global export prices. Are these witnesses going to criticize Trump’s “unfair” dismantling of Obama’s Russian reset on grounds that he knew Putin had tried to sabotage his campaign via having Russian operatives seeding Christopher Steele’s phony dossier?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/what-if-the-democrats-hadnt

Sondland’s testimony provided their daily ‘this changes everything’ fix.

The excitable team of Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is especially excitable in Stelter’s a.m. newsletter today. Darcy, filling in today for Stelter, thinks everything has changed. “Historic day” is the headline of his newsletter. Isn’t every day? Approvingly, he quotes CNN colleague Jeffrey Toobin: “I think you can divide the Trump presidency into two periods, before November 20th, 2019, and after, because now we know. I mean, now we know that every fantasy about how corrupt this administration was is actually true. That this was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.”

I won’t bore you by listing all the other times Team Excitable has solemnly declared that Suddenly Everything Has Changed, the Other Shoe Finally Dropped, and it’s The Beginning of the End. Just to give a quick recap, Trump was going to be dragged out of the Oval Office  because he colluded with the Russians during his campaign; because he fired James Comey, which was obstruction of justice; because he paid off Stormy Daniels; because he interfered with the Mueller investigation, which was obstruction of justice; and because he violated the Emoluments Clause by continuing to be a hotelier. This last was deemed the “number one” reason to impeach Trump by the Democratic party’s shaman-healer-id, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as recently as April.

Toobin’s statement is self-contradicting; Gordon Sondland’s testimony didn’t demonstrate that this administration “was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.” That Toobinism is the Democrats’ problem; the fact that they’ve been calling this administration a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning negates the idea that Sondland’s Testimony has Changed Everything. Darcy enthusiastically quotes pundits who called yesterday a “John Dean moment.” I think not. People who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s were about four standard deviations less cynical about politics than everyone is today.

Brian Stelter’s newsletter would have us believe that yesterday was like the moment when Krusty the Clown’s switch was flipped from Good to Evil. He and Darcy never expressed the slightest objection to anything in TrumpWorld until now, when it becomes their reluctant duty to call foul. That Darcy would suggest this simply indicates that his memory works about as well as that of the unfortunate hero of Memento. A more useful metaphor is that the Trump administration is like a tub of clear water into which beef-bouillon cubes of accusation have been thrown since before he even took office. The water turned dark brown a long time ago. Sondland’s testimony merely made the leather-colored water a bit more leathery-looking.

https://www.city-journal.org/ny-mental-health-court-system

Today’s jails hold a disproportionate number of offenders with mental illnesses. As Stephen Eide has noted, these individuals often stay in jail far longer than typical inmates, which increases the likelihood of violent incidents or even solitary confinement. If they receive any treatment, it’s provided in a punitive rather than therapeutic environment. 

Working to change this grim reality is the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, which last week celebrated a milestone: 1,000 successful graduates from its criminal-justice-system diversion program. Mental health courts provide low-level offenders with community-based treatment as an alternative to trial and potential incarceration—if both the prosecution and defense agree to it. Participants must appear in court regularly to report on their progress. If they complete their program (which often lasts 12 months or more), their charges are dropped. Thanks to the court’s approach, New York has 1,000 fewer instances of jailed mentally ill persons.

The Brooklyn Mental Health Court works in similar fashion to Kendra’s Law, the New York statute that empowers judges to order people with serious mental illness to receive mandated and monitored treatment while they live in the community. Both programs catalyze treatment and can reduce recidivism by holding systems accountable for providing services to those who require care. As the city prepares to close Rikers Island, mental health courts and Kendra’s Law are more important than ever.

Judge Matthew D’Emic has presided over the program since its creation in 2002. Today, 29 other mental health courts operate in New York State, including in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. They have handled over 11,000 cases. According to an evaluation of the mental health courts in the Bronx and Brooklyn prepared for the National Institute of Justice, participation reduces the likelihood of re-arrest by 46 percent. By diverting defendants with serious mental illness from the criminal-justice system into community-based treatment, mental health courts improve public safety and limit unnecessary incarceration. This common-sense solution ultimately increases coordination between systems responsible for the mentally ill—a shortcoming since the 1960s.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/pelosis-projection-lloyd-billingsley/

In Adam Schiff’s “impeachment palooza,” as one Republican called it, not a single witness has flagged an impeachable offence on the part of President Trump. As the smears, hearsay and lies surge onward, an offstage player has provided the key to all mysteries of the 2016 election and beyond.

After former ambassador Marie Yvanovitch failed to signal any bribery or crime on the part of the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promptly targeted President Trump. “I think part of it is his own insecurity as an imposter,” Pelosi told CBS. “I think he knows full well that he’s in that office way over his head. And so he has to diminish everyone else.”

Nancy’s keyword was “imposter,” a person posing as someone he is not. That profile hardly fits the current president of the United States.

Donald Trump has been a public figure for decades, putting up buildings, staging boxing matches, and appearing on television. Nobody has suggested that Donald J. Trump ever posed as somebody else, and nobody can point to mysteries in his ancestry. All that, and more, does apply to his predecessor in the White House.

The junior senator from Illinois, a virtual unknown, claimed that his father was a Kenyan goatherd who went to school in a tin-roof shack. That story came from the 1995 Dreams from My Father, which official biographer David Garrow proclaimed a novel and the author a “composite character.” That was apparent to the most casual reader of the Dreams book, which claims the Kenyan “bequeathed his name” to the Hawaiian-born American, and called him a “prop” in someone else’s narrative.

In all his writing from 1958-1964, the Kenyan Barack H. Obama makes no mention of an American wife and son. Barry, as his mother named him, was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student his mother Ann Dunham married, and raised in Indonesia.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/21/new-poll-shows-independents-oppose-impeachment-by-15-point-margin/

A new Emerson poll for November found more Independent voters oppose the impeachment of President Trump, compared to October when more Independent voters supported Trump’s impeachment.

In October, 48 percent of Independent’s supported impeaching Trump, with 39 percent in opposition. Now, the tides have turned. 49 percent of Independents oppose impeachment, while only 34 percent support it. That’s a 15-point margin in opposition of impeachment among Independent voters.

According to Emerson’s newest poll, the impeachment hearings are being watched, or at least followed, by 69 percent of voters. These open-door hearings are actually making an impact on American’s perception of the impeachment inquiry.

Emerson’s data concluded voters are getting their impeachment information from the following news sources (the percentage denotes how many voters watch each outlet for impeachment coverage):

Fox News – 26%
ABC, NBC, or CBS – 24%
CNN – 16%
MSNBC – 15%
Outside source – 19%

The results from these open-door impeachment hearings are helping Trump’s case for reelection. There are two narratives circulating in the media. The first, there is no question Trump bribed Ukraine and he must be impeached. The second, this impeachment is a partisan witch hunt.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/20/nobody-expects-the-splc-inquisition/

Voltaire wrote that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Something similar could be said of the Southern Poverty Law Center—if it ever had anything to do with helping poor people in the South with their legal problems, it doesn’t any longer. (It is a center, though!)

Instead, it’s turned into the Inquisition for the True Faith of today’s leftism. It sniffs out heretics and blasphemers who are promoting the false doctrine they deem “hate” and uses smears (their own word) to “completely destroy them.” It even publishes a map to target the infidel.

This has proven an enormously lucrative enterprise for the SPLC. Rather than seizing the assets of its targets like the original Inquisition, the SPLC’s fundraising feasts on the fear of gullible liberals, amassing a hoard of close to half a billion dollars, much of it stashed in offshore accounts.

The SPLC occasionally has paid a price for its promiscuous accusations of “hate” and “extremism,” most notably in a court settlement of $3.375 million for smearing Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

But such settlements have not deterred the SPLC from its mission of cleansing society of heretics, the most notorious of which are designated as “hate groups.” My own organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), was placed on this list shortly after Donald Trump’s election, and the list includes a host of other mainstream conservative groups, including the Alliance for Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Liberty Counsel, The American Family Association, the Center for Security Policy, Act for America, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and many others.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-misplaced-patriotism-damaging-to-constitutional-order/

In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency. We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters.

Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.

Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.

Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.

On the first day of the impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff called his initial two witnesses, career State Department diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent. Far from providing damning evidence of criminal presidential behavior, Taylor and Kent mostly confined themselves to three topics: their own sterling résumés, their lack of any firsthand knowledge of incriminating Trump action, and their poorly hidden disgust with the manner and substance of Trump’s foreign policy.

Oddly, both had little clue that their demeanor and thinly disguised self-importance were a perfect example of why Trump got elected — to come up with new ideas antithetical to the conventional wisdom of unelected career bureaucrats.

Taylor and Kent announced that they are simply high-minded civil servants who serve the presidential administrations of both parties without bias.

But by nature, the huge federal bureaucracy counts on bigger government and more taxes to feed it. So naturally, the bureaucracy is usually more sympathetic to big-government progressives than to small-government conservatives.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-impeachment-inquiry-democratic-debate-proves-to-be-afterthought/

After three days of Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry, we are left with only the monotony. We know in advance all the questions, the subjective mood answers and bureaucratic mindset of the witnesses, the ensuing spin, and the congressional posturing.

In lieu of a Jaworski or Starr special prosecutor’s damning report, a White House tape, or even a blue dress, there is only “I assumed,” “I gathered,” “I presumed,” and “my personal belief is that” — without direct knowledge of impeachable wrongdoing or some smoking-gun email or document.

The next “star” witness, Ambassador Sondland, played perfectly the Janus consummate businessman — nodding first to Democrats, only then turning to grin at Republicans.

Sondland seemed at last to offer Schiff the chance to run out to announce to the captive press a proverbial MSNBC/CNN “bombshell.” But it was mostly a dud, with Sondland referencing a hoped-for Ukraine meeting in the White House (that never happened) for Ukrainian statements on corruption (that never happened), rather than a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Ukraine — at least according to Sondland’s “own presumption.” He even mentioned a “quid pro quo,” but that was focus grouped out to “bribery” days ago. (Sondland, like most major ambassadors, should be an expert in quid pro quos, given that it is a hallowed and bipartisan American tradition to sell off the most prestigious European ambassadorial slots to the most generous campaign donors.)

But then the cagey Sondland tacked back by reciting his phonecall question to the president, in which he asked the existential question of what Trump wanted from Ukraine — with Trump answering “Nothing!” Checkmate?

All day long, the grinning Sondland played Roadrunner to Adam Schiff’s Wiley E. Coyote, as he slowed and pulled up to offer up Trump — only to scoot away in a puff of dust as soon as Schiff tried to wrap his hands around him.

What we are left with so far are two inconvenient truths that won’t go away.