RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/13/ben-rhodes-attacks-trump-to-obscure-obamas-complicity-in-irans-forever-war/

Despite Rhodes’ propaganda, America is in a far stronger position to deal with Iran’s provocations under Trump than at any time since Obama entered office.

Peevish Obama national security official Ben Rhodes of “we can tell journalists anything and they’ll believe it” fame recently published an editorial in The Atlantic ripping the president’s recent dealings with Iran. Rhodes’ ripostes flow from the president’s game-changing retaliatory strike on the Obama administration partner — and leading terrorist of the leading terror force of the world’s leading terror regime — Qassem Soleimani.

Rhodes’ Atlantic retorts to Trump’s foreign policy have been as mendacious as his tweets are manic.

As he did with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Rhodes is again working to manipulate the press — who, in his words, “literally know nothing” — by farcically contrasting the Obama Iran policy with the Trump one. The media seems a willing partner, what with the wake-like atmosphere it has created over a genocidal jihadist’s demise, and the irresponsible war hysteria it has ginned up.

In spite of Rhodes’ cynicism, disingenuousness, and demonstrable Trump hatred, his arguments demand countering, since he and his minions lead the Democrats’ progressive foreign policy wing.

The Iran Deal Strengthened the Mullahs

Rhodes’ first major contention is that the Iran nuclear deal rolled back its program, and Iran was complying with it. Both elements of this argument are at best highly misleading. To make the case, Rhodes commits sins of omission and commission about the deal, its context, and purpose.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/12/remembering-the-farming-way/

We need to pause sometimes and remember who these dinosaurs were and what they have contributed. For a while longer, a few are still with us, a sort of collective keyhole through which we can look back into a now unremembered American past, whose codes and mores we simply abandoned—and to our great and present loss.

Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now.

Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore. Back in the day, when a local farmer’s wife died, I was told things like, “Elmer will go pretty soon, too. His color isn’t good and he’s not used to living without her”—and tragically the neighbor usually died within months. Now I guess I would ask Elmer whether his blood tests came back OK, and the sort of blood pressure medicine he takes. I don’t think we believe that superficial facial color supersedes lab work. Farmers did because in an age of limited technology they saw people as plants, and knew that the look and color of a tree or vine—in comparison to others in the orchard or vineyard—was a sign of their viability.

I grew up with an entire local network of clubs and get-togethers, and ferried my grandparents to periodic meetings of the Walnut Improvement Club, Eastern Star, the Odd Fellows, Masons, the Grange, and Sun-Maid growers. They exchanged gossip, of course, but also vital folk and empirical information on irrigation, fertilizers, and machines.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/useful_idiots_on_the_right_nevertrumpers_.html

One could perhaps have excused them their earlier indiscretions of November 2016.  He was, after all, an unknown quantity, an outsider of questionable conservative pedigree.  Indeed, Donald Trump had been a fairly typical New York liberal Democrat for much of his life.  And he had led a less than stellar moral life.  And so the pile-on at the time by National Review and others could perhaps have been forgiven, although not really, when one considered the alternative.  As I had written at the time:

Do we not grow weary of the sanctimonious ones?  The Never Trumpers that endlessly hector and scold, and hold themselves up as paragons of moral virtue? They display their good taste by showing contempt for Trump and his supporters.  Some of them claim they will vote down ballot, skipping the Presidential slot, or vote for Evan what’s his name (McMullin).  Some will write in a candidate or go Libertarian, neither of who will have any chance of winning.  Other pious Republicans will even cast their vote for Hillary.

But how much more compelling is the argument today, three years later, in light of the horrendous behavior of the Left, their naked will-to-power and demonic “rule or ruin” ethos?  And what of Trump, his incredible and unexpected victory in 2016, and then his very favorable performance as president and conservative standard-bearer?  What accounts for the odd and self-immolating behavior of the Never Trump crowd, most if not all of them former card-carrying members of the right?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/new-racism-walter-williams/

A voter may dislike a black, homosexual or female candidate, but it’s not likely that he would openly admit it. However, diversity-crazed leftist/progressive Democrats have openly condemned the physical characteristics of some of their 2020 presidential candidates. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are leading the polls despite the fact that they have been condemned as old white men. While Pete Buttigieg is homosexual, something that pleases diversity crazies, he is also a white man, young and religious. With Kamala Harris’ departure from the race, the Democratic field has lost one of its persons of color. Another, Senator Cory Booker, stands at 2% in the polls; his days are numbered. That means the only Democratic candidates polling high are those condemned as old white people — two men and one woman, Elizabeth Warren.

LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said she was initially eager for Joe Biden to enter the race but now has second thoughts. Brown said: “I’m over white men running the country. I don’t know if him [sic] getting in changes the field. He has name recognition, but his strength is also his weakness.” Former presidential candidate Howard Dean lamented, “If we have two old white guys at the top of this ticket, we will lose.” The newest entry into the presidential sweepstakes, Michael Bloomberg, had to apologize for what some see as his diversity insensitivity, namely that of calling fellow presidential candidate Cory Booker “well-spoken” in a TV interview. The New Jersey senator said he was “taken aback” by what he saw as Bloomberg’s racist “trope.”

Michael Moore gave us his racist warning: “Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bailout-for-criminals-11578865016?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Label something “criminal-justice reform” these days and it’s likely to be whisked into law in left-leaning states with little thought to the consequences. Witness the fiasco of New York’s bail reform that took effect Jan. 1 and is already producing ill effects across the state.

The reform that passed last year eliminated cash bail for misdemeanors and certain nonviolent felonies. The idea was that people who were no threat to the community were locked up only because they couldn’t afford bail, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo pitched it as a victory for fairness.

It turns out that some of those now going free aren’t as harmless as promised. Strict new timelines for evidence prosecutors must provide defendants means folks who otherwise should be locked up are also going free, especially on drug offenses.

In New York City, a woman was arrested three times in a week after initially assaulting Jews. After the third arrest she was finally detained in a psych ward—but only after the intervention of an embarrassed Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had said when the bail measure passed that he was “thrilled.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/hatred-whose-name-we-dare-not-spea

Week after week come new headlines of attacks upon Jews walking the streets of ordinary, traditionally Jewish New York neighborhoods.

Since the beginning of December, there have been eight attacks upon Jews, starting with the shooting assault on a Jersey City Jewish supermarket which left three innocents dead.

Quite simply, even a mere year or two ago, this was not a problem one would have expected to see in the post-Second World War United States. A new menace to Jewish life, a reawakened anti-Semitism, reminiscent of the 1930s, with its Nazi and fascist infection, when Jews were last victimized in American streets, is now with us and a high proportion of this anti-Semitic violence is being perpetrated by African-Americans.

The problem is also large when viewed in the total context of hate crimes in the US: in the third quarter of 2019, anti-Jewish incidents comprised roughly half of all hate crimes recorded by New York City police.

After the Jersey City attacks, some local blacks despicably blamed Jews for living in the neighborhood and thus supposedly causing the attack.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/11/christopher-wray-isnt-the-right-man-to-fix-the-fbi/

The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is in shambles. Following a series of internal investigations, in addition to extensive reporting on the misconduct of former top officials, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is suffering a crisis in confidence from the very people it has a sworn duty to protect: the American public.

Considering its behavior over the past four years, one could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI exists only to serve the interests of the political aristocracy. From the Clinton email server cover-up to the unfounded counterintelligence probe into four Americans working for the Trump presidential campaign and the corruption of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI has exploited its power to defend partisan allies and punish foes. 

Texts revealed contempt for voters who make up roughly half the country. Rather than working to keep the country safe, the top tier of the FBI spent most of its time massaging their press contacts, accompanying reporters to baseball games and golf outings (in clear violation of company policy), and illegally leaking sensitive information then lying about it all when caught. The FBI’s former chief, James Comey, stole his own classified memos from the agency and hid them at home before he was busted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_rule_of_law_the_abuse_of_power_and_justice_denied.html

The film Just Mercy opened this week.  It is the story of a man, Walter McMillan, who was convicted of murder in Alabama,1987. The trial was a sham, all exculpatory evidence hidden, the one witness a felon who traded his false testimony for a shorter sentence.  This gross miscarriage of justice happened because the power in the town — the sheriff, the police and the DA — all conspired to convict McMillan in order to bring closure to the community for the murder of a young girl.  

Enter Bryan Stevenson,  a young Harvard-trained lawyer who founds the Equal Justice Initiative to help those on death row, most of them having had little or no legitimate representation.  Without totally revealing the most important details of the story, suffice it to say that those most guilty of illegality, those who were complicit in the railroading of an innocent man, suffer no consequences for their participation in their crimes that sent that man to prison; he was sent to death row a year before his trial!

Watching the story unfold, it is hard not to see the parallels between the McMillan case and the Russia collusion hoax to destroy Donald Trump.  None of the many persons involved in the coup attempt have yet to suffer any consequences for their treasonous actions.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15416/bandy-lee-trump-dershowitz

Dr. Bandy Lee is literally claiming that we are mentally ill and our views should be considered symptoms of our illness, rather than as legitimate ideas.

Publicly offering “professional opinions” or diagnoses in the absence of a psychiatric examination, is a violation of psychiatric ethics and the rules of the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Lee has a history of such unethical conduct….

Her resort to diagnosis rather than dialogue is a symptom of a much larger problem that faces our divided nation — too many Americans are refusing to engage in reasoned dialogue with people with whom they disagree. Dr. Lee is part of that problem, not its solution.

A Yale professor of forensic psychiatry has diagnosed guess who — your truly — as suffering from “psychosis” for expressing legal views that happen to be on the Constitutional rights of President Donald Trump. Dr. Bandy Lee has never met me, never examined me, never seen my medical records, and never spoken to anyone close to me. Yet she is prepared to offer a diagnosis of “psychosis” which she attributes to my being one of President Trump’s “followers.” (I voted for Hillary Clinton and am a liberal Democrat.)

Indeed, Dr. Lee went even further, diagnosing “the severity and spread of ‘shared psychosis’ among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers.” Nor does she seem to be using these psychiatric terms as political metaphors, dangerous as that would be. She is literally claiming that we are mentally ill and our views should be considered symptoms of our illness, rather than as legitimate ideas.

Publicly offering “professional opinions” or diagnoses in the absence of a psychiatric examination, is a violation of psychiatric ethics and the rules of the American Psychiatric Association. According to that esteemed organization, “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to render a professional opinion to the media about a public figure unless the psychiatrist has examined the person…”