RUTHFULLY YOURS

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.

In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.

This time around it’s “radically” different.

The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.

This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.

The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.

The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.

Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.

That is what “Resistance” actually means.

I agree that McCain and Graham are idiots, but I would not say that about Mitch McConnell who did usher through the nomination of Neil Gorsuch…and does not make ludicrous policy statements….rsk
When will this jackass get the hook from the voters?

Every time Senator Lindsay Graham opens his mouth, crazy things fly out. Is there something wrong with this guy?

It’s not for nothing that a MorningConsult poll released Tuesday pegged him at the third-most unpopular senator, trailed by only John McCain and Mitch McConnell.

But there are methods to the madnesses of McCain and McConnell. In Graham’s case, the loathing is justified, given his out of control statements, signalling an unserious mind, unmoored from reality.

His latest was a call for 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. ground troops in Syria, backseat-driving the Trump administration, which seems to already have a handle on the situation. He told Meet the Press:

“We’re relying too much on the Kurds. More armed forces, 5,000 or 6,000, would attract more regional fighters to destroy ISIL.

“You need a safe haven quickly, so people can regroup inside of Syria. Then you train the opposition to go after Assad. That’s how he’s taken out by his own people with our efforts. And you tell the Russians if you continue to bomb the people we train, we’ll shoot you down.”

and

“I want more American troops, 5,000 or 6,000, like we have in Iraq, to help destroy ISIL.”

It’s like the Bush years never happened with this guy. All of those things have been tried. They’ve all been found wanting. The Syrian charmers we trained as freedom fighters back then took their shiny new weapons and joined Isis. Now this armchair general wants to risk 6,000 more American lives for this scheme? Why 6,000? Why not 20,000? Why not 1,000? Does he know what he’s talking abou? And a war with Russia? Like it’s some trivial afterthought? How blithely he puts American lives on the line for his been-there-done-that ‘prescriptions.’

UPDATE: Oh wait, I erred – Graham’s latest verbal diarrheaic was his new recommendation that barrel bombs be President Trump’s new red line with Assad, not chemical weapons. Keep on micromanaging, fool.

Less than a week earlier, he was calling for 7,000 troops. He was an easy target for Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Unless Trump is coordinating an end-around, this is a huge (yuge) mistake. Here’s why.

While Donald Trump drew in countless new, historically Democrat voters, his base was and is the conservatives, formally defined as the Tea Party. The Tea Party came onto the scene at the outset of the Obamacare debate in Congress. They made the case (rightly) that Obamacare would inflate premiums, cause patients to lose their doctors and plans, decrease full-time jobs in favor of part-time employment, and add countless persons to the Medicare rolls. All of these cautions (and more) came to fruition.

“Repeal and replace” has been a rallying call for millions of Americans, including a large majority of those who voted for Donald Trump. Countless congressmen and senators won seats by affirming their support of the repeal and replace efforts.

Nothing, or very little, anyway, of last week’s debate – and, subsequently, the bill being “forced” on the Freedom Caucus – represented what anyone could seriously consider a repeal and replace of Obamacare.

There is an ideological war being waged between liberal progressives (from both parties) and conservatives. This war has been ongoing for at least a couple of decades (if not a century). While we (Republicans) have gained countless state and federal congressional seats, governorships, and now the presidency, at the federal level, we have seen little movement off the progressive agenda advanced by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.

The Freedom Caucus’s crime: standing on what they ran on in their districts. The horra.

Here’s Donald’s mistake: while he may truly be concerned about 2018 congressional seats being lost due to not passing a bill “reforming” Obamacare, if we’re not able to unwind dependency on government for health care, we’ll be forever chasing voters who will continue to vote for the Party of Santa Claus.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266245/dems-arent-brights-bruce-thornton

“Brights” was the term popularized by evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to describe people who think like them: materialist determinists who scoff at faith and traditional wisdom, and proclaim their devotion to rationalism, science, and critical thought. The label was mocked to death for its smug narcissism, but the idea behind it is still a foundational assumption of progressives. The irony is much of the superiority progressives claim based on their “respect for science” is an illusion, reflecting instead scientism and ideology.

Indeed, as a political movement now over a century old, progressivism was founded on the belief that new knowledge of human nature and behavior required a revision of the American political order. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic and a leading progressive theorist, wrote that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.” This faith in “science” was embraced by progressive president Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to discard the Constitution’s popular self-rule filtered through divided government and checks and balances, and replace it with administrative bureaus staffed by the “hundreds who are wise” who would guide and control the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”

Wilson’s vision succeeded, which is why today we have a bloated federal government with 2.5 million workers and a nearly four-trillion-dollar budget, two-thirds of which is committed to entitlement spending. Thanks to Wilson, today we are subjected to a regulatory regime that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate,” as Alexis de Tocqueville prophesized. This technocratic rule has diminished our freedom and autonomy, compensating for that loss by redistributing money through various entitlements that corrupt character and create dependency on our government overseers.

The ancients called this “tyranny,” a consequence of human nature’s lust for power and domination that frightened the founders and explains the structure of the Constitution. The progressives just added a new twist to the old tyrannical modus operandi: the claim that not greed or ambition for personal power or aristocratic honor, but the truths of science were the bases for their political innovations and concentration of power into their hands.

So, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. Great!

Just one question: From what?

Yes, yes, Sessions is a good and decent man. He is a scrupulous lawyer who cares about his reputation. Thus, in stark contrast to Obama administration attorneys general, he strictly applied — I’d say he hyper-applied — the ethical standard that calls on a lawyer to recuse himself from a matter in which his participation as counsel would create the mere appearance of impropriety. The standard is eminently sensible because the legitimacy of our judicial system depends not only on its actually being on the up and up but on its being perceived as such.

If it looks like you’re conflicted, you step aside, period. Simple, right? Well . . .

Much as I admire our AG’s virtue (and you know I do), let’s pause the preen parade for just a moment. There’s a tiny word in that just-described ethical standard that we need to take note of: matter. A lawyer doesn’t just recuse himself. He recuses himself from a legal matter — from participation in a case. When we are talking about the criminal law, that means recusal from a prospective prosecution. You need a crime for that. Prosecutors do not recuse themselves from fishing expeditions or partisan narratives.

So . . . what is the crime?

We need to ask this question because, rest assured, this does not end with Jeff Sessions. No more than it ended with Mike Flynn. No more than it would end if the media-Democrat complex were to obtain the much coveted scalp of Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Seb Gorka, or one of the other Beltway gate-crashers we’ve come to know over the last six improbable months. The objective is President Trump: preferably, his impeachment and removal; but second prize, his mortal political wounding by a thousand cuts just in time for 2018 and 2020, would surely do.

As I tried to explain in my book Faithless Execution (2014), impeachment cases do not just spontaneously appear. They have to be built over time, and with vigor, because most Americans — even those who oppose a president politically — do not want the wrenching divisiveness and national instability that impeachment unavoidably entails. The reluctant public must be convinced that there is urgency, that the president’s demonstrated unfitness has created a crisis that must be dealt with.

But remember: Democrats are from Mars and Republicans are from Venus.

In the matter of Barack Obama, the GOP had an actual case based on systematic executive overreach and the empowering of America’s enemies, the kind of threat to the constitutional framework that induced Madison to regard the impeachment remedy as “indispensable.” Yet agitating for upheaval is against the Republican character (a generally good trait, though paralyzing in an actual crisis). Plus, President Obama’s personal popularity always insulated the unpopularity of his agenda and bathed even his most lawless actions in a glow of good intentions. Republicans had no stomach for mentioning impeachment, much less building a case.

It should already be obvious that the fake media firestorm over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ meetings last year with the Russian ambassador is nothing more than the Democrat Media Complex — led by Obama’s shadow government — trying to take down a key member of the Trump administration. Their game is to find some minor issue (Sessions could have been more forthcoming during his confirmation hearing) and turn it into a major impeachment-worthy scandal.

It’s a tried and true strategy that Democrats and their friends in the media were able to pull off with amazing success during the Bush years. But the playing field is completely different in 2017 — more people are on to their games, and we have a president who loves to fight. President Trump doesn’t crouch in a defensive posture — he goes on the offense. Good luck with that, Dems.

Now, new information has come out that throws cold water all over their phony “RussiaGate” scandal.

It turns out the senator spoke to the Russian ambassador in one of the allegedly scandalous “meetings” on the invitation of the Obama administration.

Hans A. von Spakovsky of Fox News reports (emphasis added):

So what are the two meetings that Sessions had? The first came at a conference on “Global Partners in Diplomacy,” where Sessions was the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, The Heritage Foundation, and several other organizations, it was held in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.

The conference was an educational program for ambassadors invited by the Obama State Department to observe the convention. The Obama State Department handled all of the coordination with ambassadors and their staff, of which there were about 100 at the conference.

Apparently, after Sessions finished speaking, a small group of ambassadors—including the Russian ambassador—approached the senator as he left the stage and thanked him for his remarks. That’s the first “meeting.” And it’s hardly an occasion—much less a venue—in when a conspiracy to “interfere” with the November election could be hatched.

Sessions also apparently met with the Russian ambassador in September. But on that occasion, Sessions was acting as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. That’s why the meeting was held in his Senate office. His DOJ spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores, says they discussed relations between the two countries – not the election.

There was nothing unusual about this: Sessions met with more than two dozen ambassadors during 2016, including the Ukrainian ambassador the day before the meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Move over, Howard Stern. Donald Trump is the new “king of all media.” His address to Congress was politically and theatrically brilliant, confounding his media critics–– even the virulently Trumpophobic ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and the other usual suspects gave it positive reviews––and exposing the sore-loser Democrats for the partisan hacks they are. You knew the Dems were in a panic when they scurried from the hall at the end of the speech so they could start spinning the journalists waiting outside.

We are witnessing a profound shift in presidential politics, but whether it will lead to significant reform of our soft-despotic state remains an open question.

After a campaign and first month in office filled with caustic tweets, petty squabbles, heated rhetoric, and seeming disarray, Trump spoke in the disciplined, lofty, aspirational, conciliatory tone we expect of presidents. But the Democrats mostly sat on their hands, even when Trump promised to create jobs and help curb the slaughter in blighted black neighborhoods, boons for the Democrats’ constituents. They did rouse themselves when, like Nero in the Colosseum, they gave the thumbs-down to Trump’s proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare, or destroy ISIS, or actually enforce federal immigration laws. Given how much Americans dislike the failing health-care entitlement behemoth, fear metastasizing jihadist terror outfits, and want illegal alien criminals deported and our borders secured, it was bad optics for Dems to churlishly remain seated, their scowls and silence implying to viewers that they value illegal alien murderers, an imploding Obamacare, and avoiding “Islamophobia” over the security and interests of American citizens.

The highlight, of course, came when Trump acknowledged the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, killed during a raid in Yemen. Questions about the raid have been raised by Owens’ father and the Dems, giving the hostile media another pretext for attacking Trump. But all the debate about the value or success of the raid has been eclipsed by the minute-and-a-half standing ovation given to Owens’ widow, who wept as she occasionally lifted her gaze upward and silently spoke to her lost husband. Critics are carping about “exploitation” and “political theater,” something they didn’t mind when Hillary exploited a grieving “Gold Star” couple at the Democrat convention. But their complaints won’t reach a fraction of the millions who witnessed that powerfully moving moment.

“As they try to lynch Sessions to appease their crazed base, Democrats are holding a Hypocrisy Olympics right now.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially recused himself yesterday from the nonsensical, possibly even nonexistent, federal probe into claims of Russian interference in the election – claims that for all we know were invented by President Trump’s enemies in the intelligence community and the Democratic Party.

Despite the oceans of mass media hysteria, there is still no publicly available trustworthy evidence that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government last year. Sources in newspaper articles are never identified. There is not a scintilla of proof of improper conduct. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. All we have is the alleged say-so of faceless CIA spooks whose motives are questionable, to put it charitably.

President Trump called out his predecessor for meddling this week. Accusing Barack Obama of being “behind” the unruly town hall protests and maybe the leaks coming out of the White House, too. A New York Times article from Wednesday stated that in the dying days of the Obama administration officials “spread information” about the alleged Russian tampering in the election and supposed ties between that country and Trump associates “across the government.” Some have called the clues Trump-hating spooks left behind as “intelligence bread crumbs” planted to be discovered later.

It needs to be said that even the theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to undermine the public’s faith in American democracy is suspect. The KGB veteran delights in being seen as a puppet master who throws his weight around in other countries. As a few voices in the wilderness have suggested, if Russia is trying to manipulate the American political process, it is in an attempt to shore up Putin’s position at home. In other words, it is a propaganda campaign aimed at Russians in Russia, and the Left is only too happy to help out in order to hurt Trump.

The Sessions-is-a-Russian-traitor story came about just when the Trump administration was basking in the glow of the president’s historic speech to Congress. How convenient. Suddenly good news about Trump evaporates in the news cycle. Poof.

As CNN’s resident self-described “communist” propagandist Van Jones was forced to admit, President Trump’s widely praised address was a game-changer. Trump “became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones was moved during Trump’s tribute to fallen Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a Navy SEAL, and his widow Carryn Owens. Trump looked towards a visibly emotional Mrs. Owens and said, “Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity … thank you,” a comment that was followed by a stand ovation that lasted two minutes.

“That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” Jones said. “If he finds a way to do that over and over again, he’s going to be there for eight years.” Not surprisingly, Jones’s simple acknowledgment of reality earned him the wrath of professionally unhinged MSNBC-reject and dead-ender Keith Olbermann and a chorus of other radicals.

Returning to the Sessions story, at a press conference yesterday the attorney general stressed that a recusal is far from an admission of guilt and that the Department of Justice does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

Sessions is mindful of the important aphorism that over time has hardened into a legal maxim: “Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.”