RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/end-impeachment-circus-bruce-thornton/

Not since Caligula enrolled his horse Incitatus in the Roman Senate has a deliberative chamber of a great power seen such a display of undignified triviality and dishonest sophistry as the case for impeachment that the House Democrats delivered last week. Over and over the same flimsy arguments we’ve already heard for months were repeated, with all the same question-begging accusations gleaned from second- and third-hand office gossip, and the same fake “high crimes and misdemeanors” fabricated by the desperate Dems. Time for the Senate to restore its dignity, put an end to this taxpayer-funded political circus, and get back to doing its job.

The House Dems’ argument boils down to criminalizing the President’s Article 2 powers into made-up crimes like “abuse of power for corrupt purposes” and “obstruction of Congress.” Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a mundane example of the President conducting foreign policy in straightforward style, is an “abuse of power,” because he brought up the hinky behavior of the Bidens supposedly in order to benefit himself politically.

This sophistry is transparently specious. Ukraine’s government is notoriously corrupt, and our president was right to ask for some help in getting at the truth of the evidence that Ukrainians had been involved in meddling with the 2016 election, and that a U.S. vice-president had used his power to benefit a son who, with no record of expertise and experience, nonetheless was being paid $50K a month by a sketchy Ukrainian company. For Trump not to mention it just because Biden was running for office would have been a ridiculous application of the Caesar’s Wife standard, and made running for office a convenient defense against scrutiny.

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

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who occupies a position at the heart of American politics, blithely retweeted an unsourced, unproven, and untrue claim that Jews living in Beit Hanina kidnapped and executed a seven-year-old boy. This is a  modern version of the medieval blood libel against the Jews.

The anti-Semitic blood libel has a long history, going back to at least the 1st century A.D., when the Jewish historian Josephus rebutted a claim that Antiochus Epiphanes found a Greek man in the temple in Jerusalem being fattened for sacrifice. A thousand years later, a Byzantine document again accused Jews of kidnapping a stranger every seven years to serve as a human sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem.

By the 12th century, the blood libel had firmly taken in England hold after Jews were accused of ritually sacrificing William of Norwich, a young boy found stabbed in the woods. After that, until the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, Jews were routinely accused of executing children and using their blood in rituals, especially when making matzo for Passover. The Jews were then slaughtered in pogroms. The libel migrated to Europe with the same deadly consequences for Jews.

The great irony of the blood libel, of course, is that one of the central stories in the Hebrew Bible is the Binding of Isaac, in which God ends human sacrifice. The Ten Commandments, the foundation of Western morality, forbid murder. The Jewish laws governing kosher cooking even forbid using blood when cooking.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-left-is-one-huge-internet-troll/

As conservative writers for online magazines are all too well aware, their leftist adversaries are not interested in serious debate or mannerly conversation. Civility is not the left’s strong suit. Tactics vary along a spectrum of readily predictable talking points, false assertions, vituperation and obscenity, the stock in trade of those who have come to be known as trolls. Who and what is a troll?

Originally, trolls were unsightly folklore creatures dwelling in caves, forests, and, as in the famous folk tale, under bridges. Unlike their doppelgängers in the Disney film, they were not sweet and innocent powder-blue creatures resembling the Smurfs and the Na’vi, but gnarled and revolting specimens of indiscriminate voracity. Distinctly hostile and governed by an appetite for human flesh, they became the source of the contemporary internet troll.

The modern troll is the digital form of the contract killer. He lives in the shadows; is prone to using an alias behind which he hides; has no known street address or postal code; is often paid for his services by some powerful figure whose public presence may be known—say, a bloviating multi-billionaire with a highly dubious personal history who manages to evade the law; has no conscience and is not very intelligent but is as cunning as he is unscrupulous—in short, the internet troll is a coward who “kills” in the dark. He is motivated by envy and resentment and has neither self-respect nor moral fiber. He is devoid of productive talents and lacks the ability to make a success of his life. He is, in the current idiom, a loser.

Or course, not every troll is a hired gun. Some like to devour their prey as self-elected vigilantes who need not bother with the labor of constructing a convincing counter-argument—that, after all, takes real work. But in either case, they are the gremlins of the internet world, sniping away at the legitimate participants in the cultural debate or infesting the Twittersphere, often under the cloak of anonymity and the camouflage of fake accounts. They are not part of the conversation but the dregs of the hermeneutic exchange.