RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/lessons_to_learn_from_lara_logan.html

The perils of false equivalences and overstatements are the shameful trivialization the of darkest chapters in human history.

A few days ago, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan was dropped by her talent agency for comments she made about Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical adviser last Nov. 29.

Logan said the following during an appearance on “Fox News Primetime”:

“This is what people say to me, is that he (Fauci) doesn’t represent science to them — he represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps

And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this, because the response from COVID, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty — it has obliterated economies,” she added.

Acting a little late on the uptake, United Talent Agency said that Logan’s comments were “highly offensive” and “unacceptable” comments.

Logan also hosts “Lara Logan Has No Agenda” on Fox Nation.

Fauci is demanding that Fox News sack Logan for her comments.

Logan has not appeared on Fox News since the above comments were made. Also, new episodes of her Fox Nation show have not been aired. Warm Springs Production, which produces her series, has distanced itself from Logan.

But is Logan the only one?

https://nypost.com/2022/01/19/dear-joe-your-first-years-been-a-total-disaster/

Dear Joe,

Happy Anniversary.Can we get a divorce?

Sorry if this isn’t the most effusive of messages as you celebrate your first year in office as president of the United States.

But I fear it’s exactly what many disillusioned Americans, including some who voted for you, are now thinking.

I don’t like to sugar-coat things, so let me be blunt: You’ve been a disaster.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a more insipid, less inspiring, fiasco-ridden opening 12 months to a presidency.

Nor one that has so spectacularly failed to deliver on the promises made at an inauguration ceremony.

You were going to reunite a bitterly fractured country by ending “the anger and harsh rhetoric,” remember?

You’ve failed. Your enraged, spiteful, Republican-bashing speeches at the start of this year were just as divisive as anything Donald Trump ever spewed. 

You were going to “defeat” COVID, remember?

You’ve failed. More Americans have died from coronavirus on your watch than under President Trump, the Omicron variant is surging out of control all over the country, your testing system has been disastrously slow, and you’ve still only persuaded 63% of US citizens to be vaccinated.

You were going to fix the economy, remember?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/texas-synagogue-hostage-crisis-a-case-study-in-downplaying-antisemitism/

“And, in the historic harmony of American life, there are more anti-Jewish crimes perpetrated than all the other religiously motivated crimes combined — often at the hands of other minority groups. And the habit of downplaying this kind of antisemitism, or appropriating it for partisanship, is a dangerous game.”

Being cautious about assigning motive seems to apply only to certain politically inconvenient acts.

W atching the Congregation Beth Israel hostage situation unfold this weekend, one might have been under the impression that a 44-year-old British Islamist named Malik Faisal Akram had traveled 5,000 miles and then merely wandered into a temple in a Dallas suburb by happenstance, before taking four hostages and demanding the release of a notorious terrorist.

Akram — or as the Telegraph described him, a man “with an English accent” — allegedly demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, known by the moniker “Lady al-Qaeda,” from the nearby Carswell Air Force Base. Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who spent years in North America, is serving an 86-year sentence for the attempted murder of a U.S. soldier in 2010. The Justice Department alleges that she was picked up carrying notes on how to manufacture a “dirty bomb” and held plans for potential attacks on the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/30/vice-president-kamikaze-harris/

After more than 11 months in office, with inflation skyrocketing and the country’s superpower status plummeting, Americans can’t stand either President Joe Biden or his vice-presidential-beneficiary of-affirmative-action, Kamala Harris.

Every time Harris tries to help herself, she hurts herself. As border czar who for three months avoided visiting the Mexican border, Harris relented only after plans were made known of former President Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott traveling to the frontier – and then she briefly visited only a border patrol station about nine miles from the actual border, far removed from where masses of illegal migrants have been crossing.

To humanize her disastrous public image and connect with ordinary people, she staged a ludicrous fake meeting with child actors to tout space exploration. She chose to own Biden’s catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal by telling the world she was the “last person in the room” when he formulated his policy. And her office has been hemorrhaging senior staff.

But on Sunday, the vice president outdid herself in self-destructive stupidity, and made it crystal clear she is unqualified to assume the presidency should the ever-more-enfeebled Biden become incapacitated or, God forbid, pass on to his eternal reward.

Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” she began by sounding, more even than Joe, like big, dumb, dangerous government personified. “Everyone has to get vaccinated,” Harris insisted at a time when the federal government’s approach to COVID is more discredited than ever, both among the populace and within the medical community, adding that “they’ll save your life.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/29/the-left-doesnt-own-minority-voters/

Demographic transitions present political opportunities, but do not protect politicians from their own folly. The shift in most Western countries to a more racially and ethnically diverse demographic has been widely seen by left-wingers as an opportunity to cement their ascendancy.

Yet after early successes with this strategy, the parties of the left have witnessed the departure of some minority voters – Hindus in Britain, Asians in Australia, and Asians and Hispanics in the United States. In some cases, minorities are opting out of the intersectional bandwagon, which includes certain cultural attitudes, imposed progressivism in schools, and an increasing tolerance of crime.

Sadly, racialism and constant campaigns to address ‘systemic racism’ have driven a certain element of working-class whites not only in Trumpian America, but also in France, Britain, Germany and even Scandinavia, towards nativist, even openly racist, politics. As Michael Lind among others suggest, the fashionable focus on ‘white privilege’ and assigning original sin based on someone sharing DNA with settlers and slave owners also doesn’t work with the majority of Americans, who come from families who came to America after the Civil War. Meanwhile, crowing about ‘the end of white America’ might be popular in ethnic-studies departments, but it does not translate into a better life for most minorities.

Racial minorities’ shift to the centre and the right represents a healthy step, as it undermines the racialist, us-versus-them rhetoric shared both by the nationalist right and the intersectional left. Once politicians begin addressing people as people, with their own interests, and not as artefacts of their own heritage, we can look to employ diversity not as a weapon, but as an asset.

When you ask them, most people of colour do not generally share the politics of the faculty-lounge racialists. Nor do most Americans. The overall PC agenda, built around identity politics, is rejected by 52 per cent of Americans, according to a recent NPR poll. Opposition to PC is even greater among Latinos. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the woke anti-racist meme, even as it is widely adopted by the billionaire class and corporate HR departments.

https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2021/12/28/the-biden-presidency-a-horrible-accident-of-history-n2600984

There’s an accident in the Oval Office. Not the kind of accident left on the rug in front of the Resolute Desk on a regular basis by the untrained, rowdy dogs the Biden’s sicced on the unwitting White House staff and Secret Service. I’m talking about the man who sits behind the resolute desk for his daily naps. 

Joe Biden is the accidental president. He is the result of an accident of American politics. 

His presidency will not be remembered with an asterisk, as my friend and fellow Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter would say. No, it will be remembered… reviled… as the accident that it was, is and ever shall be. 

He became the Democrats’ nominee in 2020 by accident. He shouldn’t have even run in the first place. Everyone knows that’s true. 

If he was such a great man and gifted leader and our nation couldn’t do without him, why didn’t he just run for Obama’s third term in 2016 as the sitting vice president? This would’ve been the natural move for such a powerful, important, and wise leader to make. 

But he didn’t run in 2016. And did you notice that nobody seemed to notice? Nobody seemed to care. Even Obama sat by and let him languish as the Democrats openly joked about him and Hillary Clinton’s henchmen bullied him into officially declaring himself a non-candidate. 

At the time, the adoring and compliant media ran interference by declaring that he couldn’t possibly run for office due to the grief over losing his son Beau to cancer. Sure. Yeah. That’s what it was all about. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Biden had become a walking punchline and even then was seen as too old for the job. 

He ended up getting the 2020 nomination because the other choices at the time were Pete Buttegeig, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. 

Biden was the dream nominee given the nightmare of that choice. So it fell into his lap. 

Couple that accident with the very deliberate bastardization of our elections and voting protocols in 2020 under the dubious guise of fear over China’s diabolical gift to the world, Covid-19, and boom, we got President Accident. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/kamala-harris-bad-press-racist-sexist/

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats.

It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.) She refuses to visit the US-Mexican border, aside from one brief stop a thousand miles from the crisis. When she was asked about it, she noted that she hadn’t been to Europe, either. That PR blunder was widely noted but she soon corrected it: she visited Europe.

Why was this clunker picked for such an important office? We still don’t know the full answer. Part of the answer surely lies in Trump’s weakness with women voters and the Democrats’ goal of motivating high turnout among them and among African Americans, who are crucial to any Democratic victory. Candidate Biden first promised to pick a woman for his ticket and then faced intense pressure to pick an African American. The list wasn’t a long one.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/20/math-for-demmies/

The Biden administration “Believes in Science.” But math – not so much. It seems to have a fuzzy concept of large sums of money as all being just “bazillions.” So here is a little arithmetic using nice round numbers that even the administration and congressional progressives can follow.

There are about 330 million people in the United States. So, if we say that the average family is 3.3 people (mom, dad, one or two kids), then we have about 100 million families. So, on average, each trillion dollars costs each family $10,000. And ultimately, it’s they who pay the lion’s share of taxes.

President Joe Biden recently signed into law an “infrastructure” bill that will cost about $1.2 trillion. That means that each family will pay, on average, $12,000. A person working full time for a year (about 1,800 hours) at the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) makes about $13,050. So good news! You get to keep $1,050 of that for food, rent, energy, and other “luxuries.”

But now the Democrats want a “human infrastructure” bill, which, as they first proposed, would have cost $3.5 trillion, which boosts per-family costs to $45,000. Sorry, Josephine the Plumber and Lewis the Librarian, no Caribbean cruise for you this year.

But there’s more! We still have to pay for Social Security, Medicare, national defense, welfare, unemployment, interest on the existing debt, and a few sundries such as electric vehicle subsidies and endowments for the arts and humanities. Those add up to about another $3.5 trillion. So, add another $35,000 to the above. Don’t go out and buy that Tesla just yet.

The confiscation of resources from ordinary Americans to satisfy the aspirations and whims – good, bad, or indifferent – of the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exerts an “income effect” that reflects the correlation between wealth and health.