RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/who-responsible-darkness-has-descended-us-david-horowitz/

The late author Susan Sontag once famously said, “Communism is fascism with a human face.” A more perfect description of what the Democrat Party has become would be hard to come by. For five years the Democrats have focused their energies on laying the foundations of a communist economy and a one-party state. In pursuit of the latter, they have tried to abolish the electoral college, change the election laws to undermine the integrity of the voting system, give non-citizens the right to vote, eliminate voter I.D.’s which connect legitimate voters to their ballots, pack the Supreme Court, end the filibuster, pass legislation that would put control of presidential elections in the hands of the Democrat-favoring Washington bureaucracy and remove that control from the fifty states, as the Constitution now requires.

These efforts led to massive irregularities in the presidential election results that put the brain-damaged, pathological liar in the White House and led directly to the crises on the southern border, in America’s streets, and in Afghanistan. They were accompanied by a campaign to demonize former President Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him as “white supremacists” and “cultists.” This was itself a dagger aimed directly at the heart of the democratic process which depends on respect for the political opposition and compromise on legislation. If an opposing political party is placed beyond the pale, the inevitable result is a one-party state.

Character assassination has become the Democrats’ first weapon of choice, with Trump’s multiple bogus impeachments providing examples of how far Democrats are prepared to go to tear up the Constitution and two-hundred and forty years of American political tradition. Trump is no longer president but as a private citizen he is still the target of a Pelosi “commission” or “committee,” stacked completely with members who voted to impeach him, whose sole purpose is to convict Trump of inciting a fake “insurrection” in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. This is one more despicable effort to demonize Trump and his 74 million voters as “domestic terrorists” and therefore enemies of America to be dealt with as such.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/three_takeaways_from_afghanistan_for_us_at_home.html

First, remember our troops, living and dead, who served the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.  They are owed our gratitude for their steadfast presence in a difficult country and our help as they and their families, and the families of the dead, navigate the emotionally terrible terrain of a defeat inflicted not by the enemy, but by our government’s failure to plan properly for the end of their mission.  If it was time for the U.S. to leave, then so be it.  But there is nothing the civilians or the military higher-ups can say that will make Americans believe they knew what they were doing.  Resignations are in order.

Spare a moment, too, for the 182,071 soldiers in the Afghan Army and Air Force and the 118,628 members of the police and paramilitary security forces serving as of July 2021.  Yes, the Afghan force collapsed — but only after the U.S. withdrew its air power and intelligence capabilities, both of which the Afghans had relied upon under our tutelage.

Second, retire the word “privilege” as used in the U.S. to denigrate those perceived to have some inborn, unearned advantage.  Whatever your color, race, or sex; whether you are the sixth great-grandchild of slave or fifth great-grandchild of Chinese railroad slaves or the second-generation Vietnamese refugees or the remnants of the Holocaust — if you live in the United States today, you are privileged.  You have the advantages of freedom, liberty, and a Constitution.  You have access to education, food, medicine, and bathrooms.  If you doubt your privilege, watch CNN.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/02/u-s-in-more-trouble-than-at-any-time-in-its-history/

Candidate Joe Biden said last October that we were nearing the “most important election of our lifetime.” He was right. What made it so crucial was keeping him out of the White House.

President Joe Biden is visibly exhausted. His mental decline that began long before the 2020 election appears to have now gone straight over a cliff. The first seven months of his term have depleted him so thoroughly that the toll taken by eight years of the modern presidency look mild in comparison.

His errors and poor judgment continue and compound. Never in possession of an abundance of sound thinking, he’s been drained of what little wisdom he ever had. And he’s only going to get worse.

Biden’s record of failure is well-documented. He’s been a train wreck in progress for decades. Just added to his resume of misery is the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan where Americans have been murdered and abandoned; historic inflation that threatens economic growth; a workforce that feels work is optional; dire conditions in which businesses can’t find enough workers; an open wound on our southern border; and a greenlighting of terrorism both in the U.S. and abroad.

President Ice Cream has also caused further political and social division, increased gasoline prices through perverse energy policies, and forsaken allies while inviting enemies and rogues to test American resolve. Given that his handlers often call a lid on his workdays before afternoon tea, he’s often been able to make a hash of things before lunch.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/24/taliban-under-the-bed/

After the fall on Kabul, our elitists raced to Twitter and other forums to equate the Taliban to conservatives and Republicans in the U.S. What kind of country are we becoming, in which a significant part of it cannot, or will not, distinguish the difference between terrorism and political differences?

Duplici-mentarian Michael Moore, as he often is, was an early arrival at the buffet table of buffoonery. While so many of us were wondering just how things could have gone so wrong, even under Joe Biden, he tweeted “their Taliban, our Taliban, everybody’s got a Taliban,” complete with a photo of a few of the Jan. 6 Capitol intruders. Of course it was met with great approval.

Actress Rosanna Arquette, who has declared she will never again stand for the American flag and will kneel when she hears the national anthem, apparently couldn’t help herself, either. She tweeted that “the Taliban extremists” in the U.S. go by “a different name.” She wants the world to know that “the GOP right wing extremists who support destroying democracy are the terrorists in America and will continue to terrorize America until they are  stopped and pay for their crimes against Americans Jan 6.”

“Late Show” host Steven Colbert, dance partner of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, used his national forum to wonder “why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan” since “we’ve got our own on Capitol Hill.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid called the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul a “true cautionary tale for the U.S., which has our own far religious right dreaming of a theocracy.” 

And then there’s Ahmed Tharwat, host and producer of some Arab-American television show who “writes for local and international publications.” Last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune allowed him to rant about “the American Taliban,” which “stormed the Capitol to reinstall their cult leader to office after he lost the election and launched the stop the steal movement.” It was, he said, a “hillbilly coup.”

Much of the effort to link America’s political right to the Taliban is nothing more than pathetic virtue signaling. It’s the screeching of attention-hungry media personalities and celebrities who desperately need to show the world they’re on the right side of history, and are morally and intellectually superior than most of their fellow Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-agony-of-the-centrist-democrats-nancy-pelosi-infrastructure-house-spending-11629754803?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

With the House back in town, the debate for Democrats is which colossal plan they should pass first: President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package? Or Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget outline? The media is covering it as a real showdown but, if history holds, this will turn out to be Kabuki theater.

Nine Democrats, including several from swing districts, say the infrastructure bill should be passed before any budget vote is taken, and so far they have held their ground. “We are firmly opposed,” they wrote recently, “to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”

The left is demanding the opposite. Do the $3.5 trillion spending binge first, the argument goes, and then reward the Democratic centrists with the infrastructure goody bag. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to lose either faction, and her narrow majority means she has only three votes to spare. She’s trying to accommodate both sides with a rule that lets her claim the two proposals are moving forward more or less simultaneously.

This is mainly about process, not substance. The nine Democratic holdouts want to vote on infrastructure now, but tomorrow they’re prepared to roll over for $3.5 trillion in spending and new entitlements, which is what really matters. “I’ve literally said to my colleagues, ‘Let’s vote on the infrastructure bill, and then, like, 15 minutes later we can start debate on the budget resolution and vote on it the next day,’” Rep. Josh Gottheimer told a reporter.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/22/the-drossy-touch-of-joe-biden/

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

 Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans. 

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance. 

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can? 

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!” 

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

https://quillette.com/2021/08/09/watching-americas-crack-up/

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.