RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let’s take a closer look at Fusion’s “academic expert on Russia,” Nellie H. Ohr, the mystery woman, intriguing for her marriage to DOJ official Bruce Ohr, her fluency in Russian, her ham radio operator’s license, and, finally, the possibility that she had a hand in the anti-Trump “dossier.”

The “H” stands for Hauke, Ohr’s maiden name. On reading through a Washington Post obituary of Kathleen A. Hauke, Nellie’s mother, and a guide to the papers of her parents, Kathleen A. and Richard L. Hauke, both Ph.D.s, which are archived at the University of Rhode Island, a sketch of the Hauke family’s life of the mind takes shape.

Clearly, Nellie grew up in a family on the intellectual Left — i.e., the mainstream of American academia. Her mother, an English professor, was active, if not activist, in black-white racial issues of the late 1960s and 1970s, including interracial adoption and “promoting racial equality in education,” a kindly-sounding idea, which, via coercive means of “promoting,” has atomized our society into a sum of non-working parts — yes, the opposite of “a more perfect union.” Whoever conceived of the project, there was something devilishly clever about turning college admissions offices into key enforcement centers of racial and other quotas of a state-mandated order. As we might finally admit, from Berekely to Yale to Mizzou, it is here where generations of cadres have received Marxian indoctrination under cover of cap and gown, the indispensable legions of ideological victory in a “Cold War” Americans still insist they won.

In this same pioneering spirit of “promoting,” perhaps, Kathleen A. Hauke devoted herself to studying black/African American authors and writers on the same Left, even communist, wavelength, from Langston Hughes to South African writer Richard Rive. One notable biographical detail was Kathleen’s first visit to South Africa in 1954, via freighter, when she was just 19 years old.

Her main academic interest, however, was a black American journalist named Ted Poston. She wrote or edited three books on Poston, including a 2000 collection of his journalism, which is described as having “infused” his newspaper, the New York Post, “with a black viewpoint on topics as varied as the paranoia engendered by McCarthyism and the light-stepping magic of Bill Bojangles Robinson” (emphasis added). A highlight of Poston’s pre-“McCarthyism”-youth came when he, along with Langston Hughes and others, journeyed to the USSR in 1932, the height of the Stalin’s mass-starvation of “collectivized” Ukrainians, to be wined and dined by the Soviets as they worked on a Comintern movie about the plight of the “American Negro.” It was never completed.

Nellie’s father, Richard L. Hauke, was a botany professor. His listed works are mainly scientific, but his biographical notes highlight his interests in creationism, bioethics and, circa 1983-1985, “nuclear winter.”

In these days of “global warming” (it was 7 degrees when I woke up), it’s easy to forget the mass hysteria over “nuclear winter” that gripped the 1980s, the final decade, they say, of the Cold War. This was the heyday of the Reagan administration, and Soviet strategists were thus concentrated on thwarting Reagan’s program to modernize US and NATO arsenals (plus ca change …). Talk about “Russian influence,” that cartoonishly misunderstood mantra of today: It was the “active measures” of Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko-Gorbachev’s Kremlin that drove the Western disarmament movement known as the “peace movement,” or “nuclear freeze movement,” across Europe and the US, sparking outrage via “disinformation” against neutron bombs and “Star Wars” and “war-monger” Reagan along the way.

The chance that Americans will learn what really happened between the FBI and Fusion GPS is growing with Thursday’s vote by the House Intelligence Committee to give every House Member access to key information. Soon the House should move to declassify all documents in the case that don’t jeopardize intelligence sources and methods so the public can get the complete story.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes also moved Thursday to release to the public his committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Every Democrat joined Republicans in voting for that public disclosure. Yet every Democrat voted against letting the rest of the House see a memo that will list the facts about the FBI’s use of FISA warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign in 2016. Strange. What are Democrats afraid of?

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has been a loud voice for accountability regarding the Trump-Russia probe, but his outrage evaporates regarding the role that Fusion GPS and its Democratic financiers may have played in persuading the FBI to seek a warrant to eavesdrop on American civilians. What were the FBI’s reasons and the evidence it used to seek such an extraordinary writ?

All of this is relevant to the House’s recent vote to extend Section 702 that allows law enforcement to monitor foreigners. Mr. Nunes provided two closed briefings to Republicans last week as they prepared to renew Section 702, and he assured Members that he’d seen no evidence that government had abused 702 powers. But he also said he had seen evidence that law enforcement misused powers involving the surveillance of U.S. citizens as part of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

It hasn’t been easy recently to make an attack against President Trump that is over-the-top enough to stand out from the run-of-the-mill hysteria, but outgoing Republican Sen. Jeff Flake managed it.

In a speech hitting Trump for his broadsides against the press, Flake excoriated the president for using the phrase “enemy of the people.” Per the Arizona senator: “It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.”

The association of Trump, whose offense is being crude and thoughtless while occupying an office he won in a raucously free election, with one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century is so wildly irresponsible it is its own corruption of our discourse.

Trump isn’t a despot. Far from being an autocrat, he’s a weak president susceptible to the views of the last person he’s talked to and so deferential to Congress that he spent all of last year pining for a signing ceremony for literally anything lawmakers could send him on health care or taxes.

At its worst, the Trump White House isn’t sinister; it’s farcical. It’s not Recep Tayyip Erdogan carefully and deliberately creating a one-party state; it’s Trump getting miscued by a TV show into a tweet undermining his administration’s own position on the reauthorization of a surveillance program.

The Trump alarmists thought that a brittle democratic culture and set of institutions were about to encounter a man representing a dire, determined threat to their integrity; instead, a robust democratic culture and set of institutions encountered the guy sitting down at the end of the bar yelling at the TV.

David Frum of The Atlantic warned at the beginning of the year of Trump cowing the media. Instead, Trump faces the most hostile press at least since Richard Nixon. So comprehensively do Trump outrages dominate the news cycle that it’s difficult for a sex scandal involving a porn star to break through. If you’re a late-night host who doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on Trump, your ratings lag. Michael Wolff has sold more than a million copies of a loosely sourced book whose power is the salaciousness of its gossip and its confirmation of everything people who hate Trump already believe.

Rather than stretching his powers, Trump has reined in the executive overreach of the Obama years, which was brazen and unconstitutional, although undertaken with much greater politeness. Obama proudly thought he could rewrite immigration law on his own and make recess appointments when Congress wasn’t in recess.

There’s no doubt Trump violates norms that we should want to preserve. The president shouldn’t slam reporters and news organizations by name, call for people in the private sector to be fired, criticize companies or urge his adversaries to be jailed, among other routine provocations.

Democrats are out of touch.

They made that abundantly clear when every liberal lawmaker rejected the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and did everything possible to obstruct its historic passage. Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to help grow the U.S. economy and restore the American dream for all, liberal politicians — including Democratic Party leadership — told voters the GOP tax bill would be bad for them, bad for the economy and a gift to the rich.

Then millions of Americans got a raise — faster than liberals could knit another pussy hat.

Just ask the multitude of blue- and white-collar workers across industries and demographics who are enjoying higher wages, lucrative bonuses, extended family-leave benefits and an abundance of other perks thanks to the tax reform bill, which not a single Democrat voted for. Yet despite the fact that AT&T is giving out $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 U.S. employees as a result of the new law and scores of other American businesses are doing the same, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “In terms of the bonus that corporate America received versus the crumbs that they are giving to workers to kind of put the schmooze on, it’s so pathetic. … I think it’s insignificant.”

Only an out-of-touch 1 percenter like Pelosi — a well-known multimillionaire — could dismiss thousands of dollars in working families’ pockets as mere “crumbs.” To the contrary, for 99 percent of the population, it’s significant.

Notwithstanding, Apple announced this week that it’s going to invest $350 billion in America. This investment includes expanding existing campuses and building new facilities, as well as creating 20,000 jobs. The maker of the iPhone also said it’s giving the majority of its employees $2,500 in stock options.