RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

Experts, not elected politicians,
Rational bureaucratic procedures,
Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/16/afghan-tragedy-border-blunders-vaccine-disaster-now-biden-co-want-to-spend-us-into-socialist-oblivion/

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had it partly right when he called for a “strategic pause”. But now it is clear that the $3.5 trillion price tag seriously understates the Bernie Sanders/AOC/progressive reconciliation bill through which they will try to remake America into their socialist image.

Early on, Sens. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., both recognized that the price tag was artificially low for all these socialist goodies revealed in the initial budget resolution. And that’s just the start. They and many others are pegging the actual price tag at $5 or even $7 trillion. The reason for the discrepancy is found in the entitlements, the actual details of which are still embargoed in the massive 10,000-page bill.

What we do know comes from the budget resolution that outlines the Bernie Sanders/AOC “leftist wish list” and seeks a complete remaking of the American economy. It is key to remember that congressional budgets are blueprints for the actual spending – advanced ultimately in this case in a reconciliation bill – which will take place later this month.

Reconciliation was originally adopted as a provision of law to cut overall government spending to fit into the federal budget. But today it is a chance for another bite at the apple for tax increases and for new entitlement spending that cannot be cut since entitlement spending is automatic as provided by law. Today reconciliation serves another purpose: adoption of new regulatory policies that effectively operate as taxes by imposing new costs on businesses.

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.