RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/09/georgia-democrat-raphael-warnock-says-he-didnt-praise-murderous-dictator-fidel-castro-heres-video-of-him-doing-it/

Georgia Democrat Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock praised communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castor, who is responsible for tens of thousands of brutal state murders, in a sermon in 2016 days after the dictator passed away. A recently resurfaced video from 2016 shows Warnock behind his church’s podium, giving a eulogy for the authoritarian to his congregation.

“We pray for the people of Cuba in this moment. We remember Fidel Castro, whose legacy is complex. Don’t let anyone tell you a simple story; life usually isn’t very simple. His legacy is complex, kind of like America’s legacy is complex,” Warnock said.

“While we focus on political prisoners in Cuba, you saw the folks standing here this morning,” he continued. “If some people get slapped on the hand for the same crime and others go to federal prison, then we too have our own political prisons because politics more than the crime politics of race and class. And in that sense, many of us have sisters and brothers who are political prisoners. We are about to pray to a man who was a political prisoner.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/160338/biden-popular-front-doomed-unravel

It’s lucky that votes usually don’t get counted till late at night. Victorious presidential candidates have two audiences to speak to. Their zealous volunteers generally get little reward other than the sense, inculcated over months of battle, that they are fighting to vanquish the forces of evil. On election night, they expect someone to extol their bravery and ruthlessness, and to hold aloft the head of the vanquished foe. It’s preferable if this can be done while the rest of the country is either sleeping or weepily watching its own candidate concede. When, days later, the president-elect pivots to flatter the whole country and extend an olive branch to his rivals, his loyal followers can feel jilted.

Because of late arriving mail-in votes, huge turnout, and the sheer closeness of November’s election in swing states, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to rile up supporters and reassure neutrals at the same prime-time event. It was four days after the election, at one of those outdoor parking lot rallies that became a staple of Biden’s Covid-era campaign. Harris was triumphal: “Our very democracy was on the ballot in this election, with the very soul of America at stake,” she said. “You chose hope and unity, decency, science, and yes, truth.” Biden was conciliatory, quoting the Bible and promising to “work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” Perhaps that will be a viable division of labor for the indefinite future.

But Biden and Harris have a problem. The vision of ousting Donald Trump has been wildly attractive, drawing 79 million votes, more Americans than have ever voted for anything. As Michelle Obama put it, they voted against “lies, hate, chaos, and division.” If by this she means Trump, then lies, hate, chaos, and division turn out to have quite a constituency themselves, commanding 73 million votes, more than her husband won in either of his races. Trump’s House delegation has been bolstered by the elections—and radicalized, judging by the arrival in Washington of Georgia QAnon habituée Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado gun enthusiast Lauren Boebert. His Senate majority has held, barring a Democratic sweep of January’s pair of runoff Senate contests in Georgia. As long as the Trump coalition remains the central force in American politics, reconciling the country to a Biden presidency will be difficult. But reorienting the Democratic Party may be harder. With Trump himself gone, Biden’s historic purpose is achieved. His work is done. If he doesn’t secure a base within his own party, he risks radicalizing Republicans and Democrats alike.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/29/no-refunds/

In his Minneapolis Southwest High School senior yearbook, fellow students named Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s pick for national security advisor, “most likely to succeed.”

At 43, the wonkish Sullivan is the youngest in decades to serve as head of America’s national security—a pressure for which, a former schoolmate assures, Sullivan is worthy. 

Speaking to Minneapolis local media, Katy Sen recalled her English teacher’s revelation that only one of her earlier students could write a paper first time and without error, while his peers had to re-write their drafts—Jake Sullivan. 

Ms. Sen remembers Sullivan, one year her senior: “He’s just somebody that can handle pressure,” she said. “He just picks up on things quickly, and I think he just has this strong commitment to public service.” 

Sullivan has degrees in politics from Yale, and Oxford. At Yale Law, he edited the Yale Law Journal. Hillary Clinton, with whom he travelled to 112 countries, calls him “discreet, earnest, and brilliant.” 

A deputy chief of staff at the State Department under Obama, Sullivan climbed to then-Vice President Biden’s national security advisor, and now rests U.S. foreign policy on his shoulders. 

Like his prospective colleague, Tony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, Sullivan threads his hawkish tendencies with the prospects of middle-class Americans, but only insofar as he consults their opinions, and concludes their interests entwine with his own. 

Sullivan’s fundamental belief is that the interests of the American middle class are umbilical to a U.S. foreign policy in which America returns to the Obama era of “liberal interventionism.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/26/the-trump-paradox/

President Trump’s decision to direct the General Services Agency to begin working with the Biden transition team, along with several failures of the president’s legal team to garner enough evidence to change the outcome, has made it increasingly likely that Biden will be the next president. These moves do not mean that Trump and the Republicans should stop working on exposing the electoral fraud that certainly contributed to Biden’s victory. But the odds have increased that Biden will take office in January.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve been seeing more postmortems of Trump’s presidency and his apparent failure to get reelected. The various explanations all point to a paradox at the heart of the Trump phenomenon, one that exposes a larger paradox among the American electorate.

We don’t need to explain why progressive Democrats voted for one of the weakest, least accomplished, and most unsuited candidates in American history. The party fancies itself a technocratic elite, motivated not by Madison’s “passions and interests,” but by “science” and credentialed “experts.” This faith is stubbornly resistant to the decades of empirical evidence that repudiates the assumption that the human mind, behavior, motivations, and free will can be understood sufficiently enough to generate scientific truths to govern them. What appears to be a technocracy is in fact a political religious cult, a fact made obvious by the last four years of hysterical, irrational tantrums thrown by the Democrats.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

It may seem odd that I, a conservative, would quote Bertrand Russell in the rubric that heads this essay. But I find the sentiment expressed fitting for the world in which we live where hypocrisy and double standards are the standard. In my opinion, a hypocrite is one who professes virtues he does not possess, in the hope his words will camouflage his actions. It is a condition common to the halls of political power.

I was mocked for my prediction in my last essay – perhaps deservedly – that Trump would be as gracious in defeat as he was competitive in battle. It is still too early to know. Mr. Trump has not yet conceded, and Congress has yet to certify the election. But (and on this I am more certain) what he and his followers will not do is become the sore losers who created the “resistance” four years ago. Mr. Biden will not be subject, from the media, academia and our cultural elite, to the never-ending barrage of personal attacks Mr. Trump endured. Nor will the intelligence agencies and their flunkies in Congress try to upend his Presidency, as they attempted to do with Mr. Trump throughout his four years.

It is not easy to cast Donald Trump as the principal character in a morality tale, a “heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone,” as Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, described him. However, there is about Mr. Trump the possible makings of an heroic, but tragic, figure. He exposed much of Washington’s ruling class to be corrupt and self-serving, and he showed the media to be the partisan attack dogs they are. He brought to light the role universities have played in censoring conservative speech. He unmasked the hypocrisy of politicians for their refusal to accept school choice for poor and minority students, and he watched the Left’s double standards regarding masks in riot-torn streets. He ignored Chuck Schumer’s advice in 2017 about taking on the intelligence community. For this, he received no acclamation.

Looking back to the 2016 general election campaign, we know – or should know by now – that Hillary Clinton was corruption incarnate and had been peddling lies for 25 or more years. In the 2016 general election, Trump, although no great debater at the time, took the upper hand during the second and third presidential debates. It is worth remembering what took place during that time as it relates to what we now face during this problematical 2020 election.

A most intriguing example was how both he and Hillary had handled a question from a Moslem woman in the Town Hall format during the second debate who had appeared without the obligatory veil; appearing instead in secular dress: Her question was, “How would you deal with Islamophobia?”

Mrs. Clinton went into full pander mode, almost like saying “some of my best friends are Moslem,” as she commenced to give her response in even more pander power. In fact, her best friend and senior adviser, Huma Abedin, a veritable eminence grise, was the daughter of radical Islamic parents and privy to top US Security and Military Classified information. That made the contemporary Wiki email leaks look like kindergarten child’s play.

We should take note that the very word, Islamophobia, is a made up term created by Islamists to discourage any justified criticism of Islamic intolerance and violence by those whom they still impudently call, ‘infidels.’ But Hillary’s response in all the debates was the usual uber liberal cry of “can’t we all get along.” Of course, Hillary couldn’t resist making the usual snide references to Trump’s falsely alleged “bigotry” against everyone and everything. Trump, on the other hand, challenged the Moslem questioner by asking, “…why are American Moslems not more forthright in denouncing jihadist terrorism and cooperating with law enforcement in reporting suspicious activities?”