RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-won-the-debate-but-won-bigly-the-post-debate/?utm_source=

There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum. 

In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate.

He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil. So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. 

But far more importantly, the back-and-forth repartee will not matter other than Trump went toe to toe, but in a tough, dignified manner and beat Biden on points. Biden did not go blank — although he seemed to come close, often especially in the last 20 minutes. Had the debate gone another 30 minutes, his occasional lapses could have become chronic.

What instead counts most are the days after.  The debate take-aways, the news clips, the post facto fact checks, and the soundbites to be used in ads over the next ten days all favor Trump. In this regard, Biden did poorly and will suffer continual bleeding in the swing states. 

We will know that because by the weekend Biden will be out of his basement and trying to reboot his campaign and actually be forced to campaign. 

So we are going to hear over the next week that Biden simply denied the factual evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop computer, the emails, the cell phones, and the testimonies from some of the relevant players as a concocted smear, a Russian disinformation attack. That denial is clearly a lie. It is absolutely unsupportable. And Biden will have to drop that false claim.  

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2020/10/20/the-need-to-know/

Hunter Biden’s laptop, abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, is now the centerpiece of what could potentially be a huge pay-to-play controversy that directly affects the presidential election. The incendiary emails and pictures on the computer detail lucrative business dealings by the former vice president’s son. They were first reported on Wednesday, October 14, by the New York Post, which received them from Rudy Giuliani. More emails are sure to be disclosed between now and the November 3 election.

These emails raise two overriding questions:

Are they real? Or are they a dirty trick by Joe Biden’s domestic political opponents or a foreign enemy?
If the “Delaware emails” are real, do they implicate the vice president himself? Or do they simply detail the dealings of a man who profited enormously from his family name but did so without his famous father knowing, helping or profiting?

Americans deserve to know the answers to both questions. And we need to know now, before Election Day.

The term “Delaware emails” is important here because there are others that potentially point to corrupt insider dealings. Specifically, the emails on the laptop are different from another set of 26,000 emails belonging to Hunter Biden’s ex–business partner, Bevan Cooney. Those, too, include troubling details about business arrangements with foreign partners, many closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Cooney is now in prison for some of his corrupt deals. A second partner, Devon Archer, is awaiting sentencing. Hunter Biden was never charged. Cooney has now given direct, unfettered access to his email account to Peter Schweizer, a journalist who specializes in official corruption. Schweizer has begun releasing the emails and his findings through Breitbart. So far, no one, including the Biden camp, has raised any questions about the authenticity of the Cooney emails.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/19/5-other-things-well-learn-about-biden-after-the-election/

For weeks, Joe Biden has played coy about whether he’d pack the Supreme Court with liberals should he win the White House and Democrats take control of the Senate. The media has largely ignored the issue, as they have anything that might harm Biden’s chances.

So what else isn’t Biden, or the press, telling us? What else will voters learn after they’ve cast their ballots? We can think of five things that, had voters known about them before Nov. 3, would have no doubt sapped support for Biden.

1. Biden is a far-left liberal with a big agenda. In his one debate with President Donald Trump, Biden seemed to distance himself from his party’s far left. He said he wasn’t in favor of the Green New Deal, and didn’t support Medicare for All. His entire campaign is built around saying nothing about what he’d do as president, other than be a nice guy.

Biden’s succeeded because on the few occasions where he’s answered questions from the media, they lob him softballs. But make no mistake, Biden is fully on board with his party’s far-left agenda, something we’ve been pointing out in these pages for months.

The Green New Deal that Biden says he opposes, for example, is contradicted by his own campaign website: “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”

Biden wants to eliminate carbon emissions from power plants by 2035, which is only five years later than the socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. He plans to reach net-zero carbon emissions for the entire country by 2050, which is the same deadline as the GND.

On Medicare for All, Biden has simply sidestepped the issue with his proposal to create a “public option” for everyone. Moderate Democrats rejected the public option in 2010 because they knew that it would quickly lead to the elimination of private insurance. Biden’s plan will reach the same destination as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All.

Biden’s tax-and-spend plans are just as ambitious, and on social issues, Biden is as leftist as they get.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/is_a_vote_for_joe_biden_in_the_interest_of_american_jews.html

A recent study conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 67% of American Jewish respondents planned to vote for Joe Biden and 30% for President Trump.  Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed claimed to be pro-Israel and 64% said Israel is an important election issue.  Most ranked Biden higher on U.S.-Israel relations, the handling of anti-Semitism, and ensuring the security of the Jewish community.  The survey results are surprising, given Trump’s stellar record on Jews and Israel.  American Jews must reconsider, for Biden’s record and positions on critical topics belie these perceptions.

Record on Israel

Biden’s record should dispel any notions he is staunchly pro-Israel.  In 1982, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations committee as a Democratic senator from Delaware, he argued with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.  He threatened to cut aid to Israel if settlement expansion continued in Judea and Samaria, shouting and banging the table when Begin wouldn’t budge.

In 2010, Biden upbraided Israel for building apartments in a Jewish section of East Jerusalem and opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to extend sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. 

In 2016, he pressured Ukraine, an abstainer, to vote for U.N. Security Council measure 2334, which identified the Jewish Quarter, the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall as located in “illegally occupied Palestinian territories,” an affirmation that defies historical fact.  UNSC 2334 also condemned Israel building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  Approval of the resolution emboldened the Palestinian Authority to call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea, Samaria, and the Jewish Quarter, reversing decades of U.S. vetoes against such moves.  That year, the U.N. General assembly passed 20 resolutions against Israel.  There were only six against other countries.

Biden’s anti-Israel stance is further confirmed by how the Obama administration interfered in the 2015 Israeli elections and tried to get Netanyahu defeated.  Obama and Biden tried to rupture Netanyahu’s governing coalition and move it to the left.  That year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the State Department had granted $350,000 to OneVoice, a radical anti-Israel organization that supports Hamas and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.  The funds were issued for a political campaign known as V15 or Victory 2015, a political campaign that used voter contacts and State Department-funded activists to defeat the incumbent government.  The Obama-Biden administration also published never-before-released details of Israel’s nuclear program, heedless of its profound impact on Israel’s security and the balance of power in the region.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trump%E2%80%88yes/#slide-1

Just look at the alternative

As I write this, the outcome of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is not yet known. Besides observing that she is eminently qualified, there is just one thing we can say with confidence: The president trying to seat a third justice on the nation’s highest judicial tribunal is not Hillary Clinton. 

Those two words, “Hillary Clinton,” more than any others that can be uttered, explain why Donald J. Trump is president of these United States. 

Out of the 17 Republicans who sought the party’s 2016 nomination, Mr. Trump was at or near the bottom of my preference list. More times than I can count, I’ve argued that the best thing he had going for him in the final showdown against the Democrats was . . . the Democrats — in particular, their nominee. 

Plus ça change . . .

But Trump is unfit, many proclaim. Tell me about it. Conservatives and Republicans have made that case with great persuasive force since the New York real-estate magnate first announced his candidacy in summer 2015. The consuming narcissism, nonstop dissembling, infantile outbursts, inability to admit error, withering attacks on well-meaning officials he entices into working for him — though Trump has been a much better president than I thought he’d be, it’s not like the leopard’s spots have faded away. 

The indictment continues: Trump is unprincipled — that’s the modifier invoked by those without patience for the grand-master designation preferred in MAGA Land, transactional. The norms he is demolishing are not, in fact, musty, deep-state relics; they are, to the contrary, the essence of the presidency, of its capacity to influence world events for the better. So deep runs his solipsism, so thin is his skin, that he cannot — not will not, cannot — distinguish between his own petty interests and the vital interests of the nation. Nor can he spot friends from foes, thus becoming infatuated with the rogues who flatter him and antagonistic toward allies anxious to preserve the post–World War II international order and America’s stabilizing centrality in it. His social-media fusillades, more befitting Don from Queens on his fourth beer in the saloon than the leader of the free world, degrade the office, undermine the rule of law (Attorney General Bill Barr has said that the president’s tweets sometimes “make it impossible for me to do my job”), and confuse both American officials and foreign powers regarding what the position of the United States is on matters of great importance. 

We could go on, as some have indeed gone on in this vein for four years running. Yet this argument has always missed the point. The most compelling case for Trump has never been Trump. It has always been, and remains, Trump . . . as opposed to what?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/ten_lessons_from_a_tumultuous_2020.html

“The Democrat party is now the fully owned subsidiary of the Marxist/socialist American left.  While the party hierarchy clings to the façade of moderation by trotting out the old faces from a bygone era, such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, the party is now the vehicle to radically transform the nation into a hybrid Marxist/socialist state by any means either illegal or unethical.  It is also an entity that does not care about the poor, working class, or marginalized groups enough to place their interests above a political agenda.”

This year has been not only stunning but eye-opening.  The list of what we as a nation have learned about ourselves is not limited to the political arena but includes the scientific and medical communities as well as modern-day American society.  Among the most notable lessons are the following.

The Chinese Coronavirus pandemic has revealed that virtually all Democrat elected state and local government officials are fully capable of doing the unthinkable: creating a de facto police state.  They have issued orders and edicts or convey preferences with no legal authority and with little consideration of the human cost while callously disregarding individual rights.  Further, they have relentlessly fostered unfounded fear among their citizens as well as deliberately prolonged their economic hardships by enforcing lockdowns for no sound medical purpose, solely to defeat Donald Trump in November.