RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/09/21/wrong-way-biden/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

“Alas, Abraham Lincoln is not on the ballot this year. Two flawed men present themselves for our inspection. Biden may promise “hope and light and love,” but that is merely the accepted euphemism for greatly expanded federal powers to reshape everything from the energy sector to girls’ locker rooms. The distractions of personality foibles, Twitter wars, and misadventures in assertions of truth aside, the crux of this election is that we are confronted as usual with one party that says, “Let’s get to work reshaping everything in the United States” and another party that says, “Let’s not.””

Joe Biden is a proud retail politician, a man who believes the personal touch is how elected officials cement a connection with us. So I’ll share my personal story about how he cemented a connection with me, back when I and a few hundred thousand other troops were preparing for war, and Joe wafted in to warn us we were all to get our collective ass kicked.

In January of 1991, I was a second lieutenant in the 178th Personnel Service Company, an administrative appendix to the buffed body of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. My troops and I had landed in the Gulf town of Dhahran a week before Christmas and gradually made our way inland by long, grim, nearly silent convoys — creeping, 20-mph slogs across the one two-lane highway, then off the road and across the sands to set up camp.

In mid January, after maybe twelve hours of deliberate, dusty driving, I climbed out of a deuce-and-a-half and stretched my limbs as the soldiers began unloading, somewhere beneath the triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. A radio was playing in someone’s truck. Radio options were limited in this landscape; occasionally you could find the signal for the Armed Forces Network, if there was a large enough base nearby, but sometimes you couldn’t. AFN, Stars and Stripes, and occasional copies of a surprisingly good English-language broadsheet called “Arab News” were our sole media diet apart from whatever magazines we subscribed to, which would arrive weeks late in the mail. All three of our main sources were, of course, pro-U.S., which was fine by me. I had no idea what we were in for. I wanted only the most optimistic spin on things.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/moral-equivalence-camouflage-moral-cowardice-bruce-thornton/

NRO’s Jim Geraghty in his daily column indulged one of the NeverTrump favorite rhetorical devices: That the president is just as bad for the Republic as the radical Democrats, and neither side “wants to solve real problems.” Apart from the common mistaken notion that the Founders created our political order “to solve problems” rather than protect the liberty of states, towns, civic society, families, and individuals, this tic often obscures an unwillingness to identify clearly those guilty of creating conflict and disorder by equally apportioning guilt to both sides.

Moral equivalence becomes the camouflage for moral cowardice, a fear to assign responsibility where it is due.

During his discussion of the Democrats’ dilemma over how to spin the ongoing riots, Geraghty can’t help sniping at Trump:

But we all know that Donald Trump’s view on how to deal with an angry and potentially destructive mob is dramatically different from that of Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, or New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Trump’s administration sent U.S. Park Police into Lafayette Park, using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” Quite a few observers contended the tactics used more force than necessary or that was justified by the situation. But we know Trump’s instincts are to overreact to the threat of mob violence, not underreact.

The Dem blue-state mayors underreact, but Trump overreacts because of his “instincts” rather than a sober and judicious analysis of the crisis. The two responses are morally equivalent. Hence in Lafayette Park, near the storied church “peaceful protestors” had set on fire, and swarming with violent thugs know for using bricks, rocks, commercial fireworks, frozen water bottles, skateboards, and other weapons against the police, Trump overreacted by using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” In other words, standard non-lethal methods for dispersing a violent mob set on injuring others.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/01/joe_bidens_three_risky_choices__144106.html

Joe Biden’s quick trip to Pittsburgh and his speech there Monday condemning urban violence show Democrats now recognize they made a major mistake in ignoring the problem at their convention. They’ve read the polls and finally realize voters care about the arson, shootings, and looting — and their own safety. That’s a problem for the Biden campaign, which had almost nothing to say about the violence all summer. Now, they are doing “cleanup on Aisle 6” and there’s a lot of broken glass around.

“Rioting is not protesting,” the Democrats’ presidential nominee told the Carnegie-Mellon University audience. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. … It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.” That’s true, but it was no less true two weeks or two months ago. Even now, Biden’s main thrust is less against the violence than against President Trump for “fomenting it” and “sowing chaos.” As Biden put it, “The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he’s trying to scare America.”

That Biden was willing to leave home on short notice, fly to a swing state, and speak out about the rioting is the clearest indication yet that the election is tightening. Discussing the violence is one of three big, difficult decisions Biden faces as the campaign heats up. Each entails significant risks for a candidate who must hold together a fractious coalition and avoid major gaffes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/29/what-trump-got-right-our-choic

Even today, we often hear there are no real differences between the two parties. They’re like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, we’re told. But hearing President Donald Trump’s lengthy, and detailed, acceptance speech Thursday night, we must agree: Never in modern history has there been a greater gap between the two major parties.

“Despite all of our greatness as a nation, everything we have achieved is now endangered. This is the most important election in the history of our country. At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas,” Trump told Americans.

“This election will decide whether we save the American Dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”

He’s right. And yes, the choice is that stark.

In the midst of an American cultural and political crisis, brought on by far-left inspired terrorism and rioting in the nation’s cities, it’s important to draw clear distinctions. And that’s exactly what Trump and others did in their convention speeches.

“The president and his surrogates boasted of replacing NAFTA with USMCA, passing criminal-justice reform, getting a significant tax cut through Congress (though this didn’t receive as much attention as usual for a GOP convention), destroying ISIS, and killing Qasem Soleimani, along with many less widely heralded achievements in foreign policy and regulatory reform,” as Daniel McCarthy of the Spectator USA magazine neatly summed it up.