RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/andrew-cuomo-chris-cuomo-myth-better-than-reality/

The myth of famous Mario’s famous sons does not match the reality.

  T he media gushes over a supposedly ascendant New York governor Andrew Cuomo. His daily press conferences are purportedly the sort of muscular and animated high drama that Joe Biden should be staging. Robert DeNiro now says he would like to play the Homeric governor in a new pandemic film portrayal. Cuomo seems giddy at the thought.

Democratic politicos are whispering of a Bidexit.

Good ol’ Joe from Scranton would graciously step down and take one for the party. Cuomo then storms the convention. Bernie hands over his delegates in a show of gracious unity. That way, all the “troubles” — Joe’s cognitive impairment, Tara Reade’s sexual-assault charges, the currently dormant Sanders socialist threat — dissipate. Cuomo selects Joe’s promised minority or female — or both — vice-presidential candidate. Or in fact he doesn’t and is free to choose anyone he prefers. Presto, the party hits the campaign trail in August united.

There are problems with such a scenario — namely Biden, and, then, Sanders, not going quietly into the night after a grueling year of campaigning. And then there is Andrew Cuomo’s current underreported but actually spotty performance as governor during the crisis. Hs record has been as anemic as his press conferences have been robust, resulting in the surreal result that he effectively advertises his shortcomings.

Remember that the omnipresent and televised Cuomo was inviting the world into New York even as evidence mounted that the virus was spreading and densely packed cities such as New York were the most vulnerable? Cuomo oddly did little to prevent the state’s trains and subways from becoming the arteries of the epidemic. He neither implemented a social-distancing policy to prevent crowded conditions nor ordered daily cleaning of cars. Much less did he prevent the homeless from turning the subways into a veritable mobile home.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/10/unbearable-truths-about-our-current-political-moment/

“You can’t handle the truth!”
—Col. Nathan R. Jessep, “A Few Good Men”

Sometimes the truth is like mythical kryptonite. It radiates power and yet promises great destruction. And so reality is to be left alone, encased in lead, and kept at bay.

Take the Chinese genesis of the COVID-19 epidemic. We started in February with the usual Chinese deceptions about their role in the birth, transmission, and worldwide spread of the virus.

No one, apparently except Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates, was surprised by the accustomed politically correct prevarications of the Chinese-purchased World Health Organization, whose transparent lies were passed off as truth—and led to tens of thousands of deaths.

On cue, our own obsequious media accepted Chinese and globalist myths—their shared antipathy for President Trump meant whatever he is for or says, they are against and deny.

But by late March the bits and pieces of the truth had emerged. All that gobbledygook talk of a Chinese wet market, of patient-zero bats, snakes, pangolins and such, were likely ruses to deflect attention from a conveniently nearby level-4 Chinese virology lab.

We are beginning to learn that Chinese scientists were conducting research on—surprise, surprise—coronaviruses in general, and in particular, methods to enhance their lethality, all for the ostensibly exalted humanitarian aim of discovering cures and vaccinations, although how that was to be so was never quite disclosed.

China’s patient zero almost weekly was backdated by communist party officials from late January to mid-November. When the lying is exhausted, we may well learn the virus was known to the Chinese even earlier.

In addition, we learned that China variously threatened to cut off medical supplies in transit to the United States. It stopped all flights in and out of Wuhan on January 23, but called America racist for waiting a week until January 31 to issue a travel ban on China—including, but not limited to, ending direct flights to the United States from Wuhan. Consider the Chinese communist logic: running-dog American capitalists mimicked Beijing in forbidding Chinese from flying—but only after a week-long interlude of bourgeoise debate and puerile reflection.

Were the Chinese embarrassed that they had accused Washington of being racist for belatedly doing exactly what they had done earlier? Of course not. In their eyes, weak decadent Westerners welcome such help in aiding their own self-abnegation and debasement.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/5/the-scab-the-wound-beneath

EXCERPTS:

An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge. From Thucydides’ warnings, we can glean that even suburban elites in Range Rovers can in a day be reduced to tugging over toilet paper rolls at Whole Foods.

Of course, in historical terms, covid-19may prove a rookie virus in comparison to the still mysterious infection—typhus, smallpox, or typhoid?—that wiped out one quarter of the Athenian population along with its iconic sexagenarian leader Pericles. He was the architect of the very wartime strategy of forced withdrawal inside the walls of Athens that birthed the plague in the first place and took his life.

Thucydides’ accounts of the plague, the savage factionalism at Corcyra, the mass executions at Mytilene and Melos, and the disaster at Syracuse all remind us that what is considered normal in calm can be rendered absurd instantly in the cauldron of panic and death. Last month I saw what seemed to be a stylishly dressed woman in a Lexus buying toilet paper from her car window in the parking lot of a local Walmart from someone who appeared homeless, a social interaction rare in healthier times.

The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath. Take the central actor of this plague, China. For much of the twenty-first century, the American establishment’s foreign policy toward China, to the degree it was even formalized, was ethically and logically bankrupt. Yet the status quo remained unquestioned, given it rested on a rare alignment of both progressive and commercial self-interests.

Of course, Americans in general have had a long romance with China. They were never colonialists in China, at least in the manner of the Europeans. Over fifteen million Chinese, our erstwhile allies, were killed in World War II, many brutally slaughtered by our enemies, the Japanese.

More recently, Mao Zedong, arguably the most lethal mass murderer of the twentieth century—perhaps a greater killer than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined—held an attraction for the New Left of the 1960s. His cherubic smile, worker’s cap, peasant dress, cool aphorisms, and hatred of running-dog capitalists once captivated student protestors. Even Barack Obama’s acting White House communications director, Anita Dunn, in 2009 still swooned that Mao was one of her two favorite political “philosophers”:

And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/21/the-economy-doesnt-need-government-help-to-reopen/

After weeks of lockdown, several states have begun to outline plans for returning to business as usual. The economies in these states don’t need political schemes. They simply need to be released from government chains.

Governments don’t create economies. It’s not only beyond their legitimate functions, it’s beyond their abilities. They need to stay out of the way and let the wisdom of markets steer us back to normal. But some officials see an opening through which they can drive their big government dreams.

For instance elected officials in California, which is likely to be the last state to fully open though it hasn’t seen the most suffering from the COVID-19 outbreak, view the crisis as a means to push the state harder and faster down the Blue State path. When asked by a reporter earlier this month if he saw “the potential, as many others in the party do, for a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said yes, of course “there is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism.” 

“Absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern,” Newsom added.

A little more than two weeks later, Newsom announced the formation of his Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. Behind the official sounding name, and a few non-Democrat token members, hides a plan to use the pandemic as a means for advancing Blue State economic interventions that include: greater redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, bankrupting the oil and gas industry, an “unhinged” green energy program, minimum wage that breaks the backs of small businesses, and more of California’s hostility toward business in general.

Expect Newsom’s task force to draw the blueprint for other progressive states to follow.

The task forces, committees, and other councils across the country that will be charged with reopening economies “didn’t build that,” if we might borrow a particularly repugnant phrase. In fact, there is a certainty the most active of these will take what others built and wring the life out of it.