RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/22/dont-forget-what-harris-and-biden-have-done-to-the-country/

When Americans listen to Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech tonight, they need to tune out the thrill-up-the-leg praise from the media and the audience’s stream of verbal bouquets and ask themselves one question: Are they better off today than they were four years ago. For all but a few, the answer would be resounding “no.”

In the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, just days before the election, Reagan asked what the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government called “one of the most important campaign questions of all time:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” 

Voters said no, and sent Reagan to the White House with 489 electoral votes and sent Carter home with 49.

Forty-four years later, the question is still relevant, and still yields the same response, because:

The unemployment rate was 4.3% in July 2024 – the fourth straight month it has increased – compared to 3.5% in February 2020 when politicians and unelected public health officials began choking the economy with pandemic lockdowns. Even though that comparison is bad enough, it’s somewhat misleading, because there are 5 million fewer Americans in the labor force than there were just before the lockdowns. Adjusting for that, the real unemployment rate, which has never been below 4% while the Biden-Harris regime has been in office, would be 5.2% today.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/21/the-ghosts-of-1968-still-haunt-the-democrats/

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week is already invoking memories of another, infamous DNC in the windy city. In 1968, between 9,000 and 10,000 people – mainly students – gathered in parks and outside the convention centre to protest against the Vietnam War. The resulting violence and mayhem was broadcast around the world.

This week, thousands of demonstrators protesting against Israel’s war on Hamas arrived in Chicago. The aim of the Coalition to March on the DNC, which is made up of more than 200 organisations, is to pressure the Democrats to abandon their support for Israel. On Monday, the coalition held a demonstration of about 3,000 people and hopes to up those numbers on Thursday, when vice-president Kamala Harris is due to speak and officially accept the presidential nomination. The coalition’s website brands the current president ‘Genocide Joe Biden’ and warns: ‘Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.’

Some of today’s protesters hope to explicitly invoke the 1968 protests. ‘This is the Vietnam War of our era’, said Hatem Abudayyah, a spokesman for the coalition. ‘The attacks on our movement, our students and our organisations are similar to the attacks on the movement that was trying to stop 1968… I absolutely see those parallels.’

There are indeed some notable parallels between 1968 and now. Just like the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the recent, unsuccessful attempt on Donald Trump’s life threatened to change the course of history. Similarly, the 1968 DNC protests followed a wave of student unrest across American campuses over an overseas conflict. Just as Biden is stepping aside for Harris, then president Lyndon B Johnson made way for his heir apparent, then vice-president Hubert Humphrey, to take the nomination.

The Democrats would rather not see these parallels, given that the eventual outcome of the 1968 election was victory for Republican Richard Nixon. There is certainly an air of desperation in the many media attempts to dismiss the comparisons. Elderly protest veterans have been wheeled out to say, essentially, that 2024 will be nothing like 1968.

https://quadrant.org.au/

The Democrats have just begun their convention in Chicago, the hope being that anti-Semitic protests don’t become riots, Steven Spielberg’s stage-management goes off without a hitch and — fingers tightly crossed —  Kamala Harris doesn’t get too close to a microphone and go off script.

Just such a moment came to pass in Pennsylvania on Sunday, when the anointed candidate strayed too cvlose to reporters and couldn’t resist delivering one of her trademark word salads.  Her thoughts on democracy, such as they are, are below.

In the background, if body language is anything go by, Veep candidate Tim Walz seems a little uncomfortable.

These are the things we stand for and these therefore are the things we fight for! And that’s what our election is about.

Our election is about understanding the importance of this beautiful country of ours in terms of what we stand for around the globe as a democracy.

As a democracy, we know there’s a duality to the nature of democracy. On the one hand, incredible strength when it is intact. What it does for its people, to protect and defend their rights. Incredibly strong.

And incredibly fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And that’s what this campaign is about.

This campaign is about a recognition that, frankly, over the last several years there has been this kind of perversion that has taken place, I think. Which is to suggest, that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up. That’s what we see as strength.

Anybody who is about beating down other people is a coward! This is what strength looks like. So we know what we are about, we know what we stand for. And one of the beautiful things about these next 79 days is what the people in this room already have been doing and know. Let’s build community, let’s reinforce community.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-argues-fate-of-the-world-at-stake-in-presidential-election-in-fiery-convention-speech/

Chicago – Up until July 21, President Joe Biden was planning to cap this week’s Democratic convention here in the Windy City with a Thursday evening speech that would quiet his critics and forcefully make the case to the American people that he is fit to take on Donald Trump again in 2024.

Instead, this 81-year-old, post-dropout president walked onstage at around 10:25 p.m. Central Monday evening to concede that his second-in-command is better equipped to do the job. It’s “not true,” he told the crowd, that he’s “angry” with those who asked him to step aside. “I love the job. But I love my country more.”

Biden’s onstage delivery Monday evening was fiery and far more energetic than the president America saw on live television during the June 27 in Atlanta, where he looked pale, confused, and struggled to string sentences together. “Folks, let me ask you — are you ready to vote for freedom?” the president said in a more than 45-minute long post-primetime speech that was apparently delayed by poor logistics. “Are you ready to vote for democracy and for America? Are you read to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?”

In a speech that hearkened back to his democracy-versus chaos reelection pitch at the start of his 2024 reelection bid, he reflected on the gravity of his swearing-in nearly four years ago, two weeks after a mob had stormed the U.S. Capitol. He spoke of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that he claims inspired his 2020 presidential run, making sure to pepper his remarks with characteristic Biden quips about his battle for the “soul” of this nation. Biden cast the Democratic Party’s electoral fight against Trump in existential terms, a turnaround from his plea to the American people after an attempted assassination on Trump’s life last month to “lower the temperature” in our politics.

“We’re facing an inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re in a battle for the very soul of America.”

“We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024,” he added.

After he concluded his remarks, Biden was joined onstage by Harris, who held the president’s hand in a passing-of-the-torch moment. While he sprinkled in references to his confidence in Harris, Biden focused his speech mainly on his own record and accomplishments as president.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/19/texas-gop-looking-into-reports-that-dems-are-registering-noncitizens-to-vote-outside-of-dmvs/

Republican officials in Texas are looking into reports that Democrats have set up tables outside of several Department of Motor vehicles (DMV) offices and are registering noncitizens to vote.

On Sunday, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo revealed on X that, according to a friend, Democrats had set up voter registration drives outside of three DMVs in Weatherford and Fort Worth.

“Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license,” Bartiromo began.

Couldn’t get an online appointment (all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.

Brady Gray, Chairman of the Parker County Republican Party in Weatherford, reacted to the report on X, saying he would look into it.

“Under Kamala’s watch the border has been overrun, now MY county is being overrun,” Gray wrote. “I’m done listening to those who claim ‘replacement theory’ is racist and conspiratorial. Democrats are intentionally trying to circumvent law to steal elections. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact.”

The Republican chairman added that since Bartiromo’s disturbing post went out, he had been inundated with messages from concerned residents asking if the Parker County GOP was aware of the report.

“We are, and I will be fully investigating the claims in our community,” Gray said.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/beyond-scandal

Every presidential campaign opens with a controversy and closes with a scandal. Faced with this prospect, some observers feel disgust, others stoically accept it as the way of the world, and still others approach it with a Machiavellian delight. They see mudslinging and coarseness as the substance that drives great political drama.

The 2024 presidential election, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, is no different. Vice President Harris began her political career through a high-profile affair with the powerful San Francisco politico Willie Brown. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, cheated on his first wife with their children’s nanny, whom he subsequently impregnated. Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, has embellished his military service to the point that some critics have accused him of “stolen valor.” And since becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Harris has changed her positions on multiple issues. These scandal archetypes were once enough to torpedo, or at least damage, presidential campaigns of men like Gary Hart and John Kerry. No longer.

Former president Trump, too, has survived a protracted sequence of personal scandals. His romantic life has splashed through the tabloids for decades, with multiple marriages, accusations of infidelity and womanizing, and an alleged tryst with a pornographic actress. His political scandals as president included impeachment; after leaving the White House, they have included indictment, arrest, and conviction—incidents with no historical precedent.

And yet, Trump endures. He has refashioned his criminal conviction, even his scowling mugshot, as the inciting incident for a comeback narrative. Likewise, Harris has trampled the negative stories beneath her feet and presented herself as a defender of democracy. Trump surpassed his scandals through strength of personality; Harris, through the power of the national media.

What is the significance of this shift in political life? A moralist might argue that we have entered a period of ethical collapse. The old Christian standard no longer holds, it would seem. There is another possibility, however: maybe we have abandoned moralistic pretense and entered a period of greater realism.

https://www.thefp.com/p/john-fetterman-has-no-regrets?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

John Fetterman is skipping this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, to hear it from him, it has nothing—literally nothing—to do with him scotch-taping photos of the Israeli hostages to his Senate office walls. Or attacking fellow Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for falsely blaming a hospital bombing in Gaza on Israel. (“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”) Or comparing the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia to a neo-Nazi rally (“Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students,” he tweeted). 

Nor is it about “Fetterman Alumni for Peace”—a group of former Fetterman campaign staffers—publicly scolding their old boss: “It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history.” 

“I’ve got three young kids, and they’re out of school,” the Pennsylvania senator said of his absence this week in Chicago, waving off the suggestion that he might not be welcome there. “That’s four days I can spend with my children.”

The choice to skip the convention “was made well before that debate,” Fetterman told me in a one-hour conversation via Zoom—the senator at home, in the not quite one-square-mile, ex–steel town of Braddock, twenty minutes outside Pittsburgh; me in Los Angeles. He was referring to the June 27 Joe Biden–Donald Trump showdown that led the president to step aside and Vice President Kamala Harris to snag the Democratic nomination.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_words_we_need_to_elect_trump.html

Living in one of the most far-left communities in the United States for the past many decades, I am intimately familiar with the mindset of the left — the liberals, leftists, progressives, or whatever they’re calling themselves today.

And as the entire world has witnessed over the past eight years, since the man they used to lionize and admire — and rewarded with a 15-year boffo success TV show, The Apprentice — descended the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, a true mass hysteria erupted to denounce, vilify, degrade, reject, and ultimately try to destroy — including with a bullet! — one Donald J. Trump.

Why?

The primary reason was because America had just survived the eight-year hate-America regime of Barack Obama, whose communist leanings had successfully ushered in socialized medicine via Obamacare and socialized education via the Common Core Curriculum — both disastrous contributions to the devolution of America.  The left fully anticipated that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would spend the next eight years completing the left’s hundred-year mission to turn our dastardly capitalistic system with its allegiance to the horrific Constitution of the United States into the communist paradise on earth they all so fervently believed in…and do to this day!

The Trump Imprimatur

In spite of non-stop harassment, bogus accusations, and vicious lawfare suits, President Trump ushered in — this is the very short list — low taxes, low regulations, low food prices, low gas prices, sky-high employment across all demographics, a challenge to our NATO partners to pay their fair share (which they had never done, but complied with immediately), energy independence for the next thousand years, unprecedented success with peace initiatives via the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and — ta-da — no wars!

It will be amusing to watch this stellar record go up against the Harris-Walz slate, which features virtually not a single policy or action that has benefited America.

Yes, they will have non-stop positive coverage from a craven media, but the Trump team will have what to liberals is the most terrifying lethal weapon imaginable: cold, hard facts!

Just a Few Examples

Five words: Darfur, Yemen, Myanmar, Ukraine, Israel — all raging wars that did not exist four years ago.  These are the sole responsibility of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — and are costing American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/19/the-myriad-projections-of-the-2024-campaign/

Projectionism

Projection is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them.

These mental gymnastics are intended to alleviate one’s own guilt or sense of inadequacy at the expense of another.

Sound familiar?

But in the political sphere, projection involves more overt dissimulation. It is increasingly common for leftist candidates or political parties to falsely accuse their opponents of the very destructive behaviors and unpopular agendas that they themselves embrace, but out of political necessity must deny.

Rather than an unconscious Freudian defense mechanism, political projection is usually a conscious strategy of hiding one’s own negatives by fobbing them off on antagonists.

Projection often proves a quite successful ploy.

After all, the political projectionist knows best his own hazardous or off-putting conduct and policies. And so, he can most skillfully attribute just these liabilities to those who have had no experience with them.

Our Leftist Projectionists

The 2024 Harris-Walz campaign is turning out to be projectionist to the core. How?

First: Kamala Harris and her new running mate Governor Tim Walz have long advanced fringe leftist political agendas. (Her “everyone needs to be woke” and his claim that riots happen because society doesn’t prioritize “equity and inclusion.”)

They have been loud in their fringe cultural commentaries, which are not just unpopular but roundly rejected by the majority of the electorate. And they know that if they become open and honest about what they have done, they will likely be defeated.

Second: On a more personal level, both are attacking the behavior and conduct of their rivals as a way of deflecting attention from their own weaknesses on that score.

Thus, this kind of projection, about both policy and personal behavior, is more common on the left because its ideology is fundamentally far more distant from the views of most voters.