RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-7-2-the-lawfare-campaign-against-donald-trump-takes-three-big-blows

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office. This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.

So for all those 235 years, our predecessors in the government, whatever their political differences and contentious disputes, have largely refrained from the temptation to use the criminal justice system to bring down political adversaries, and entirely so in the case of ex-Presidents. That political norm came to an abrupt end with the massive “lawfare” campaign initiated during the past two years by Democratic Party prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions against ex-President (and current candidate) Trump.

You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.

During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions. The first of those came in a decision called Fischer v. United States, issued on June 28, and the other two in Trump v. United States, issued yesterday (July 1).

https://unherd.com/2024/07/the-true-president-of-americas-fifth-republic/

The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fueled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. The country’s elite would be glad if this were hyperbole; unfortunately for them, it is not. But Joe Biden’s fitness for office is no longer the big question that the American press is afraid to ask. After three years of near-total silence, they suddenly can’t stop asking it.

There may have indeed been members of America’s political and media elites who were shocked by Biden’s debate performance. Crediting the sincerity of their reactions doesn’t say much for their powers of observation, though. Biden’s shuffling gait, frozen facial expressions, babbling fabulist arabesques and inability to perform simple physical tasks without falling down have all been on public display since the first year of his Presidency — an office he won mostly in absentia while hiding out in the basement of his home in Delaware.

It is certainly possible that the American elite stuck its fingers in its ears and covered its eyes in order to block out Biden’s resemblance to late-period Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps by repeating the ideas that Biden was not only sharp as a tack but also a geopolitical genius and probably even the greatest American President of any of our lifetimes, they came to believe that some version of these things were true, and had to be true — because everyone said so.

Those who favour psychodynamic in-group explanations can certainly find support in the rapid about-faces staged by America’s leading pundits. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-bidens-alternative-facts

President Joe Biden, in his interview Friday night with ABC News, said many things. The polls had him in a dead heat with Donald Trump. Democratic Party leaders have urged him to stay in the race. America, under his leadership, has “checkmated” China. 

He delivered these assessments with a gravel-voiced clarity missing from his disastrous debate performance on June 27. He was engaged and followed his train of thought to a conclusion. The problem was the substance of his answers were lacking. In fact, many of the things he said strained credulity. 

Call it Biden’s alternative facts. 

Let’s start with the polling. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up” between him and Donald Trump. It’s possible Biden has indeed spoken to pollsters who tell him the presidential race, after the debate, is 50-50. But the highest quality polls after the debate show Trump in a firm lead. 

The New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, has Biden down six points among likely voters. A Wall Street Journal post-debate poll found 60 percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. CNN’s latest poll among American adults has Biden at 43 percent versus Trump at 49 percent. 

Former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Axelrod posted on X a more realistic assessment of Biden’s chances in the race on Friday evening: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/05/americans-want-to-know-who-is-really-in-charge-in-the-white-house/

In last Thursday’s presidential debate, we saw the most decisive loss ever by an incumbent American president. Biden’s performance was so abysmal that it raises serious questions about how he can continue to function as president, especially in his role as commander-in-chief.

Donald Trump dominated the debate, making important new criticisms that Biden failed to answer—especially how the surge in illegal immigration during the Biden presidency is hurting social security. Trump put Biden on the defensive, parried tough questions, and pointed out how many of Biden’s statements were incoherent.

Biden could hardly have done worse. He was incoherent, lost his train of thought and appeared confused. He offered no believable defenses for his record as president. The defenses he did provide made no sense.

The left-wing publication Slate gave this stark assessment of Biden’s performance in the debate, claiming it “revealed that [he] is indeed an old man who appears to be in no condition to be running this country, even now—not to mention in another four years.”

Many Americans had the same concern after the debate.

We saw Biden staring into space and looking slack-jawed with his eyes glazed over when Trump spoke. If Biden acts this way during Oval Office meetings, cabinet meetings, and meetings with foreign leaders, one has to ask: How is he making decisions as president?  Is Biden simply signing everything his staff puts in front of him?  Do unnamed White House advisers run cabinet meetings while Biden sits motionless in his chair?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/04/the-democrats-civil-war-has-begun/

Let the great Democratic civil war begin. The impending demise of Joe Biden and the patched-together coalition he represents is threatening to accelerate the very intra-party conflicts his presidency was meant to assuage.

In 2020, Biden was able to cobble together the remains of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition, along with huge support from both the oligarchic elite and the progressive left. This was possible in large part because the repellant Donald Trump alienated not only the left, including the rising Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but also dominant elites and numerically strong moderate liberals.

Today, as the Republicans unite around Trump, the Democratic alliance has become creaky. As has been happening for decades, much of the traditional New Deal coalition has further abandoned the party. Biden’s inflationary policies and embrace of progressive cultural and environmental priorities have not gone down well with the traditional base of mostly working-class voters. This has been particularly alienating given that the majority of Democrats consider themselves moderate or even conservative.

Biden’s performance, even before last week’s disastrous presidential debate, has unsettled more than just his core voter base. It has also rattled the oligarchic elite that funded his 2020 campaign, as well as the party apparatus and its media appendages. They may still conveniently genuflect to cultural progressivism and climate-change hysteria, but are less likely to want a mass redistribution of wealth and other curbs on their power. There have been tentative signs, at least on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, that some are now contemplating support for Trump instead. These defectors may be few in number, but they reek of money.

Increasingly, the one reliable – and vocal – bloc of Democrats resides on the far left. This faction backed Biden in 2020 against Trump, despite his relatively moderate political record. The idea was to influence his administration afterwards. It would be an ‘evolution’, as Squad congresswoman Pramila Jayapal described it. Biden largely accommodated to this agenda, at least rhetorically, championing issues from Net Zero targets to the promotion of transgender ideology.

https://thespectator.com/politics/united-states-10-4-president-biden/

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.

The narrative, according to which Joe Biden was “sharp and intensely probing,” had been assiduously maintained by mendacious Democrats and their sycophantic lackeys in the media since before Biden became president. Few people outside that circle of magical thinking actually believed in Biden’s cognitive competence. I and many others have been calling attention to his debility for years. But the illusion has been cynically cultivated by uniparty lieutenants much as the illusory nostrums of communist solidarity were propped up by the Soviets as their regime teetered towards is final, senescent collapse in the late 1980s. Few people believed the illusion; everyone in power said they believed it, even though they could taste the cynicism and disbelief among the masses they sought to control. That curious dialectic of disbelief and acquiescence was part of the corrosive rust that eventually precipitated the collapse of the regime.

Has the uniparty changed its song about Joe Biden? There are signs that it has. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week, the narrative broke in two, or at least seemed to break in two. On one side there was horror and — word of the moment — “panic” among the Dems. The New York Times led the way in calling for Biden — for the good of the country — to resign. At the same time, there was considerable push back, encapsulated comically in the observation that dementia Joe “had a cold,” hence his gibbering incoherence. St. Barack weighed in with what appeared to be a supportive post of X: everyone has bad debate nights, he said, but “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary people his entire life [Obama meant Biden, in case you were wondering] and someone who only cares about himself [the bad orange man].”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-scotus-cases-show-how-an-unaccountable-administrative-state-hurts-ordinary-people/

After the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.” That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute. The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable, creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires, and fundamentally misguided, allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function.

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture. Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate. He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits the government owed him. Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/collaborator-intelligence-agency/

It has now emerged that Gina Haspel, director of the CIA from 2018-2021, was aware of the October, 2020 letter from 51 “intelligence community” officials charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” The signatories included three former CIA directors –Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, plus acting CIA directors John McLaughlin and Mike Morel. A full 41 signers were from the CIA – some still on contract to the agency at the time.  In 2022, many of the signatories refused comment on the letter or ducked the question.

Asked in early June if he would retract his signature, former director of national intelligence  James Clapper said “no.” In the recent debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden claimed that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” which he too knows is false.

As these events revealed, American intelligence officials are willing to deploy their spycraft on the domestic scene for partisan purposes. This failure goes back to events 50 years ago, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein  who, before he passed away at 88 in January, reprised many of his books and articles in Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe.

Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA broke new ground but was released in 1989 when the Soviet empire was breaking apart. The book landed in remainder bins, because readers thought the invisible war was over. It wasn’t, and Deception remains more relevant than ever.

Epstein’s primary source was James Jesus Angleton, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. In the style of a fly fisherman, Angleton liked to play Soviet defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko for all they were worth. Angleton needed to know if he Soviets’ deception loop included persons inside the CIA who could tell how the other side was interpreting the operations. CIA bosses were unwilling to believe they could be penetrated and in 1974, amid charges that the CIA was spying on Americans, Angleton was fired. For Epstein, this effectively turned the CIA inside out.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/the_spirit_of_1776.html

Ah, 1776 — a time when the ruling aristocracy taxed Americans without their say, destroyed printing presses of those publishers demanding liberty, and jailed outspoken critics for treason.  How things have changed — not!  If there were one indispensable truth to be learned from America’s glorious Independence, it is this: governments do not give freedom; they take freedom away.  

Any smooth-talking politician who pretends that government should be praised for the “gifts” it bestows upon the people is a smiling agent of the Crown fashioning new chains for citizens to wear.  Laws, taxes, and regulations do not liberate human beings; they are the bricks and mortar trapping us inside ever-smaller cells.

Government is the destroyer of liberty.  Bureaucracies do not light the flame of freedom; they snuff freedom’s light out.  People alone (separate from the organizing strictures of the State) secure their liberty by pushing back against and restraining the otherwise ever-growing oppression of power-hungry governments.  Citizens hold the keys to their own prison cells.  They must only find the courage to open up their doors and walk outside.  This was true in 1776; it is no less true today.

What is remarkable about the period leading up to the American Revolution is how quickly public sentiment shifted.  By and large, colonists saw themselves as loyal servants of the English Crown until, suddenly, they were not.  They celebrated King George III’s birthday each year.  They formed militias to aid their king in wars against his European foes.  As late as 1775, few Americans desired anything so radical as political Independence.  The idea seemed far-fetched.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/the_communist_plan_that_has_subverted_our_intel_agencies.html

On June 21, the FBI declassified a 1999 video of Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi casing the Capitol and other Washington D.C. sites for the 9/11 attack.  How, then, did the CIA-FBI 9/11 report conclude in 2005 that Saudi Arabia was not involved in the attack?  And why did the FBI maintain — for 20 years, before its recent retraction — that al-Bayoumi wasn’t a Saudi agent?

Such willful deception, practiced increasingly by American intelligence, is the subject of former CIA agent J. Michael Waller’s new book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.  The dramatic writing and detailing, backed by the author’s experience in espionage — in Central America and the U.S.S.R., and against jihadist conspiracies — make it a page-turner.  In 37 chapters, plus additional sections and a reading list, it presents an alarming history of how a century-old Marxist campaign has succeeded in ideologically subverting America and its intel agencies.

The results of that success are seen in today’s leftist street protests, the DEI obsession, and prevalent anti-Israel sentiment; also, in the saturation of academia and bureaucracy by Marxists.  Not so evident, because intel agencies operate covertly, is their transmogrification from valiant fighters for American freedom to an emerging state police harrying those who oppose the acceptable narratives du jour.