RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-corrupt-pardon-of-death-row-inmates/

Last week, as we covered here, the Biden Justice Department filed a death penalty charge against Luigi Mangione, the alleged cold-blooded killer of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Mangione was already facing state murder charges for the murder committed on a Manhattan street. The only reason to pile on a capital charge — for an administration that both says it philosophically opposes the death penalty and has imposed a moratorium on executions since President Biden entered office in January 2021 — was to grab headlines in a case that had riveted public attention.

And now, just days later, Biden has cynically commuted the sentences of almost all remaining federal death row inmates — 37 of the 40 — so that none of those defendants will be executed.

I say “cynically” because this is the game Biden and Democrats in power play with capital punishment, which is broadly popular nationally but reviled by their party’s progressive base. For public consumption, in murder cases that enrage voters, they take on the mantle of capital punishment’s reluctant champions. Thus did the Obama-Biden Justice Department indict Dzokhar Tsarnaev on death charges when he and his brother bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013 — notwithstanding that Obama, like Biden, had imposed a moratorium on executions. And when a Democrat-appointee-dominated First Circuit appellate court irrationally reversed the death sentence endorsed by the Boston federal jury, the Biden Justice Department appealed and convinced the Supreme Court to reinstate it.

But that was out of one side of the administration’s mouth. On the other side, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were assuring their political base not to pay any mind to these theatrics because, after all, they weren’t going to allow anyone to be executed.

And, naturally, Tsarnaev is one of the three death row inmates whose sentence Biden did not commute — the others are Dylann Roof, the white racist who in 2015 murdered black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and against whom the Obama-Biden Justice Department sought the death penalty despite its claimed constitutional qualms; and Robert D. Bowers, the Jew-hating murderer who killed worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, and against whom the Biden Justice Department decided to proceed with death penalty charges in 2023.

The Democrats’ death penalty cynicism aside, this is a corrupt invocation of the pardon power — I should say, yet another corrupt invocation — by Biden.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-was-so-different-this-time-about-trumps-election/

In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Donald Trump was polling between 35 and 40 percent.

He would average only about 41% approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure.

No one knows what lies ahead over the next four years. But for now, Trump already polls well over 50% approval.

His inauguration in a few weeks will likely not resemble Trump’s 2016 ceremony.

In the 2016-7 transition, Democratic-affiliated interests ran commercials urging electors to become “faithless,” and thus illegally to reject their states’ popular votes and instead elect the loser, Hillary Clinton.

Massive demonstrations met Trump on Inauguration Day.

In less than four months after assuming the presidency, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the hoax of Russian collusion.

That wasted 22-month, $40 million investigation found no collusion, but did derail the first two Trump years.

What followed the collusion ruse was a consistent effort to undermine the Trump presidency — two subsequent impeachments, the laptop “disinformation” hoax, the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown, and news suppression of any mention of the Chinese lab origin of the virus or questioning the closing of schools.

In the Trump administration’s last summer of 2020, 120 days of riot, arson, looting, assault, and murder followed, with the denouement of the January 6 turmoil.

In contrast, the 2024-5 Trump transition has all but assumed the presidency. Over 100 foreign leaders have elbowed each other to be invited to Mar-a-Lago or to phone in their congratulations to the newly elected Trump.

Remember that in 2016 the Left screamed “Logan Act” if a Trump transition appointee even talked with foreign officials.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/24/old-saint-knick-washington-irvings-antidote-to-woke/

According to Walter Russell Mead’s recent analysis, “One way to read Trump’s second victory in three elections is that the movement for a post-American America with a successor ideology and post-Judeo Christian cultural and ethical foundation aimed at fundamentally changing American society has reached its sell-by date.”

Do not hold your breath.

The demise of “Woke” has been greatly exaggerated. The unfortunate truth is that the Woke Era, under which the great mass of Americans has been harassed since the reelection of Barack Obama, is merely the latest spasm of the puritanism that has periodically plagued the body politic since the English Civil War. The particular issues change, but the insufferable moralization and coercive war on preexisting cultural traditions and symbols are always recognizable.

Fortunately, Wokeness does appear to be receding at the moment, the antidote having been provided by a New Yorker who “looked at things poetically rather than politically” and “revered the past and the stability that a sense of the past provides.” No, I am not referring to Donald Trump, but another Knickerbocker — Washington Irving.

Born in 1783, the year of victory over the British, Irving’s life would span the entire antebellum period of American history. Fittingly named after the father of his country, Irving would go on to establish himself as the Father of American Literature. He believed that America’s puritanical impulses stunted healthy cultural development, a belief developed in rebellion against a puritanical upbringing under Irving’s strict Presbyterian father.

“I have no relish for Puritans either in religion or politics, who are pushing for principles to an extreme, and overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career,” wrote Irving. Instead, Irving had faith in tradition, where “population, manners, and customs remained fixed.” And nowhere is Irving’s impact on American traditions greater than in the way we celebrate Christmas.