RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/06/who_wants_to_blow_up_our_c

The most profound attacks on Donald Trump are that his presidency is illegitimate and that he wants to destroy our constitutional structure. The Democrats have leveled those accusations for four years, accompanied by charges he is a wannabe dictator, elected thanks to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin.

These frenzied charges, we now know, were invented and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then funneled to the U.S. government through the FBI, Department of Justice, and State Department. Meanwhile, the CIA and then the FBI were busy spying on the Trump campaign (and, later, in the FBI’s case, on the Trump presidency), trying to find “collusion” with Russia. Their relentless effort led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose partisan team knew almost immediately there was no proof of these damning allegations. They should have told the public immediately.

Instead, they spent the next two years trying — and failing — to catch President Trump on a “process” crime of obstructing justice, without any underlying crime to investigate. They were pursuing a person, not a crime, violating our most basic idea of legitimate law enforcement. Trump actually cooperated fully with the collusion investigation, providing millions of otherwise-privileged documents, but he didn’t bite on a personal interview designed to catch him in a purported false statement. (His promise to cooperate fully with Mueller’s collusion investigation was based on the special counsel’s explicit promise to complete the investigation quickly. Mueller’s team reneged on that assurance after they received all the White House documents and testimony they sought.)

Why bother trying to lure the president into a false-statement trap if you can’t indict him? Simple: because Mueller’s team, effectively led by his zealous deputy, Andrew Weissmann, wanted to help House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so she could impeach the president.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16600/president-health-confidentiality

But there is a countervailing right which few in the media have written about. All Americans have the right to medical confidentiality. This right is assured by federal law, state law, medical ethics and the long traditions of the medical profession. What a patient tells his doctor, or what the doctor observes from the patient, are confidential, subject only to a few limited exceptions.

Among these exceptions is the obligation of doctors to report threats to other people, such as a highly contagious disease. It also includes the obligations of doctors and other professionals to report when they learn of abuse of or by the patient. There is no explicit exception for high ranking public officials, including the president.

All current White Houses leak like sieves. Staff members develop quid pro quo relationships with the media: in exchange for leaking information, the media promises to treat them well. That is the reality of contemporary journalism.

Perhaps the law should be changed and government doctors should have their first obligation to the public. But such a change would come with a high cost: presidents would not disclose to these government doctors information that they did not want to be made public. That might have a negative impact on their medical treatment.

The pubic has a right to know the details of the president’s medical situation. But the president has the right to keep his medical information confidential. There is a conflict between these rights, even when they involve the president of the United States, who is a candidate for reelection. The reason the public has the right to know about the president’s medical history is self-evident. He is the most powerful person in the world and he is seeking a second term. Voters are entitled to know the truth about his medical condition. No one would dispute that.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16601/haspel-britain-trump-coup

In the next paragraph, [Washington Post reporter Scott] Shane notes breathlessly: “… Trump has accused the United Kingdom of conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign.”

President Trump certainly has made that claim, and one believes for very good reasons that seem to compound weekly.

Having the British run an aggressive intelligence collection operation against Team Trump targets, bypassing US legal prohibitions, and then laundering the intelligence “take” back to US officials via the UK-US liaison relationship is precisely something an “honorary UK desk officer” might be good and adept at accomplishing. Certainly, these subjects and questions deserve closer examination, without the phony prophylactic defense of grave warnings about “sources and methods.”

CIA Director Gina Haspel can answer all of those questions, and she does not even have to touch upon classified information to do so. The American public is due her answers.

We have raised and discussed serious matters of fact and questions about the role of CIA Director Gina Haspel in the Anti-Trump conspiracy. It appears Haspel (while serving as London Chief of Station from 2014 to early 2017) was an active, knowledgeable party to the efforts to target candidate Trump with an FBI-instigated foreign counterintelligence operation. That seditious conspiracy carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a soft coup against President Donald J. Trump.

Looking back on news reporting concerning Haspel, we turn (with caution) to a Washington Post article from July 2019 by Scott Shane, titled: “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump”. We are supposed to believe that Haspel and her office did not cooperate with the reporter for the article. Shane disclaims Haspel involvement by writing:

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-coronavirus-diagnosis-models-positive-masculinity

The media and Democratic establishments are in a frenzy of Schadenfreude over President Trump’s Covid diagnosis. Trump’s contracting the disease, they argue, discredits any coronavirus policy short of lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, outdoors as well as in. Trump is now “exhibit No. 1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told the New York Times.

By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden’s basement-bunker response has been vindicated, such commentators allege. Biden drove home his status as the country’s premiere symbol of safetyism on Friday by giving a masked and muffled speech in the vast outdoors of Grand Rapids. No one was within yards of him; Biden could not possibly have become infected or infected anyone else, since transmission in well-ventilated outdoor spaces is virtually nonexistent. Yet such displays of coronavirus virtue-signaling will now multiply exponentially, especially from masked television reporters speaking en plein air to a camera yards away.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claims that Trump’s infection proves that the country has been lax in its coronavirus response. “It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves,” he wrote on Saturday. “We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s response to the coronavirus, but we can vow not to continue making them.”

“Be safer?” The United States has wiped out decades of hard-won prosperity by following the spirit-crushing injunction to “stay safe.” The lockdowns have destroyed the dreams of thousands of entrepreneurs and have put millions out of work, leaving cities like New York moribund ghost towns. The school closures are consigning millions of children worldwide to stunted lives due to delayed, if not now permanently deferred, acquisition of reading, writing, and socialization skills. Children are being inculcated into a culture of fear.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/05/massive-trump-caravans-take-over-where-the-boat-parades-left-off/

As boat season winds down with fewer pro-Trump boat parades scheduled, patriotic Americans throughout the nation are increasingly participating in car and truck caravans to show their support for President Donald Trump.

Now, more than ever, Republican voters are hitting the streets to support the president in the wake of his recent coronavirus diagnosis.

A caravan of the president’s supporters circled Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, on Sunday, as a large crowd stood vigil outside the hospital.Trump briefly left the hospital Sunday evening to wave to the supporters gathered outside, to the delight of the supporters and great distress of the corporate media.Hundreds of flag-waving Trump supporters also lined up outside Trump Tower in New York City early Sunday, to show their love for the president.These pro-Trump caravans have been going on for months, but have amped up in recent weeks. Unfortunately, as the pro-Trump events have increased, so have violent, left-wing counter-demonstrations, especially in Democrat strongholds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/ditch-commission-presidential-debates-bruce-thornton/

The first presidential debate, a raucous display of decidedly “unpresidential” behavior, called forth the usual bromides and analyses. Hands were wrung over the threat to our “democracy” and the loss of “civility,” complaints that were missing when in 2014 Joe Biden bullied Paul Ryan. Many pundits on both sides confessed their depression over the spectacle. As usual, most voters didn’t have their minds changed by this glorified reality-television show.

Maybe it is time to just ditch the CPD sponsored debates.

Televised presidential debates are an artefact of the television age. As a creation of an entertainment medium, the debates have never been about informed questions, answers, and rebuttals over policies or governing philosophies. They are political ads and gotcha tournaments, with the audience keeping score over who makes a gaffe, misspeaks, blatantly lies, avoids the question, or personally attacks his opponent. Like professional wrestling, each contestant has his or her fan base whose minds will not be changed, and whose estimation of points scored will be mostly subjective.

And don’t forget, superficial appearances are very important too. Remember poor Dick Nixon, whose five o’clock shadow, translucent skin, and lack of cosmetic skills may have lost him the presidential debate in 1960? I recall a poll (later challenged) that found radio listeners thought Nixon won, but television viewers thought JFK did. Even if the poll was flawed, there’s no question that appearance counts. Remember Hillary complaining about Trump “looming” over her during their debate? And of course, good looks and physical presence, as filtered through a television camera, add another subjective and irrelevant element to the spectacle.

More revealing is the fact that the “moderators,” as the hosts of these shows are called, nearly always come from television news shows. That is, from the ranks of professional readers of other people’s words. I can’t figure out how a job based on such an ability, a pleasing voice and demeanor, and the knack for not looking like an oaf on television, equips anybody to be a critical analyst of the policy prescriptions of professional politicians.