Tuesday, July 23, 2024

MY ESSAY. OLD TUCKER CLIP. MORE.

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BY Matt Vespa

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ESSAY B Y DICK BERKOWITZ

WE ARE NOW ENTERING WHAT COULD BECOME THE WORST PERIOD 

IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE THE 2 WW'S AND THE CIVIL WAR.  WE 

HAVE NO FUNCTIONING PRESIDENT FOR THE NEXT 6 MONTHS.  

CHINA, RUSSIA AND IRAN COULD CHOOSE TO BECOME BECOME 

MORE AGGRESSIVE, LEADNG TO ANOTHER WW.


KAMALA AND/OR OBAMA ARE THE ONES MOSTLIKELY WHO WILL BE 

PULLING THE STRINGS.


THE OTHER SCENARIO IS MORE BENIGN AND WE ESCAPE ANOTHER 

WAR. HOWEVER, KAMALA IS OUT CAMPAIGNING AND THE 

DEMOCRATS ARE BUSILY WORKING TO PRE-STEAL THE ELECTION BY 

REGISTERING ILLEGALS.  


AMERICA IS IN A PICKLE AND THE ELITIST ARE WILLING TO GO TO THE

 BOTTOM OF THE BARREL TO REMAIN IN POWER  AFTER OVER 50 

YEARS OF TRANSFORMING AMERICA INTO A NEO-SOCIALIST/

COMMUNIST NATION THAT IS NO LONGER RECOGNIZABLE TO WHAT 

OUR FOREFATHERS CREATED AND/OR INTENDED.


WOE IS AMERICA, THE '"DEPLORABLES" AND.FRANKLY,THE ENTIRE 

WORLD IS WITHOUT A STABLE POLITICAL RUDDER.


AMERICAN RADICALS HAVE WEAPONIZED POLITICS, MADE SURE 

INTIMIDATION IS WORKING AND STILLING VOICES AND COMMENTARY

THAT OFFENDS WHILE INTRODUCING SOCIAL NONSENSE, SLOGANS 

AND METHODS THAT ARE CHIPPING AWAY AT OUR FREEDOMS AND 

OUR REPUBLIC.


YOU MIGHT FIND TRUMP OFFENSIVE BUT HE AND VANCE ARE YOUR 

ALTERNATIVE. DUCK IF YOU WILL BUT YOU HAVE AN OBLIGATION 

TO SAVE AMERICA AND KAMALA, WITH OBAMA PULLING THE STRINGS,

 IS AN ANATHEMA OF A CHOICE. 

BALL IN YOUR COURT OR IS I? ITCOULD BE IN THE HANDS OF BLACK AMERICANS WHO HAVE A CHANCE TO TURN AMERICA INTO A BLACK AFRICAN  BASED  ATION BECAUSE OF ELECTORAL VOTE REQUIREMENTS AND PRE-ELECTION VOTE FRAUD EFFORTS.

AND:
https://x.com/alexstein69420/status/1815459445159457277





AND AGAIN:
https://x.com/LizzySavetsky/status/1815422449422381542 



FINALLY: 


YES, THAT CAN BE  AND PROBABLY IS SO.


 https://www.thefp.com/
https://search.app/mbZ9X1Ki8nwck9Fu7

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Bari Weiss: The Era of the Noble Lie

Why do we have a crisis of trust? Because the experts keep lying. Joe Biden is only the latest example.

BY BARI WEISS




 

Why do we have a crisis of trust? Because the experts keep lying. Joe Biden is only the latest example. Bari Weiss for the Free Press. 


Once the reality of Biden’s deteriorating condition became plain on that CNN debate stage, the question was only who was going to admit what they knew and when. (Kent Nishimura via Getty Images)

The reason there is no Democratic presidential nominee right now—27 days before the party’s convention in Chicago begins—is because of a lie. The reason the Democrats are going to scramble to whip a majority of their 3,936 delegates into line behind Vice President Kamala Harris—the reason the most basic elements of the Democratic (and democratic) process are being so dramatically challenged—is because of the lie that everyone around Joe Biden told themselves and then told the public.


By now, there is no denying that that’s exactly what happened.


Once the reality of Biden’s deteriorating condition became plain on that CNN debate stage, the question was only who was going to admit what they knew and when. 


To choose just one example: George Clooney, who had been onstage with Biden at a fundraiser on June 15, wrote in The New York Times on July 10 about what he had actually seen when he was hauling in checks for Biden’s second term. “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote, referring to the disastrous June 27 CNN debate that led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.


It’s not just that they knew about Biden’s condition and lied about it. They knew they were lying and believed they could dupe their supporters at least through November 5, 2024. In other words: double talk. One message in public. A different message in private. Until it became impossible to sustain.


I remember my own little encounter with this strange phenomenon last summer at a dinner in New York with some muckety-mucks. The conversation inevitably turned to the presidential election. The dinner guests went around the table, expressing their preference for the only candidate acceptable to support: Joe Biden.


When my turn came, I suggested that I thought Biden was dangerous not because he was a bad man but because he was not fully there anymore—a point I thought was entirely obvious to anyone who had been paying attention and therefore uncontroversial. How wrong I was. Those sitting around the table were aghast. But the man next to me—a major Democratic donor—admitted privately to me that Biden, who he had known for years, could no longer reliably remember his name. 


Why did these Democrats lie? Or at least: why did they avoid voluntarily telling the truth? 


As political scientist Timur Kuran recently explained in these pages, until the debate, “a majority of Democrats were afraid to tell a basic truth in public—to say openly what they know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health—for fear of emboldening Donald Trump or taking a position that may seem adverse to their party. . . . Why did they do this? Fear. Fear, in this case, of being punished by their fellow Democrats.”


A Democratic insider put it more bluntly to me over the weekend when I asked him what had taken so long: “Proximity to power, privilege, prestige. That’s the currency. And people fiercely protect their access. They put self-preservation over principle.”


The more generous read for why Democratic elites chose this path goes like this: Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, and Joe Biden is the only Democrat who has beaten him. If we want to defeat Trump again—and save democracy—let’s stick to the winning horse. 


You can understand how the logic got them there. Americans, they told themselves, are ill-informed and impulsive and taken by celebrity and fame and don’t understand the implications of their preferences and choices. Better to put the thumb on the scale—just the lightest of touches—and make sure we get the right outcome. A few white lies for the sake of the Republic seems a small price to pay.


That condescending logic is by now very familiar to Americans.


It’s the same thinking that during the pandemic led public health experts to demand the closure of communal spaces, schools, and vast swathes of our economy, and to refrain from visiting grandma, to “stop the spread.” But in no time, these experts published an “open letter,” supporting nationwide protests. As one Politico headline suggested at the time: “Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance.”


It’s the same logic that drove many to smear anyone who uttered the words “lab leak” as a conspiracy theorist. Better to cut off that line of inquiry—that pursuit of truth—than to risk raising questions about where and how the virus started, questions that could be embarrassing to U.S. public health officials.


The same logic—of only telling the public what the elites think they ought to know—led to the unforgettable CNN chyron that summarized the absurd summer of 2020: a reporter standing in front of burning Kenosha, Wisconsin, while beneath him flashed the words: “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests.”



(CNN)

Imagine if we had been told: kids are safely going to school across Europe, and our kids should, too. And it turns out there’s no scientific basis for standing six feet apart, so we can drop that, as well.


Imagine if we had been told: it’s very possible this disease came from a lab. We don’t yet know. Getting to the bottom of what happened is a priority for the U.S. government to make sure it never happens again. 


Imagine if we had been told: many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations descended into violence and particularly hurt small, uninsured businesses that bore the brunt of the damage. Acknowledging that does not take away from the fact that many protests actually were peaceful.



We’ve written thousands of words in these pages about the crisis of trust we are facing—a crisis gripping our most important institutions, from the legacy press, to our public health officials, to our universities and our government. What’s become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately described as a crisis of trustworthiness. 


In other words, it’s not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists. It’s that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust. And too many of the ideas dismissed as the province of nuts have turned out to contain more than a kernel of truth.


How do our institutions and experts—who do tend to possess above-average knowledge of important subjects—come back from this?


Stop spinning, stop lying, and stop the condescension. 


Apologies are also in order. The people who have misled us with noble lies and obfuscation need to own up to the damage they’ve caused. 


Time to accept the new normal: in the age of X, there is no gatekeeper or censor powerful enough to veil what we can see with our own eyes. You can’t hide reality when everything is seeable. 


Now we are faced with the fact that the very same people who last month insisted that Biden was at the top of his game have now shoved him into some Delaware basement and are sporting “Harris ’24” sweatshirts. How are we supposed to believe anything they say? 


Imagine if our experts and pundits and politicians spoke to the American people as if they had an iota of intelligence. Imagine if they treated us like adults, capable of handling uncomfortable, nuanced information. Imagine if they told the truth.

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 Looking Past Netanyahu’s US Visit



By Sherwin Pomerantz




Earlier today Prime Minister Netanyahu left for Washington with a group of relatives of those still being held in Gaza as well as Noa Argamani, who was rescued by the IDF in a daring operation that returned two other hostages to Israel at the same time.  He is scheduled to address a joint session of congress on Wednesday



On the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport, he said: “I will seek to anchor the bipartisan support that is so important for Israel. And I will tell my friends on both sides of the aisle that regardless of who the American people choose as their next president, Israel remains America’s indispensable and strong ally in the Middle East.”  Does he need to go to Washington for this purpose?  Don’t they already know that?



In an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-803922) on May 28th I argued that I thought it was a mistake for him to go to Washington and I have not changed my mind. The US right now is in an incredibly polarized place, whose situation is made even more tenuous by the decision of President Biden to withdraw from the presidential race just 100 days before the election.  (Personally, I believe he did the right thing both for him and the country and applaud him for it.) The Prime Minister will speak to a joint session where any number of seats will be vacant because a significant number of legislators will use their “protest power” to show their displeasure with Israel over how we are handling the war.  Do we need that?



And, of course, there will no doubt be hundreds if not thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators in the streets in Washington voicing their displeasure with Israel and its Prime Minister.   We don’t need that either. 



But the good news is that surveys show that in spite of all of this, 85% of the US public is behind Israel in its fight with Hamas and continues its vocal support for our efforts here.  Given that, the Prime Minister does not need to tell the US Congress “…that regardless of who the American people choose as their next president, Israel remains America’s indispensable and strong ally in the Middle East.”  They already know that and have shown their incredible support of our efforts here since October 7th for which we need to be very grateful.



It would have been better for him to have stayed home and helped us get to a deal to release the remaining hostages and not butt into the domestic affairs of the US at a time of such upheaval there.



While the Prime Minister was on the tarmac talking about his upcoming trip, a Canadian citizen who had entered Israel this week legally, rented a car, bought a knife, and was on his way to Kibbutz Netiv Ha’asara near the border with Gaza to kill Jews.  Fortunately, as he exited the vehicle with the knife in his hand announcing his intention to punish Jews for what we are doing in Gaza, the Rapid Response Team of the kibbutz saw this and opened fire, killing the perpetrator before he could carry out his rampage.  This opened  a new chapter in terrorism, with someone traveling to Israel from the west for the specific purpose of killing Jews.



Of course, one day the insanity that has enveloped Israel since the attack on October 7th will end and we will then need to face the future and decide what kind of a country we want so that we will never again face the type of challenge that is upon us at the moment.



To their credit, The Times of Israel put forth a podcast late last week with economist, and one of our resident geniuses, Dr. Eugene Kandel, who painted a vision of a new Israel and what we need to do to get us there successfully.  Eugene is a personal favorite of mine ever since I met him over 20 years ago and brings a fresh approach to dealing with the challenges that will face us once this war is over.  You can view the podcast here……


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FROM NEW YORK SUN: 


KAMALA SEEKS MORE LEGAL TRAUMA?


Kamala Harris, Now Presumptive Nominee, Likens Trump to Predators, Fraudsters at First Campaign Event.

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