Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Just watch soon what the Left has birthed...

Progressive Regression By Victor Davis Hanson| July 30th, 2018
https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/progressive-regression/
Donald Trump has certainly changed the rules of presidential behavior, through his nonstop campaign rallies, tweets, and press conferences. What his critics call lowering the bar of presidential decorum by unfettered and often crude invective, Trump dubs the “new presidential.”
His style has become a sort of “don’t-tread-on-me” combativeness. In truth, Trump at home and abroad is mostly retaliatory. His theory seems to be that no slight should go unanswered. When Trump retorts in kind or trumps the original attack, he believes he adds yet another brick to his wall of deterrence—and exposes the sometimes dormant and disguised irrational hatred of the Left.
But what the Left loses in its slugfests with Trump are some once-supposed cherished leftist principles, justified by the short-term advantage of nullifying the Trump agenda.
Indeed, it is eerie that almost all the canons of progressive orthodoxy no longer apply. And they will no longer be taken seriously after Trump is long gone. Certainly, those lost principles will be impossible to reassert when Democrats return to power and seek sanctuary in the very ideas they have now so utterly trashed.
Liberals, who now warn of Trump’s “war on the press” long ago excused Eric Holder’s monitoring of the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen
And they had no problem with John Brennan lying under oath when he claimed the Obama CIA had not monitored the computers of Senate staffers (he would lie brazenly again under oath about drone collateral damage and his role in seeding the Steele dossier).
Likewise, they snoozed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress in his denial of government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Both were seen at the time to be useful liars. Their partisanship and exemption from any consequences for past lying under oath led to lucrative cable news gigs—proof, as it were, of their innate Trump hatred. Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.
So Much for Civil Liberties
When Trump appeared on the national scene, an all-out assault on civil liberties followed, in a manner that is now irrevocable. The Left destroyed for good the idea that progressives are the protectors of constitutional freedoms.
If fear of Trump, some connected with the National Security Council under Obama helped to surveil American citizens, unmasked them, and leaked their names to the press. The press, hand-in-glove, complied in spreading such unsubstantiated dirt.
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice flat out lied in her denial about her involvement in unmasking. The Obama FBI and Justice Department officials deliberately misled FISA courts, on the premise that spying on American citizens even with flimsy or fabricated evidence was OK—if it at least neutered the Trump candidacy and presidency. Had they just told justices something like, “We present, as justification for these warrants of surveillance, opposition research compiled on candidate Donald Trump, and paid for by Hillary Clinton during the present campaign,” they likely would never have been able to spy on American citizens.
No one again will have much confidence either in the FISA courts or any rationale for spying on any American citizen. They will logically assume FISA requests are political efforts to spread dirt on the opposition—in the fashion that we now have no idea, in the era after Lois Lerner, what prompts an IRS letter in our mail. The legacy of the Obama Administration is that if one is not progressive and loud in the public sphere, he may well be monitored, audited, or investigated.
Reputations Stained Beyond Repair
The FBI may not recover its reputation. Certainly, the brand of its Washington office is shredded. Watching new Director Christopher Wray stumble about to reassure us about his reforms inspires about as much credulity as a pre-war French general touting the invincibility provided by the Maginot Line.
The Left more or less has canonized a parade of disreputable FBI officials. Peter Strzok violated almost every canon of professional conduct, in his personal comportment, in his blatant prevarication about his own text messages, and in his dogged pride in his conflicts of interest in using his authority to pursue a political agenda. His superior Andrew McCabe, according to the inspector general, likewise lied on several occasions.
So did former Director James Comey when he denied under oath the prominent role of the Steele dossier in FISA warrant applications. Leaking a classified government memo with the expressed intent of prompting a special counsel investigation is not what FBI directors do. Nor do they deliberately set up a president by not informing him that base accusations against him are the result of opposition campaign hit pieces, subsidized in part by the FBI.
FBI directors do not politicize investigations, in the manner Comey warped his conduct toward Hillary Clinton on the rationale she would be elected. Comey alone has pretty much destroyed any idea that in the near future the FBI Washington office can again be trusted to be disinterested.
Add in the conduct of Lisa Page and various other FBI officials—James Baker especially—who have either resigned or been reassigned. FBI apologists on the Left are excusing the very weaponizing behavior that they used to rant about in the days of J. Edgar Hoover—who, we think at least, never sought to alter the outcome of a U.S. election.
The Left is fine with the idea that the FBI, with a wink and nod from the CIA, can insert spies into an ongoing presidential campaign, on the rationale that embarrassing information might be collated, leaked, and thus useful to “insure” that a supposedly dangerous man would not be president. Should a right-wing FBI do the same with a candidate Bernie Sanders, reminding us that Sanders went to Moscow on his honeymoon and therefore was under suspicion, what would the Left say?
Any notions of conflict of interest are gone. The Obama Justice Department, FBI, and CIA destroyed that concept entirely. When Loretta Lynch met Bill Clinton on the tarmac in the course of investigations about his wife’s likely illegal behavior or the Justice Department and FBI gave immunity to Clinton’s top aides after making false statements, all credibility was shot.
Justice Department official Bruce Ohr communicated with a political campaign’s opposition research team that had hired his own wife. The deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe oversaw the Hillary Clinton email investigation shortly after his wife had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Clinton-related political action committees. Rod Rosenstein was knee-deep in the Uranium One investigation, the Clinton email investigation, the FISA warrant applications, and the Trump-collusion mythologies. He should have been recused long ago. If Rosenstein was not recused, there is now no such thing as an idea of recusal at all.
Liberals do not care much whether Bill Clinton received a $500,000 honorarium in Moscow or that Russian interests gave millions to the Clinton foundation shortly before Hillary Clinton urged the government to approve the sale to them of 20 percent of U.S. uranium.
If there is someday a special counsel appointed to monitor the possible illegality of the Obama FBI, Justice Department, CIA and NSC, and many of its legal team proves to be Trump donors, and a few of them are found out to be veteran counsels for Trump-related defendants, or two members are caught texting their hatred for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and bragging how they had schemed to stop such a 16-year envisioned Obama-Clinton continuum, apparently no one is going to complain of any “bias” or conflict of interests.
More Norms AnnihilatedIs there still any notion of a confidential lawyer-client special relationship or disdain for stealthily taping private conversations of a client? Apparently not. Former Clintonite Lanny Davis knows the Left saw nothing wrong when the FBI seized legal records from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen or that lawyer Cohen taped the phone calls of his own unknowing client Trump. Instead, the Left’s shrug is that if Trump was stupid enough to hire such a creepy rake, then he deserves what he gets—legal precedent and civil liberties be damned.
It used to be a progressive truism that “words matter”—as in the warning not to give voice to violent things because they may happen just because you said them. Actually, words today no longer matter at all. If they did, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, Robert De Niro, or Peter Fonda would all be socially ostracized for their threats of bodily violence to the president of the United States or his family. God forbid that such eliminationism rhetoric will spill over to the next Democratic presidency. But if it should, the Left has now lost all moral authority to condemn it.
By the same token, there is no longer any accepted limitation on presidential hate speech. No one will have a problem with calling any president a Nazi, the new Hitler, an abject traitor, treasonous, or his conduct tantamount to the mass death of Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or the Holocaust. Those who compare Trump to the worst monsters of history regularly appear on cable news and enjoy vast Twitter and social media audiences. I fear theirs will be the new standard: For every Trump Hitler who killed 6 million, we will one day hear of a new anti-Trump Stalin who killed 20 million. All one now needs to say is “President X or President Y is a threat to the United States, and so deserves what he gets.”
Security Clearances-as-First Amendment Right
We have also established a new code of behavior for ex-security and intelligence officers.
From now on, they will really never leave office. Instead, their opposition to the new administration begins the moment they become private citizens—while drawing on and sometimes monetizing their vestigial security clearances to enhance their invective against the sitting president.
Imagine the following: that as soon as Trump leaves office, a paid Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo or Dan Coates begins trashing nightly newly inaugurated President Elizabeth Warren as despicable, treasonous, or the worst something in the history of America—while still privy to some of top-secret communications of her administration. And they will wink and nod at their clearances as proof of their seriousness and of direct conduits to “sources tell me” gossip. To question why they would do so or expect security clearances at all will earn cries from Republicans of “enemies list!”
There is no longer any sense of public and private first families. If Barron Trump can be smeared and ridiculed in print and cartoons, if the president can be accused of incest with his daughter by mainstream reporters, if the first lady can be demonized as everything from an illegal alien to a former call girl, no first family is off limits. The next time a Democratic president takes office, any call for “restraint” or “have you no decency” to recreate the bubble that once protected the Obama family would be laughed at—and understandably so.
Endless Unchecked and Unaccountable Investigations
Special counsels will have no restraints. They will be sacrosanct Roman tribunes about whom any criticism will be tantamount to unpatriotic behavior. They can ignore their original mandate and wander wherever they wish on the principle that they have found their criminal and need only find the crimes by which to destroy him.
The special counsel will stock his team with partisans who hate the object of his investigation, with law firm cronies who share his views. If he fires one or two of them, he will hide the reasons for their departures and stagger their severance to avoid the appearance that they were connected—in the style of belatedly and separately disclosing the career ends of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
From now on, the accusation that a president is a traitor, a colluder, a lackey, a pimp, a whatever of the Russians, or a dupe of the Chinese, or of who knows what else, will be an accepted way to help stall an opposition administration, to smear it as unpatriotic, to use any low means necessary to achieve a supposed high end of destroying it.
Just watch soon what the Left has birthed. Thucydides, writing more than 2,400 years ago about the civil strife on the island of Corcyra, observed that “men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.” They are not going to like the results when in their “day of danger” they cry foul and no one listens.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Of Social Justice and Christianity

Pastor Bill Wilson
NOTE: When writing about God and Jesus, The Daily Jot means YHVH as God and Yeshua Ha Mashiach as Jesus--the actual original names and the true nature and character of them.
Friday, July 27, 2018

In Acts 5, Peter and the apostles were forbidden by the High Priest of the Sadducees to preach the gospel in the streets and the temple. They were thrown in prison and an angel of the Lord freed them. They were again brought before the priest, who said, "Did we not straightly command you that ye should not teach in this name?...Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." In essence, this is the Christian commission to obey God rather than humanism. God's laws are supreme and just, man's laws are flawed, sometimes just, sometimes unjust. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "An unjust law is no law at all."

The Communist Manifesto says, "...Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." From a humanistic point of view--a communist or socialist believes that a just law is unjust unless it follows the Manifesto. And the manifesto denies Christianity. What we see today, therefore, is a dichotomy regarding social justice. One form is Biblical social justice rooted in God's law as fulfilled by Jesus Christ and His righteousness. And another form, political social justice, rooted in humanist principles but disguised as Christian by those claiming to be men of God supporting it.

Political social justice as defined by man in contemporary society is against the word of God. And because we are a nation whose laws are derived from the Laws of God wrapped in the garment of Liberty, we have not only a say in them, but a responsibility to the God we serve to uphold the laws of God over the laws of man. Law is only just if it is in harmony with God's law...And since we are justified by faith, taking on the righteousness of Christ, justice emanates from "we" as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation hungering and thirsting for righteousness; that in this act we shall be filled and salvation of souls be at hand.

Christians, as the ones who know the truth, are responsible to act on it through the righteousness of Christ. We must put aside traditions of men and hyper-Biblical doctrines, and act on the Word. The Beatitudes, found in Christ's Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, is a call to action by Jesus Christ. If we are hungering and thirsting for righteousness we shall be filled--our faith shall find action as a just people. And we shall, as James 1:25 says, "...look into the perfect law of liberty, and continue therein..., being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." Let us hunger and seek after righteousness by not being deceived, and by being hearers and doers of the word as we continue in the perfect law of liberty. This is the true social justice of Christianity--not the false imitation of humanist social justice. Have a Blessed and Powerful Day!
Bill Wilson www.dailyjot.com

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

"No Dogs In Heaven"

An old man and his dog were walking down a hot, dusty road lined with a beautiful white fence on both sides. As they walked along, the old man and his dog became very thirsty and tired.

Soon, they came to a gate in the fence where, on the other side, they saw a nice grassy, wooded area surrounding a cool clear pool of fresh water. "Just where a thirsty 'huntin' dog and a man would like to rest!" thought the old man. But there was a sign over the gate that read "No Dogs" so they walked on.

Further on, they came upon a man in flowing white robes standing just inside a strong iron gate across a path that led to a beautiful, sunny meadow with a cool clear stream running through it.

"'Scuse me Sir," said the old man, "My dog and I have been on this road all day. Mind if we come in and sit in the shade for awhile?" "Of course!" The man said. "Come on in and rest. You look thirsty and tired." The old man said, "We sure are!" and started through the gate with his dog.

The gatekeeper stopped him. "Sorry, you can come in but your dog can't come with you. "You see, this is Heaven, and dogs aren't allowed here. He has to stay out here on the road." "What kind of Heaven won't allow dogs?" said the old man. "Well, if he can't come in, then I'll stay out here on the road with him. He's been my faithful companion all his life and I won't desert him now."

"Suit yourself," said the gatekeeper, "but I have to warn you, the Devil's on this road and he'll try to sweet talk you into his place. He'll promise you anything, but dogs can't go there either. If you won't leave that dog on the road, you'll spend all Eternity on the road with him. Better if you stay here."

"Well, I'm stayin' with my dog," replied the man and he and the dog walked on. Gradually, the fence became more and more faded and rundown until they finally reached a spot where the boards fell away completely leaving a gap. Another man dressed in old, ragged clothes sat just inside the broken fence under a shady tree.

"'Scuse me Sir," said the old man, "My dog and I have been on this road all day. Mind if we come in and sit in the shade for awhile?" "Of course!" The man said. "Come on in and rest. There's some cold water here under the tree. Make yourself comfortable."

The old man paused, "but what about my dog? Can he can come in, too? The man up the road said dogs weren't allowed here, and they had to stay on the road." The other man answered, "Well, you look pretty tired and thirsty. Would you come in here and rest if you had to leave that dog?"

"No sir!" the old man replied, "A glass of cold water and some shade would be mighty fine right about now but I won't come in if my buddy here can't come too. I didn't go to Heaven because my dog couldn't come with me, so I sure as how ain't about to go to Hell without him neither."

The man smiled and said, "Welcome to Heaven, and bring your dog!" The old man exclaimed, "You mean this is Heaven? And my dog can come with me? Then why did that fellow down the road say they weren't allowed in Heaven?" The man replied, "That was the Devil and he gets all the souls who are willing to give up a life-long companion for small comfort because they think it will make their lives a little easier."

The man continued, "They soon find out their mistake, but, then it's too late. The dogs come here, the fickle people stay there. God wouldn't allow dogs to be banned from Heaven. After all, He created them to be man's companions in life, why would he separate them in death?"

- Story is based on an episode of The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling

www.cbs.com/shows/the_twilight_zone/video/659911538/the-twilight-zone-the-hunt/

Thursday, July 19, 2018

There is as much evidence against Assad as there was against the Nazis

On arrival at Assad’s prisons Khalifa describes a “welcoming party”—a beating—that some detainees do not survive. The cells are overcrowded and squalid. Access to water and basic hygiene needs is severely restricted. Food is minimal and sometimes withheld altogether. When food is served it is dumped on the floor and prisoners whipped as they try to retrieve it; if they stumble they might be beaten to death.

When prisoners are allowed into the yard, they are assaulted and forced to assault each other, sometimes sexually. All of this is accompanied by verbal degradation at all opportunities. The humiliation and dehumanisation is total, reinforcing to prisoners how cheaply the authorities view life and how close death is at all times.
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