VIDEO – FINISH THE STORY – RFK JR
Friday, October 11th, 2024VIDEO
RFK Jr. Finish The Story MAHA Campaign ad
VIDEO
RFK Jr. Finish The Story MAHA Campaign ad
“When you have an agency that has gone rogue and is interfering at the highest level of the country to affect an election; and the directors of those agencies are willing to alter or leak documents that they shouldn’t or lie under oath to federal investigators or lie to a committee by claiming amnesia; and they oversee a bureau that will wipe clean phone records that are under subpoena; or they will not prosecute one person, but they will another; then it’s institutionalized. And you’ve got to get rid of it.”
The FBI should be broken up and its primary functions shifted to other departments of the federal government, argues classicist, political commentator, and military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
He’s the author of “The Dying Citizen” and “The Case for Trump.”
The FBI’s armed raid on Mar-a-Lago is unprecedented, Hanson says, and it’s the latest in a war being waged against the former president, from the Russia collusion hoax to impeachment proceedings against him—twice.
“We’re in a revolutionary cycle where the left has now said, under the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the Republic, that it requires any means necessary to end him. And therefore we’re going to do things that are revolutionary.”
After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
From the European perspective, American leadership of the West has produced excellent results and very few unpleasant surprises since the United States stepped into that role under Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. At that time, the entire future of Western civilization rested essentially upon the shoulders of just two men, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and it was the epochal good fortune of all of us that they were more than equal to their great task. The level of acuity and success of the subsequent administrations, as the competence of government of any nation must, has fluctuated. But the emphasis was on continuity, and the containment policy elaborated in the Truman Administration was generally followed through to the great bloodless victory of the West, as the Soviet Union crumbled and international Communism as we had known it evaporated.
In a 1961 memo to the White House, an agent summarized allegations that Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. took payoffs from applicants to the police force, and helped to hinder the investigation and prosecution of crimes.
The files reveal the results of an intense two-month investigation into Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Maryland politician who served in a long career as a member of Congress and mayor of Baltimore.
John F. Kennedy’s White House ordered the investigation after JFK planned to appoint D’Alesandro to a government post. A routine FBI name check revealed “allegations” against D’Alessandro, according to a Feb. 6, 1961 teletype from “FBI Director.” The director at the time was J. Edgar Hoover.
The “urgent” teletype seemed to signal the goal of ensuring that D’Alesandro would be appointed to a government watchdog board that reviewed defense contracts.
“The White House has requested that we proceed with a special inquiry investigation but that if substantial derogatory information were developed, we should report this and discontinue any further inquiries because substantiation of any of the allegations would eliminate Mr. D’Alesandro,” the FBI director wrote in the teletype that is located on page 19 of the trove.
“Assign immediately,” Hoover wrote, instructing the Baltimore and Washington field offices to “afford continuous attention” to the investigation.
In sometimes illegible and heavily redacted reproductions, the 248-page collection shows that FBI agents were tasked with running down rumors and facts surrounding their man.
“There have been allegations that D’Alesandro has associated with the Baltimore criminal element and [redacted] and the son, Franklin Roosevelt D’Alesandro, had been arrested for rape,” an agent wrote on page 14 of the trove. The allegations may have been rumor, the agent noted.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Donald Trump can count at least one new supporter in this year’s election. “I had a close friend who’d been a business partner of Trump in the ’90s,” the critic and historian Fred Siegel tells me. “Trump ripped off a quarter of a million dollars from him. He told me this when we were discussing the election” four years ago. “Trump just said, ‘So, take me to court.’ I couldn’t vote for him.” Mr. Siegel couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton either, so he “slept through” the 2016 election. Next month he’ll be wide awake—though not woke—and will vote for Mr. Trump.
Joe Biden needn’t worry too much, perhaps. Mr. Siegel, 75, has only twice backed a winning presidential candidate since he reached voting age. But while he’s no bellwether, he does make an energetic case for the incumbent.
Mr. Siegel, a professor emeritus at New York’s Cooper Union and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says he overcame his distaste for Mr. Trump for three reasons. First, foreign policy: “Crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem, and making fools of those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Second, by his “ability to withstand a prolonged coup attempt by the Democrats and the media,” which started with the Steele dossier: “If I’m saying what I find impressive about Trump, it’s that he’s survived. He has an extraordinary amount of arrogance, egotism, and self-confidence.”
Mr. Siegel’s third reason goes to the heart of his own political philosophy. He sees the president as a champion of “bourgeois values,” under threat from the “clerisy,” Mr. Siegel’s word for the dominant elites who “despise” those values. He regards Mr. Biden as a “captive” of this clerisy, and running mate Kamala Harris as the “embodiment of it.”
By Peter Buttigieg
St. Joseph’s High School
South Bend, Indiana
In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation. Each must be addressed thoroughly and energetically. But in order to accomplish the collective goals of our society, we must first address how we deal with issues. We must re-examine the psychological and political climate of American politics. As it stands, our future is at risk due to a troubling tendency towards cynicism among voters and elected officials. The successful resolution of every issue before us depends on the fundamental question of public integrity.
A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush uses the centrist rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” while Pat Buchanan, once considered a mainstream Republican, has been driven off the ideological edge of the G.O.P. Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run “test platforms” through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on major issue. This disturbing trend reveals cynicism, a double-sided problem, which is perhaps, the greatest threat to the continued success of the American political system.
Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power. Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world. Such an atmosphere inevitably distances our society from its leadership and is thus a fundamental threat to the principles of democracy. It also calls into question what motivates a run for office – in many cases, apparently, only the desire to occupy it. Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
My Thanksgiving to America
December 2, 2019Over the Thanksgiving period, I pondered a lot on my debt to America. The first thing I owe this great country is probably my very existence. When growing up in 1960s New Zealand, it was accepted wisdom that we owed our freedom and our very lives to the “Yanks.”
In 1942, tens of thousands of young Kiwi and Aussie men were in North Africa fighting the Nazis and the Italian Fascist armies. The Japanese Imperial Army was marching relentlessly through the South Pacific and South East Asia. The Philippines fell; Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, all were invaded in a matter of months, capturing thousands of British, Dutch, and colonial troops in the process.
The Japanese air force bombed Darwin in Northern Australia. There were reports of Japanese submarines in New Zealand harbors. In 1942, 22 New Zealand prisoners of war were beheaded by the Japanese on Tarawa. In 1943, Japanese prisoners rioted at a prisoner of war camp in our little North Island town of Featherston. More than 30 Japanese and one New Zealand guard were killed before order was restored. Rumors flew that the Japanese had already printed up the currency they were going to use when they invaded us.
To call someone a racist is a serious charge. Conservatives are accused of racism by the left on a daily basis. Are the accusations fair? Or is something else going on? Derryck Green of Project 21 provides some provocative answers.
There will be no cables, no memoranda or manuscripts, no official records of the presidency it’s designed to celebrate. The Barack Obama Presidential Center will not be a historical archive, scholarly resource, or even museum, so much as a vast, 33-acre monument to Obama, spread over multiple structures and a manicured landscape.
Most startling of all, the unclassified papers of the Obama administration, the ostensible purpose of any presidential library, will repose not in Chicago but in a distant federal warehouse, digitized for online access but otherwise inconvenient and inaccessible.
Presidential libraries are many things.
They’re repositories of the official papers and, in many cases, the personal archives and artifacts of our nation’s chief executives, as well as those of their families, friends, and colleagues in public service. And as the name would suggest, they are also home to vast collections of books, articles, dissertations, monographs, and journals about their subject or the presidency in general. They’re a scholar’s dream for historians, researchers, and students alike. If you’re seeking to understand, say, Harry S. Truman’s diplomacy or Ronald Reagan’s life before politics, a journey to Independence, Mo., or Simi Valley, Calif., is probably obligatory.
In recent decades, they’ve expanded their purview. Since the advent of Jimmy Carter’s eponymous center in Atlanta, they double as the site of think tanks, foundations, or institutes intended to continue the public work of retired or deceased presidents. Some are located at birthplaces or boyhood homes, which are of interest in themselves, or on college campuses, where their presence may evoke mixed sentiments. They are conference centers, ceremonial and mortuary sites, and, above all, tourist destinations featuring well-stocked museums, rotating exhibitions, troops of visiting schoolchildren, and capacious gift shops.
At the John F. Kennedy library alongside Boston Harbor, you can see a replica of his Oval Office, complete with rocking chair, and at the Reagan library in sunny Southern California, there’s a two-story fragment of the Berlin Wall on an outside terrace.