RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/gops-erratic-confirmation-strategy/

Diana West is the author of “The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization,” and blogs at dianawest.net.

One last question about newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

Why?

Why for nearly two months (a Washington eternity) did this nominee above all others galvanize GOP Senate opposition?

I ask the question in genuine wonderment. After all, there was John Kerry with that giant bull’s-eye on his record for giving outrageous aid and comfort to America’s enemies by, among other things, entering into negotiations with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1971. How does a U.S. citizen tapped to lead the State Department not have to answer to U.S. senators for such treasonous behavior while a young but already noted public figure?

He was never asked the question, that’s how. Kerry sailed, or even windsurfed, through his confirmation hearing right into Foggy Bottom with only three little dissenting bumps (no votes from GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma).

Then there’s John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for CIA director. Sure, the president’s counterterrorism adviser still sits unconfirmed on a hottish seat. But I would bet large sums of money that, whether confirmed (likely) or not, senators will never ask Brennan a single question about the gross misinformation or, worse, disinformation that he regularly disseminates concerning the nature and aims of Islamic jihad. Nor will he be asked about allegations from a credible source – former FBI investigator John Guandolo (whose special expertise is Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood) – that, as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan was successfully targeted for conversion to Islam by a Saudi intelligence operation. And forget about any GOP pooh-bah being bold enough to inquire about the role Brennan might have played in 2008 as CEO of the security company whose employee helped breach the State Department passport records of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama – whose new administration, not incidentally, Brennan would join a few months later. Mum is always the word.

But Hagel drew the heavy fire. Why? Let me explain that, except for sharing with Hagel the goal of bringing home American troops from Iraqi and Afghan hellholes and excusing them from nation-building duties forever, I do not share much of the former senator’s worldview. But when I look at the red flags the GOP seized on and waved, I remain perplexed.

Take GOP concerns over whether Hagel received compensation for speeches or think-tank contributions from freedom-hostile foreign governments – financial ties that do seem to bind. Even a quick perusal of the donors to the Atlantic Council, for example, where Hagel was chairman, reveals troubling tranches of Turkish money coursing through the coffers, as well as donations from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and other countries.

I believe the appearance of influence-selling – or even simply taking bids – should disqualify all nominees from Cabinet positions. That includes Hillary Clinton when, in 2009, she came up for confirmation to be secretary of state. Hundreds of millions of dollars flooded her husband’s William J. Clinton Foundation, with many millions sluicing in from Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar and elsewhere, creating not just a “conflict” of interest, but total wars of interest for America’s top diplomat. Not to worry, said the U.S. Senate, voting the nomination out of committee 16-1 (Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana voted no) and confirming her 94-2. (Vitter and Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina voted no.) Why was foreign money a confirmation problem only for Hagel?

http://politicalmavens.com/ In the last century, Senator Pat Moynihan coined a term for the creeping erosion of our standards and values – he called it defining deviancy down, and it referred to our escalating acceptance of abnormal behavior in mainstream society. One of the handmaidens of this worsening tendency is the media which exposes us to […]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100204252/a-nasty-brutish-imperial-presidency/ Barack Obama is not amused by growing press criticism Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But […]

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter

“Sequestration,” which sounds like an impolite stomach ailment that almost nobody can spell and few understand, now gets really interesting. With the sequestration deadline having passed, the White House is under siege by reality.

President Obama and his liege man have been crying from the rooftops for weeks that if he doesn’t get to further plunder taxpayer pockets, airplanes will fall from the sky, classrooms will empty, fire and brimstone will ruin every hearth because there won’t be anybody at the firehouse to answer the telephone, crooks and criminals will roam the land doing all manner of evil because the cops will be on furlough, babies will cry in vain for milk, men will join breadlines like we haven’t seen since the ’30s, and women will weep tears of bitter reproach, tsunamis will rise from the river, bayou and creek, locusts will devour failing crops, and we’ll all be dead by the Fourth of July (if not Memorial Day). Woe is definitely us.

With Judgment Day at hand, the only thing left for the White House to do is to kill, or at least grievously wound, as many bearers of bad news as the president’s men can find. Blaming the press is always popular, because the press deserves whatever abuse it gets. When the president read in the Washington Post, of all places, that he was being called out by the most famous reporter in the land for his fibs and stretchers (a president would never actually tell a lie) about who should be blamed for sequestration hysteria, he could hardly believe it. There, before his very own eyes and in black and white, Bob Woodward was citing chapter and verse with the proof that the sequester originated under Barack Obama’s roof. Truth will out, but it’s not supposed to will out in the president’s own house.

Another Tack: Movie musings It’s not every day that news broadcasts open with a lament for what did not actually happen. But this anomaly is occasionally recurrent in our little insular setting. Periodically at this time of year the top item on our news purveyors’ agenda is likely to be what isn’t new: yet again no […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/canadian-supreme-court-kills-last-hope-for-free-speech/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3fbc0cd0ca-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag

That sound you hear is Voltaire rolling over in his grave.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Once upon a time, it was commonly understood that this sentiment is the very foundation of a free society. Compromise free speech, water it down, and you destroy freedom itself.

In Toronto there lives a man named Bill Whatcott. During the last two decades or so, he has spent much of his time traveling around Canada, waving protest signs at gay-pride parades and Planned Parenthood clinics, agitating for the criminalization of homosexual acts and abortion, and distributing fliers packed with incendiary language about gays and graphic images of aborted fetuses. In 2010 the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined him $17,500 for distributing “hateful” materials; an appeals court overturned the ruling, whereupon the province’s Human Rights Commission appealed the case to the Canadian Supreme Court. Now the Court has ruled, and it’s an icy day for freedom in the Great White North.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3577 A new study, released by the American Psychological Association, has called into question previous assumptions about health and happiness. According to the data — collected over the course of more than a decade — those of us who believe that the best way to beat physical and emotional malaise is to “look on the […]