RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Gates’s insider memoir is the latest in a dishonorable genre.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369186/print

For all the hysteria over former defense secretary Robert Gates’s new insider memoir of his tenure during the Bush and Obama administrations, the disclosures are more breaches of trust than earth-shattering revelations. Much of Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War is the ordinary stuff of public service.

What little gossip in the book there is that may be controversial — revelations that both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cynically opposed the successful Bush-era surge in Iraq on political grounds, or that Vice President Joe Biden is a buffoonish blowhard — was already common knowledge to many Americans.

Gates sees himself as reluctantly drawn to Washington to help rescue the fading Bush administration’s unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009, he grudgingly stayed on at the Defense Department, apparently to add some sobriety to an at times comically inexperienced new Obama team.

There is a long tradition of retired court insiders revealing unflattering details about their bosses before they leave office — and it is not uplifting. The Roman court insider Petronius thought he could get away with caricaturing the buffoonish emperor Nero through his racy novel The Satyricon. He didn’t, and was forced to commit suicide as a result.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/che-guevara-si-tea-party-no/print/

“Mexicans are a rabble of illiterate Indians.” (Ernesto “Che” Guevara, May 1956)

Singer-actress Maria Conchita Alonso, a multiple-Grammy nominee, was scheduled to star in a Spanish-language production of the Vagina Monologues next month in San Francisco’s Brava Theater. Then she starred in a video ad for California Assemblyman and gubernatorial hopeful Tim Donnelly, a Tea-Party Republican who calls for enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.

Only the torches and pitchforks were missing from the outraged mobs of San Francisco’s “Latinos” who (verbally) set upon Ms. Alonso during a subsequent radio show. The woman could hardly get a word in edgewise. Callers insulted her relentlessly. “I’ve been called all these horrible names, like you can’t believe,” Alonso told Megyn Kelly. “They were saying they were going to burn down the theater, they were going to boycott (the show.)”

The hipster area’s “Latino” politico-cultural establishment joined the chorus, if slightly more decorously.

“We don’t act like that,” snapped Jim Salinas, former president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. “First of all, that is not a typical Latina.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/american-blood-on-iranian-hands/print/

“The worst part for me is that nobody remembers,” Mark Nevells said last year on the anniversary of the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

A Marine had thrown his body in front of the truck to try stop the vehicle and afterward for five days, Nevells and other Marines had dug through the rubble for the bodies of the men they had served with.

One of the first Marines on the scene heard voices coming from underneath the rubble. “Get us out. Don’t leave us.”

The Marines lost more people that day than at any time since Iwo Jima and the number of Americans murdered that day by a terrorist group was a record that would stand until September 11.

In Washington, the murder of 220 Marines and the Iranian, Ismail Ascari, who drove the truck full of explosives that tore through their barracks, are inconvenient truths and lost memories. And it has always been that way.

Before the attack, the NSA intercepted a message from Iranian intelligence in Tehran to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus ordering “a spectacular action against the United States Marines.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/english-language-media-ignores-breiviks-coming-out-as-a-nazi-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Beverly Zaslow, a documentary film producer, Michael Hausam, a conservative writer and activist, and Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

The Gang gathered to discuss Obama’s True Legacy: Not Healthcare (the title of Nonie’s recent Frontpage article.) The discussion occurred in Part II and shed a disturbing light on what Obama has truly succeeded in.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/israeli-prof-denied-honorary-degree-for-being-too-right-wing/

Dimitry Shumsky is a young anti-Israel far Leftist whose diatribes litter the far Leftist fringe media in Israel, especially the leftist daily Haaretz. Since 2009, according to his own published resume, he has held a tenure-track appointment at the Department of the History of the Jewish People at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shumsky in Haaretz on January 20, 2014 joins the cat fight of the far Left in Israel over the decision by the University of Haifa to veto an honorary PhD to Prof. Robert Aumann.

The Nobel-Prize winning economist Aumann was denied an honorary PhD by the University of Haifa on grounds that he holds conservative political opinions. It was a great victory for the campaign of the Far Left in Israel against freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Prof. Ariel Rubinstein, a distinguished economist in Israel, denounced the decision and denounced speakers at a conference at Tel Aviv University who defended the operation of a thought police in the Aumann affair.

Rubinstein is himself quite far off to the Left. However his Op-Ed in Haaretz a couple of weeks back criticizing those who insist on a political thought police in Israeli academia triggered indignation in the caverns of the Ultra-Left. Among those chiming in was Tel Aviv University Professor Rivka Feldhay. You may recall Feldhay as the Tel Aviv University leftist that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted NOT be invited to participate in a state reception in Germany. The reason is that Feldhay had signed petitions demanding that Israeli soldiers engage in mutiny and insurrection to force the government to accept diktats from the Left about the “occupation.” After decades of the Left insisting that everyone should have the “right” to boycott anyone, including settlements, Israeli universities, and all of Israel, the same Left suddenly was aghast that Netanyahu had decided to “boycott” Feldhay. (Actually he did not boycott her, he just chose not to invite her.) Feldhay responded with shrill hysteria in a number of Op-Ed articles.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-totalitarians-of-new-york/ New York City mayors excel at banning everything from salt to carriages, but they are not very good at cleaning up the streets after a snowstorm. There are two ways of looking at any major city; as a mechanical problem of buildings, streets and sewers whose infrastructures need to be maintained or as a […]

Eric Holder reopened investigations targeting CIA operatives without reading the memos describing why they had been closed. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303802904579334850751092042?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion John Rizzo spent 34 years as a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency. This memoir of his service between 1976 and 2009 is emphatically a book for anyone who cares about the security of this country and […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/20/McCarthyism-by-the-Numbers#disqus_thread
The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at least it has served a useful purpose.

This lone positive angle–counter-intuitive at first glance–is that her iconoclastic Cold War history has sparked a barrage of charges about “McCarthyism” and the senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to a decisive epoch in America’s long death struggle with the Kremlin.

As is well-known, “McCarthyism” was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: accusations of Communist taint, without any factual basis; bogus “lists” of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.

Such is the standard image of “McCarthyism” set forth in all the usual histories and media treatments of the era. Such is the image relied on by the critics of Ms. West to discredit her book and dismiss her as a crackpot and “conspiracy theorist.” By arguing that pro-Red elements in our government exerted baleful influence on US policy to suit the aims of Moscow, it is said, she becomes “McCarthy’s heiress,” reprising the evils of the fifties.

All of which, from my standpoint, has one beneficial feature–though it doesn’t make things less unpleasant for Ms. West. It pushes the issue of McCarthy and McCarthyism to the forefront, where it ought to be, and where it is now possible to view his cases in ways not feasible years ago when the relevant data were not open to the public.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/51709 INTRODUCTION BY WOFF BACHNER Perhaps no recent incident illustrates the unrestrained bias towards the Jewish people better than last week’s shameful actions by UNESCO, when Director-General Irina Bokova cancelled a major exhibit about Jewish history in Israel; “People, Book, Land – The 3,500-year relationship of the Jewish People with the Holy Land.” After 22 […]

    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.570071 Israel’s foreign ministry hopes to nix clause that might complicate renewal of scientific cooperation agreement.   The German government is conditioning continued grants to Israeli high-tech companies, as well as the renewal of a scientific cooperation agreement, on the inclusion of a territorial clause stating that Israeli entities located in West Bank […]