RUTHFULLY YOURS

With events in Iraq in mind, while it may be dawning on some of our leaders that we face an existential threat from Islamism one really wonders what it will take for them to get their act together. Do we have to wait for a bomb in the Channel Tunnel?

It is just possible that our leaders recognise that there is now an existential threat to the West, both external and internal. What is happening in Iraq needs to be understood. ISIS is not a terrorist movement. It is an army that means to seize and hold territory, create a new state that will roll back history to the 7th Century and enforce adherence to the most rigorous form of primitive Islam.

Its atrocities have been horrendous, but this is not just the barbaric behaviour of savages; it is deliberately calculated to spread panic and terror amongst the opposition. This is why they have flooded the internet with pictures of horrors rarely seen since WW2.

Small wonder that Iraqi soldiers scarpered at the first whiff of powder and shot when they contemplated being summarily beheaded if caught. And western leaders must have pondered on what the media would make of pictures of decapitated US marines or RAF helicopter pilots.

The situation needs statesmanship. It is not getting it.

Prime Minister David Cameron has no clout due not least to his incomprehensible slashing of the defence budget whilst increasing foreign aid by a staggering 38 percent. In any event, Britain has no coherent foreign policy as is witnessed by Liberal Democrat leading light Vince Cable’s mischief-making declaration that there could be an arms ban on Israel in direct contradiction of Britain’s long-standing support for the Jewish state and its right to defend itself.

President Obama has shown mostly indifference. His low-key actions are typical of his de minimis foreign policy. His weasel words say that US troops have been sent to Iraq protect US citizens in the region, whom he could easily have recalled when the troubles began. He speaks of ‘US military advisors. Now, where have we heard that before?

He says the US intervention can be terminated because there are ‘only’ 5,000 people left on the mountain

The IDF and Bibi Netanyahu deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for their restraint during such a challenging war. Israel has indeed been disproportionate; it has been disproportionately decent.

When observers describe or denounce Israeli military actions as, “disproportionate,” they glibly assume sweeping legal conclusions without sufficient proof or analysis. But the evidence shows that Israel has acted with disproportionate decency while Hamas has committed war crimes.

Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks – which now total about 3,500 in the last month – target primarily Israeli civilians. The effects of Hamas’ attacks have been serious (contrary to what most media reports suggest):

a) increasing premature births,

b) shutting down Israel’s biggest airport, blocking 90 percent of incoming and outgoing passengers,

c) forcing about 8 million people to live on the edge 24/7, fearing that if their missile defense system or scramble to shelters falters, they could die,

d) constant interruptions throughout the day and night, with as little as ten seconds to find shelter,

e) billions of dollars in economic damage.

The principle of distinction requires belligerents to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Hamas’ violations of this principle amount to a double war crime: first by targeting Israeli civilians, and second by using Gazan civilians as human shields for these attacks, thereby making it much harder for the IDF military response to distinguish Gazan combatants from non-combatants.

Hamas exhorts Gazans to act as human shields and its combat manual encourages this war crime while admitting that Israel avoids civilian casualties – an avoidance that Hamas exploits for tactical advantage.

Alan Dershowitz deftly highlights yet another proof of Hamas war crimes: Hamas chooses to locate its military efforts in the most densely populated parts of Gaza, instead of in the far less populated areas nearby – a decision calculated to maximize Gazan civilian deaths.

There being not much happening around the world at the moment, the President played golf today at the Vineyard Golf Club:

“While eating, overlooking the golf course, guests had to stand up and be wanded.” One asked if he could finish his hot soup first, and an Obama security man cracked, ominously, “So, you’re not cooperating?”

Funny. Even funnier if he’d had to be “accidentally” shot while refusing to “cooperate”. As the Instaprof points out:

YOU KNOW, THEY DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE ANY LEGAL AUTHORITY TO DO THAT

True. But Americans have lost the republican spirit. You have to have your genitals wanded at the airport, so what’s the big deal about extending it to the country club? As Professor Reynolds says:

If the President wants to go out in public, fine. If he can’t do it without assaulting the rights of citizens, then he should stay home.

Couldn’t they find a couple of bigtime Obama bundlers willing to pay for converting the White House and grounds into the clubhouse and course of the Barack Obama Golf Club? They don’t seem to be using the building for anything else.

The problem is that flood-the-zone overkill security is all American statism knows. One day we will all be policed like Ferguson, Missouri.

1. Hamas admits intimidating foreign press
2. Haaretz: “Some reporters received death threats” from Hamas
3. Bewilderment as New York Times correspondent seems to stand up for Hamas
4. “Entire family” of dead Palestinians found alive
5. In UK, Sainsbury’s removes kosher food after anti-Israeli mob trashes Tesco’s
6. In Spain, Israeli tourists’ tires slashed, “murderers” painted in red on cars
7. Anti-Semitic flyers put on Jewish-owned business in Los Angeles
8. Calls for Glasgow politician’s resignation after he waves Israeli flag
9. And on a lighter note… spike in demand for IDF soldier sperm donations

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That politicians lie is to be expected; that people believe them is unfortunate, but understandable. But, that a free and independent press ignores them is reprehensible. On September 9th 2009, speaking before a joint session of Congress, newly elected President Obama laid out his healthcare plan. In doing so, he claimed that illegal immigrants would not benefit from his plan. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) indecorously called out: “You lie!” The media attacked him as a pariah. For his transgression, Mr. Wilson later apologized. Nevertheless, while ObamaCare theoretically disallows illegals to sign up, states have found ways, such as the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to get around the law’s supposed restrictions.

In reading Hillary “We were dead broke” Clinton’s well-publicized interview in The Atlantic, I wrote a note to myself: “Why do I read this bilge?” Ms. Clinton’s words, carefully parsed, are filled with prevarications and ambiguities. As Mark Twain wrote in A Tramp Abroad, “An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.” The same could be said for a woman in politics. Interviews that politicians grant (such as Hillary’s) and books that they write are obviously self-serving and politically motivated. They would more accurately be called “infomercials.” The rationale behind lying during political campaigns is that no agenda may be pursued unless one gains office. In the world of politics, the ends justify the means. All dictators, from Caesar to Hitler felt the same.

Small lies, like other seemingly unimportant transgressions, inevitably lead to big ones. Like children who test parents, politicians test their constituents with little lies. If not called out on the small, harmless ones, they matriculate to those more substantial and more damaging. Elizabeth Warren’s claims of being of Cherokee and Delaware heritage were obviously bogus – even amusingly so. Supporters avow they did no harm, though her acceptance as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard deprived a true Native American of a job. However, in lying about something so basic, how can we trust her on matters more substantial? Does she have no sense of honor? Did not the editors of The Boston Globe detect a flaw in her character that might have consequences for one in a position of public trust? Have we become so cynical that we overlook such fabrications with an off-handed gesture that all politicians lie, so, as Hillary Clinton once asked, what difference does it make?

It has come to this after six years of Barack Obama’s Chicago-style community-organizer governance: The hard Left no longer believes it necessary to pretend that the rule of law matters. It is politics as combat. The devolution can be measured from the trumped-up indictment of Tom DeLay to the trumped-up indictment of Rick Perry.

Back in 2005, the idea of exploiting prosecutorial power to criminalize one’s political opposition was still sufficiently noxious that Democrat apparatchiks in Austin understood the need for camouflage. Tom DeLay of Texas was among the GOP’s most effective leaders and fundraisers, having risen to congressional leadership not long after he helped Newt Gingrich lead the 1994 GOP takeover of the House. Democrats decided he had to be sidelined. They also knew they had the raw power to make it happen: a political operative ensconced as the chief prosecutor in a reliably Democratic county. In politics as combat, raw power is all you need — just cause has nothing to do with it.

But nine years ago, it was still unacceptable for the rub-out to look too much like a rub-out. It was not possible to charge DeLay with the non-crime of raising money for Republican candidates — his real offense as far as his adversaries were concerned. So he was indicted for a convoluted money-laundering scheme.

Money laundering is not, as we say in the law biz, a malum in se crime — an offense that is blatantly wrong, like murder or robbery. Money laundering, instead, is malum prohibitum. That is to say, it is an exercise in social engineering: behavior considered criminal only because society (or those who are running society) choose to regulate it narrowly. The details of such “crimes” make normal people’s eyes glaze over.

Some of us legal beagles pointed out, in DeLay’s defense, that his allegedly criminal money transfers did not qualify as money laundering because, at the time he touched the funds in question, they were not proceeds of illegal activity. But as the hard Left anticipated, the reaction to this solid but technical defense to a highly technical offense was a big, collective yawn. As far as the public was concerned, DeLay was charged with money laundering, just like a drug kingpin. He sounded like a terrible guy . . . and to draw a different conclusion would have required more time than most people had to grapple with the allegation and the facts.

If you want to know where the abuse-of-power indictment of Texas governor Rick Perry may be headed, look no further than how a similar indictment of then–U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison crashed exactly 20 years ago.

Republican Hutchison was indicted only four months after her landslide win in a special election in 1993. Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle — whose successor, Rosemary Lehmberg, is at the center of the Perry indictment — persuaded a grand jury made up of residents from the liberal Austin area to indict Hutchison on charges of misusing her prior office of state treasurer. (The Travis County district attorney’s office runs the Public Integrity Unit, which enforces ethics laws for all state officials, and Austin is the county seat.) Hutchison was accused of using state employees and her state offices to conduct personal and political business and then ordering records of her activities to be destroyed. Among the specific accusations was that she used state employees to plan her Christmas vacation in Colorado and write thank-you notes.

Hutchison pressed for a quick resolution of the case because she was running for reelection in 1994, much as Governor Perry has to worry his indictment will hang over any 2016 presidential race he might run. The case against Hutchison slowly began to fall apart. The first indictment had to be thrown out because one of the grand-jury members who heard the case was ineligible to serve. A defense motion to move the trial from the politically charged climate of liberal Austin to Fort Worth was granted. Then, when the trial began in February of 1994, it ended after only 30 minutes, when Hutchison was found not guilty on all charges.

The breathtaking denouement began as soon as District Attorney Earle was forced to present his case. He began by telling the court he couldn’t go forward without knowing for certain whether records seized from Hutchison’s office without a search warrant only five days after her Senate victory would be allowed into evidence. Judge John F. Onion Jr. declined to make such an early decision — and ordered the jury, which had been seated only minutes before, to return a verdict of not guilty.

After her acquittal, Hutchison requested that all records seized during the raid be publicly released. “The case was not there,” she said at a press conference. “They turned around and ran because they knew the longer they went, the more embarrassing it was going to be. . . . They thought the lady would crack. Well, the lady wouldn’t crack.”

For his part, Earle had only excuses for his fiasco. As the Los Angeles Times reported, he said he was “shocked by the speed with which the judge proceeded in the case, and in general we feel that justice has been denied.” He accused Judge Onion of running a “rocket docket.”

Elia Kazan’s classic A Face in the Crowd [2] is a good primer on Barack Obama’s rise and fall. Lonesome Rhodes arises out of nowhere in the 1957 film, romancing the nation as a phony populist [3] who serially spins yarns in the most folksy ways — confident that he should never be held to account. Kazan’s point (in the film Rhodes is a patsy for conservative business interests) is that the “folks” are fickle and prefer to be charmed rather than informed and told the truth. Rhodes’s new first name, Lonesome, resonates in the film in a way that Barack does now [4]. Finally, an open mic captures Rhodes’s true disdain for the people he champions, and his career crashes.

So what is collapsing the presidency of the once mellifluous Obama? It is not the IRS, AP, VA, or NSA scandals. Nor did the nation especially fault him for Benghazi or the complete collapse of U.S. foreign policy, from failed reset to a Middle East afire. In each case, he either blamed Bush or denied there was a smidgeon of wrongdoing on his part.

Certainly, the stampede at the border, as disastrous as it was, did not ipso facto sink Obama’s ratings. Ditto the embarrassing Bergdahl deal, in which we traded a likely deserter for five Islamist kingpins. Was it the ISIS ascendance that is leading to genocide and a nascent caliphate? Not in and of itself.

We could go on, but you get the picture that it was all of the above that finally became too much, as Americans turned Obama off because they were all lied out. In all of these scandals a charismatic Barack wheeled out the teleprompter, smiled, dropped his g’s, soared with “make no mistake about it” and “let me perfectly clear,” and then, like Lonesome Rhodes, told the “folks” [5] things that could not be true or at least were the exact opposite of what he himself had earlier asserted.

The result is that should Obama claim again that he is going to lower the seas, cool the planet, or that he is the man whom we are waiting for, Americans would laugh. They would chuckle about more promised recoveries, millions of new green jobs, an expanding economy, or a safer world abroad. Again, we are just too lied out to believe anything our slick version of Lonesome Rhodes says anymore. And that fact may best explain his 39-41% approval rating.

The old saying goes that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. In reality, it’s worse.

Forget innocuous sandwiches, with or without Russian dressing. In Texas, at least in Austin’s Travis County, you can indict the state’s governor, Rick Perry, for doing the job any intelligent citizen would want him to do — trying to get rid of an absolutely atrocious public official.

That official was District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a dimwitted and abusive drunk driver who ran that county’s — wait for it — “Public Integrity Unit.” Perry threatened to veto funding for said unit as long as Lehmberg was in control. Maybe he had a little actual concern for public integrity — not that the good burghers of Austin would care. Perry’s fortunate Lehmberg wasn’t found guilty of DUW (driving under weed) rather than alcohol, as she was. Given the preferred lifestyle thereabouts, they would have erected a statue to her and summarily sent Perry off to Guantanamo without trial to be swapped out for the last remaining al Qaeda maniacs.

(In case, you’re one of the 12 people left who hasn’t seen the video of Lehmberg’s DUI booking, it’s an eye-roller. You can find it here [1]. Even more of an eye-roller are these dashboard videos [2]of the DA’s arrest.)

Oh, Orwell, where art thou?

Scratch that — Orwell was far too subtle a writer to populate Animal Farm with nincompoops on the level of Lehmberg, the “special prosecutor” operating a rinky-dink Star Chamber at her request or even the know-nothing hypocrites in a local watchdog group defending her with that equally Orwellian name “Texans for Public Justice.” (Doesn’t that just sound like it’s from the wrong side of High Noon?)

But wait. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems — i.e., we’re in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove and Slim Pickens has just climbed atop the bomb.

Already David Axelrod, of all people, has taken to Twitter to defend Perry, writing “Perry indictment looks pretty sketchy [3].” (I’ll say!) Since Axelrod is Obama’s chief campaign honcho, what’s up with that?

Robert Gates, who is the Captain Renault of our time, recounts the following White House exchange between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, back when she was serving the president loyally as secretary of state and he was taking notes as secretary of defense.

“In strongly supporting a surge in Afghanistan,” Mr. Gates writes in his memoir, “Duty,” “Hillary told the president that her opposition in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the primary. She went on to say, ‘The Iraq surge worked.’ The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Here’s a fit subject for an undergraduate philosophy seminar: What, or who, is your true self? Are you Kierkegaardian or Aristotelian? Is the real “you” the interior and subjective you; the you of your private whispers and good intentions? Or are you only the sum of your public behavior, statements and actions? Are you the you that you have been, and are? Or are you what you are, perhaps, becoming?

And if Mrs. Clinton supported the surge in private—because she thought it would help America win a war—but opposed it in public—because she needed to win a primary—shall we conclude that she is (a) despicable; (b) clever; (c) both; or (d) “what difference, at this point, does it make?”
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All this comes to mind after reading Mrs. Clinton’s remarkable interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said, in the interview’s most quotable line, “and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”