RUTHFULLY YOURS

There has been so much polluted water over the bridge since those days. In revisiting the scandal and President Nixon’s resignation, I am reminded of a few things:

First: Nixon was elected twice, proving that losers can rebound, even when he ran against a popular figure like Hubert Humphrey by people who were tired of the socialism bound “great society” agenda of Lyndon Johnson. And in 1972 he won in a landslide against George McGovern.

Richard M. Nixon (I) Republican 520 46,740,323 Electoral votes 520
George McGovern Democratic 17 28,901,598 Electoral votes 17

Second: When he resigned we got Gerald Ford- sort of a parenthesis in America’s list of Presidents.

Third: And most relevant. In 1976 Ronald Reagan lost in the Republican Primary by a fraction to incumbent Gerald Ford who went on to lose the general election to Jimmy Carter.

These were his words at the Republican convention that formally nominated Gerald Ford in 1976:

“If I could just take a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

And suddenly I thought to myself if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the President spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.

And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other’s country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.

And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction”?

And if we failed, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.”

Friday Afternoon Roundup – Open Minds, Closed Hearts

LEADER-SHIP

The photo was retweeted by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who had just gotten through explaining that Obama deals with genocide on a case-by-case basis.
The White House also uploaded it to its Flickr page and it’s probably on Instagram and projected above the White House with a laser on the sky.
This situation room photo is serious. It means business. Susan Rice has changed out of her PJs and into her power suit like she’s ready to go on morning shows at any minute and blame a YouTube video for the whole thing.
Iraq Crisis Worsens, Obama Deploys “Super-Serious” Situation Room Photo

A MAN TOO BROADMINDED TO TAKE HIS OWN SIDE IN A QUARREL
David, for all that he was the underdog, did not set out to be liked. He set out to win. He took an insanely dangerous risk with faith that a Higher Power would help him accomplish the impossible. Israel came closest to that in the Six Day War. It is not Goliath, but it has also forgotten how to be David.
People are more likely to rally behind those with conviction in their own righteousness. The Muslim Goliath has carried off his imitation of David through the degree of his conviction. Israel and its defenders have strived for reasonableness over conviction, trying to prove their humanitarian credentials through a willingness to see both sides.
But as the conflict has become a war of ideas, it has become clear that wars of ideas are no more won by those who see both sides than wars of force are won by those who fight on both sides.
Making David Into Goliath

MEMO TO J STREET
“It makes no difference whether a Jew is pro-peace or pro-war, whether right-wing or left-wing… and serves as a target for the Jihad of the Islamic nation.”
“Allah Akbar.”
“Khaybbar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the Army of Mohammed will return.”
Australian Muslim Leader: Also Kill Left-Wing Anti-War Jews

Christians are under constant attack, all over the Middle East and Africa. Meanwhile, if you raise the issue in the West, Islamic extremists will send you hate mail

The news that President Obama has finally confirmed the use of airstrikes in Iraq to protect Christians from ISIS Islamic militants is too little, far too late. For many months now the US and Britain have sat back and watched Iraq transform into an extremist state, overrun by vicious Islamist fighters who have ruthlessly persecuted tens of thousands of Christians.

Churches have been bombed, men, women and even children have been dragged into the streets and beheaded and houses have been marked with ‘death stamps’. In addition to these atrocities, around 40,000 people from Iraq’s various religious minorities have found themselves stuck on Mount Sinjar after fleeing for their lives, with hundreds dying of heat and thirst.

The wave of terror sweeping across an already deeply troubled country is another reminder of the very real threats posed by Islamic extremism in the Middle East. As so often in these situations, there has been much verbal public condemnation from the United Nations and other establishments but little practical action has been taken to prevent it.

Christian leaders have spoken at length to call for action with a spokesperson from Pope Francis calling on the international community, “to protect all those affected or threatened by the violence, and to guarantee all necessary assistance – especially the most urgently needed aid – to the great multitude of people who have been driven from their homes, whose fate depends entirely on the solidarity of others.”

The situation in Iraq and the lack of action around, appears to be reflective of a deeper and much more widespread trend of Christian persecution by Islamic extremists across the globe.

From the abduction of over 200 Christian schoolgirls in Nigera by Boko Haram to the relentless car bombings in Kenya and Somalia or the spate of acid attacks on Catholic priests in places like Zanzibar, Christians are under constant attack.

Both the nature of these violent attacks and the frequency of them underlines a much wider trend of anti-Christian violence which must be dealt with immediately before it can spread any further.

You in the mainstream media have been amazing in your support for Hamas, and we’re so grateful to you. This really helps us in spreading anti-Semitism, and starting new rounds of terror at will. Blessings be upon you, love from Hamas
Dear Members of the Mainstream Media,

You’ve been awesome! Everyone knows that we start unwinnable wars with Israel because the real victory happens when you predictably side with us each time. And you’ve been so supportive of our strategy that we really want to acknowledge your helpfulness. In particular, we thank you for:

-Focusing so much more on our suffering than anyone else’s. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before you take notice, so we’re glad that you value our lives so much more.

-Minimizing your coverage, if any, of our attacks that led up to Israel’s military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. We’re especially grateful to the French media for this.

Their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues, and that is welcomed by our anti-Semitic worldview (although, unfortunately, such attacks remind everyone why Jews need a state).

-Emphasizing our civilian death toll without explaining that (1) our casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) we maximize that total by using Palestinians to shield our weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF — in its annoying effort to minimize our civilian deaths — warns Gazans to evacuate.

-Never mentioning the fact that if we could kill millions of Israelis, we would (after all, our charter calls for Israel’s destruction). Just as the 9/11 hijackers made the most of what they had but would have liked to kill far more Americans (for example, with the help of WMD), we too would love to kill far more Israelis.

You wouldn’t think it if you’d been watching the BBC, but the death tolls in Gaza and Ukraine are not that far apart. Why is the media obsessing about Gaza and paying so much less attention to Ukraine? asks John Redwood MP

I have no time for Russia arming the rebels or assisting them to intensify the conflict in the Ukraine. I do, however, have worries about the continuing high level of deaths and injuries in the intense fighting that has been going on there.

I note that the UN says both sides – including the Ukrainian government – have been shelling areas where civilians are at risk. The UN thinks 1,129 people have died in the fighting between mid April and late July. There are unconfirmed reports of children being killed, of an attack on a retirement home and other atrocities.

We do know that the inspectors who need to retrieve the final casualties from the Malaysian airliner and start to investigate the cause of the crash are often blocked by military action from getting to the site.

Can’t the government and rebels at least agree a protected zone around the crash that can be free from fighting so the work can proceed? Does the Ukrainian government have no authority, no moral stance that can command respect in the east of its country?

I find it almost unbelievable that in 2014 in a part of Europe armed rebels fire against the government and local population, and that the government shells and bombs them. Why can’t the newly elected President exercise some political skills and sit down and talk through the problems?

In the end this has to be solved by political means. You cannot shell people into accepting democracy. It has to be built from both sides by active discussion and painful agreement.

I also find it curious that the media, who give us such graphic reports of the bombs, shells and deaths in Gaza, give us so little about the same problems in the Ukraine where the EU is heavily involved on the side of the Ukrainian government.

Teenage girls, heading to sex slavery for jihadists in the Middle East, are apprehended by Spanish police. The BBC and other mainstream outlets in Europe refuse to report such instances for fear of offending politically correct narratives

In breaking news from Spain, that has not been reported in mainstream media, two female teenageers have been rescued by Spanish police from being trafficked to Syria or Iraq as sex slaves for the male fighters, in the Jihad.

Spain’s English language news-media outlet, The Local, reported that the girls, aged 14 and 19, were arrested in the Spanish, north African exclave of Ceuta, which is less than 20 miles from Gibraltar.

The Local reported:

“According to a police statement, they were “on the brink” of being transferred directly to Iraq or Syria by members of a Moroccan recruitment cell.

“…It’s the first time that the police have detained women in Spain who were planning on joining the jihad,” a police chief told the newspaper.

“Sources close to the investigation have stressed that the two girls were drawn in to the jihadist movement through internet forums.”

Mainstream media in Europe do not report such instances, for fear of being labelled Islamophobic. Nor do they report that women are increasingly being transferred to jihadists in the Middle East as sex slaves.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/6-videos-that-show-the-truth-about-the-war-in-gaza/?print=1 In the Gaza war, now probably winding down, when you’re not hearing that Israel is supposedly attacking a school [1] you’re hearing that it’s supposedly attacking a hospital. What’s going on? Is Israel really a monstrously aggressive country? Seemingly hospitals, of all institutions, should be immune from war. Hospitals are the only place where some of […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/6-ugly-signs-of-resurgent-worldwide-antisemitism/ 6 Ugly Signs of Resurgent Worldwide Antisemitism Posted By Robert Spencer [1]Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV channel in late July [2] broadcast a Friday sermon in which an imam issued a chilling threat to Jews: “We will not leave a single one of you alive. Our doctrine in fighting you is that we will totally exterminate […]

People in the Middle East who put their trust in Barack Obama are suffering right now.

In January, President Obama likened fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to a “jayvee team” in Lakers jerseys on the basketball court.

Eight months later, that squad of bloodthirsty maniacs is playing quite a game of pickup. Occupying swaths of territory stretching from Syria into Iraq, ISIS stands in control of a landmass unprecedented in the annals of terrorist organizations, makes millions of dollars a day selling oil on the black market, has beheaded men and sold women into slavery, and now threatens to kill 40,000 Yazidis — an Iraqi sect ISIS accuses of devil-worship.

It was the plight of the Yazidis, stranded on a mountain, that ultimately compelled the president to initiate a humanitarian airlift of food and water, which he announced from the White House Thursday night. The president has also authorized a limited number of air strikes on ISIS forces approaching the Yazidis. The mission, however, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest, will be “very limited in scope.” This led Senator John McCain, in an exclusive interview with my Daily Beast colleague Josh Rogin, to ridicule the strikes as mere “pinpricks,” a reference to Obama’s insistence last year that the strikes he briefly supported in response to Assad’s chemical-weapons attacks would not be useless.

Asked seven years ago if the need to stave off potential genocide might convince him to change his mind about a total and precipitous withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, then-candidate Obama replied that it would not. “Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said.

This cynical avowal, I wrote at the time, was an indication of what might become the “Obama doctrine,” which I described thusly: “The United States will remain passive in the face of genocide.” Seven years later, I regret to say, my prediction stands up pretty well.

In Syria, some 150,000 to 200,000 people have died as a result of President BasharAssad’s war on his own people. “The photos show crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz,” international war-crimes prosecutor David Crane said last month upon viewing images of tortured and murdered Syrians. Never mind the innocent lives lost: Assad is an enemy of the United States, Iran’s sole Arab ally, and, as a backer of Hezbollah and Hamas, a major source of instability in the region. Equipping and training the moderate rebels who were once poised to defeat him was categorically in the American interest. But Obama never seriously entertained the idea of overthrowing Assad. Far from it: The first three years of his presidency saw one slavish attempt at conciliation after another, until Assad began murdering Syrians en masse and Obama, fecklessly, announced that the president-for-life must “step aside.”

Nixon shattered the rule of law, but Bill Clinton subjected himself to national-security blackmail.
Forty years ago tomorrow, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. He also set off a mini-industry in the media, which for decades has been obsessed with Watergate.

John Dean, a Nixon co-conspirator who moved to the left after his time in prison, wrote a book trashing the Bush years that he entitled “Worse than Watergate.” As for Nixon, a new HBO documentary about Nixon “takes a fresh look at the Nixon tapes to make the case that the already vilified 37th president was not as bad as you may think — he was worse,” ABC News Radio reported. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus concluded this week that four decades “after he slunk out of office, Richard M. Nixon retains the capacity to astonish and disgust.”

Nixon was in some ways sui generis in his contempt for the rule of law. But it is fascinating to see that while Nixon’s stock continues to shrink, the other president who drove the country toward impeachment continues to see his image burnished by historians. I’m talking about Bill Clinton, who is already deep into his new role as strategist for a planned Clinton-family return to the White House after a 16-year absence.

In his own way, Clinton was as reckless in office as Nixon was malevolent. Pre–Monica Lewinsky, he was engulfed in scandal after scandal ranging from Travel Office firings to the improper transfer to the White House of FBI files on leading Republicans. In January 1998, on the morning the Lewinsky scandal broke, President Clinton had to confess to Colonel Robert Patterson, his senior military aide, that he had lost the nuclear codes he was supposed to carry “and couldn’t recall how long the codes had been missing.” Patterson wrote in his memoir Dereliction of Duty that he was “appalled.” We now know that Clinton’s personal life frequently distracted him from his duties, and a new book by Daniel Halper of The Weekly Standard, Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, makes the case that President Clinton’s behavior also made him a target of international blackmail and threatened national security.

Whether he was agreeing to talk with the terminally insecure Lewinsky on a moment’s notice or was spending time to conduct extensive job searches for her, President Clinton did a great deal to keep Lewinsky quiet. Nonetheless, she ended up discussing her affair with eleven people. One of those was Linda Tripp, a Pentagon official who recorded Lewinsky’s accounts of the affair. But what if Tripp or someone else had taken those tapes to Chinese or Iranian agents instead of to Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor?