RUTHFULLY YOURS

For most of human history the family was the basic social unit of the species. Family was a way of passing down genes, beliefs and wealth. It was a retirement plan that you paid into by keeping your children alive long enough for them to grow up and support you. It allowed the individual to pass on his ideas to people who would care about them because they were part of their heritage. Family was a collective endeavor, small enough to reflect the individual. It was a practical and philosophical aim that made life beautiful and meaningful.

But who really needs it anymore?
The basic practical functions of the family have been replaced by the nanny state. It is the nanny that takes over the care and teaching of the child as soon as possible. And when their parents grow old, it is that same nanny that oversees their care and death.

Governments have come to serve as undying guardians of human society, ushering new life into the world and ushering old life out of it. New parents are as likely to turn to the government for help as they are to their extended family. When their child is old enough to look around for a career, it is the government that they expect to provide the education and the jobs. And when they grow old, the child can keep on working at his government job and paying off his student loans knowing that the government will be there to make all the difficult and expensive decisions about their care.

With all that taken care of, who needs parents or children anyway?

Denounced by David Ben-Gurion as ‘Vladimir Hitler,’ Jabotinsky is history’s most misunderstood Zionist.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the intellectual forebear of the secular Israeli right, is the most vilified and mischaracterized figure in Zionist history. Until his death in 1940, eight years before the state of Israel’s birth, Jabotinsky was the principal political rival of David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader who became the Jewish State’s first prime minister. Ben-Gurion labeled him “Vladimir Hitler” and denounced him and his followers as extremists and militarists who “educate their youth to kill.” Invented 80 years ago for intramural Zionist political purposes, these slanders have now become standard insults that anti-Zionists use to denigrate the Jewish state.
The right has dominated Israel’s democratic politics since 1977, when Likud’s Menachem Begin, a disciple of Jabotinsky, became the country’s first nonsocialist prime minister. But Jabotinsky’s reputation still awaits general rehabilitation. The cloud that his contemporary rivals cast over him and his political party, which evolved into today’s Likud, has never fully dissipated. To understand contemporary Israel requires an appreciation of its conservative political thought that is deeper than name-calling. This means taking Jabotinsky seriously, which is a pleasure to do, not least because his many writings were prescient, humane, artful and often humorous.

In his engaging and intelligent biography, Hillel Halkin, himself a brilliant Zionist man of letters—translator, novelist and essayist—illuminates Jabotinsky’s multifaceted nature as a littérateur and polemicist, political thinker and activist, family man and frustrated politician. Mr. Halkin’s particular interest is the tension between Jabotinsky’s lifelong, passionate defense of individual liberty and his staunch Jewish nationalism, exaltation of military discipline and tough line toward the Arabs.

Born in 1880 in cosmopolitan Odessa, the only large Russian city in which Jews lived freely, Jabotinsky was secular and sophisticated. Though his father died when he was six and his mother made a meager living running a stationery store, Jabotinsky had a happy childhood in which he played truant and mischief maker, though one with a talent for words. As a teenager, he was already a rising-star journalist, having won a newspaper job by impressing an editor with his translation of Poe’s “The Raven” into Russian.

Zionism was offering a new answer to the so-called Jewish question: what to do about the Jews’ status as unwelcome guests in other peoples’ countries. Jabotinsky grasped that Jews in Eastern Europe lived wretched lives—”always in a state of war,” as he put it in his memoirs—surrounded by neighbors who generally hated them and sporadically battered, raped and killed them in pogroms that government officials often tolerated and sometimes encouraged. He concluded that Jewish assimilationism would fail and that the Zionists were right: The Jews needed a state where they could be the majority and govern and secure themselves. And only the Jews’ ancient homeland—that is, Zion—could attract enough Jews and inspire the exertions necessary to create this new state.

President Obama finally completed the prisoner swap he has been pleading with the Taliban for years to accept. While the president draws down American forces in Afghanistan and hamstrings our remaining troops with unconscionable combat rules of engagement that make both offensive operations and self-defense extremely difficult, the Taliban get back five of their most experienced, most virulently anti-American commanders.

In return, thanks to the president’s negotiations with the terrorists, we receive U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl—who, according to several of his fellow soldiers, walked off his post in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. (For more on this, see Greg Pollowitz’spost at The Feed.) This was shortly after Sgt. Bergdahlreportedly emailed his parents that “The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at”; that he was “ashamed to even be an American”; and that “The horror that is America is disgusting.”

Sgt. Bergdahl’s father, Robert, was by Mr. Obama’s side during Saturday’s Rose Garden press conference, at which the president announced Sgt. Bergdahl’s return but carefully avoiding mention of the jihadi-windfall the Taliban received in exchange. Mr. Bergdahl is an antiwar activist campaigning for the release of all jihadists detained at Guantanamo Bay. His Twitter account, @bobbergdahl, has apparently now deleted a tweet from four days ago, in which he said, in echoes of Islamic supremacist rhetoric, “@ABalkhi I am still working to free all Guantanamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen!”

We have been warning for years here that Obama was negotiating with the Taliban—even as he duplicitously bragged that the U.S. had “removed the Taliban government.” The president and his minions reportedly even turned for mediation help to Sheikh YusufQaradawi—the top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist who issued a fatwa in 2003 calling for violent jihad against American troops and support personnel in Iraq. (Indeed, the administration has hostedQaradawi’s sidekick, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah—who also signed the fatwa—at the White House for consultations … and the State Department was embarrassed to be caught touting bin Bayyah just a week ago.)

Since the riots of the late 1960s to promote the creation of a black studies department under Nathan Hare, a professor who believed that the academy should be an inspiration for action in the streets, San Francisco State University has had a reputation for being a seedbed for radicalism. To the delight of many of its faculty and students, Hare’s union of theory and practice, what revolutionary Marxists call praxis, has strengthened over the years.

Lynne F. Stewart, who was sentenced to prison for being the liaison between her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and his violent followers in Cairo, was feted at SFSU even while awaiting sentencing. Rahman, known as the blind sheik, tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, an action that left death and injury in its wake.

Stewart made representations to the U.S. attorney during the Rahman trial that she needed repeated access to her client to carry out a defense. Instead, she transmitted messages from him to the Muslim Brotherhood back in Cairo, a fundamentalist group that murdered Anwar Sadat and has been busy cleansing Egypt of Coptic Christians.

At SFSU, Stewart was hailed as a civil rights attorney. But her delivery service had nothing to do with civil rights. Had Rahman and his followers succeeded in their goal of transforming America into a Sharia-dominated society, Stewart and the useful idiots at SFSU that rose to applaud her would be among the first to go.

There is no question that even a convicted felon has the right to speak. Whether a university should extend that right is not a question of law, but one of judgment.

And when advocacy crosses the line into taxpayer-funded political action, what then is a university’s responsibility?

The Carnegie Council on the East Side’s posh E. 64th Street, off Third Avenue, boasts modestly to attendees that it is the “18th most important think tank”. In the city? Country? Universe? On ne sais pas.

The Carnegie handout describes themselves thus:

Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1914, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an educational, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that produces lectures, publications and multimedia materials on the ethical challenges of living in a globalized world.

Their programs include a roster of impressive events. This season, for instance, they have a lineup that includes:

The rise of the new far right in Europe and implications for EU parliament elections (panel discussion);
Attacks on the press: journalism on the front lines (Joel Simon; Jacob Weisberg);
Moral imagination (David Bromwich);
Age of ambition: Chasing fortune, truth and faith in the New China (Evan Osnos).

In the main, top shelf. Topics the knowledgeable and committed care about. We go into these details to demonstrate that the captures are worthy, and the scope of discussants as wide as one could hope in this astral work-in-progress called New York City.

We also come to the reason for this report. The latest presentation at Carnegie Council was titled “Ethics matter: A conversation with Ezekiel Emanuel”. He is the elder of the celebrated and occasionally reviled Rahm Emanuel, ex- of the White House under the current 44th president, and currently serving as mayor of the nation’s highest citadel of civilian crime, shootings, drive-by killings, and other mayhemia made fresh by the resuscitation of the tightest gun-control laws in the nation (excepting only Phoenix, perhaps; but that fair Arizona dry-heat destination is title-winner mainly for abductions and kidnappings).

For those on a yoga retreat for the past five years, Zeke, one of three Emanuel brothers, high-achieving sons (the third brother is the model for Ariel “Ari” Gold, the super-caffeinated agent made amazingly eclatant by Jeremy Piven in Entourage) of Israeli physician parents, Holocaust survivors, was a prime architect of the Affordable Care Act. For those partial to nicknames, the ACA is of course what we have come to lovably bristle at as ObamaCare.

If one sets out to destroy the core pillars of a society, to incrementally break down the values of a country, and to dishearten its inhabitants, then Barack Hussein Obama has been a sterling success.

He is no amateur; he is not a feckless individual who doesn’t know what he is doing. His actions are deliberate, and his goals are in direct opposition to the vast majority of the American people. His so-called misdirections are calculated, and his leadership traits are not intended to support America. He knows exactly what he is doing, and far too many people still don’t comprehend or want to believe the machinations of this man and his underlying political arc.

Even some conservative commentators appear to be amazed at the constant replays of actions designed to hurt America. Why should they be? Obama is doing what Obama said he would do. He is transforming this country into the mold he wants – a weakened America, a demoralized American people, and a vast playground that he can ultimately demolish should he become head of the United Nations.

And he is succeeding.

What gives Obama an almost teflon-shield protection is that he is neither a bombastic leader like Hitler nor quite a sociopath like Stalin. He has mastered the art of being cool. He gives no one any conversational satisfaction, because he simply disappears from the scene. His passive resistance is a clever way of disarming the other side, who is not expecting such a response.

He has been tutored well; he is an excellent student, who has far surpassed his mentors. They would be proud.

But we do not have to be so naive. It is mandatory that we play the same game as Obama and company, but our net result is to save the country, not destroy it. We need to tweet one-liners that expose his true intentions; that speak the jargon that will resonate with people.

Is Hillary Clinton a charlatan or just the crappiest lawyer in Washington? As the Obama Left likes to say, that’s a false choice. There’s no reason she can’t be both.

The question arises thanks to yet another excellent report on the Obama administration’s Benghazi fraud by the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes. The Benghazi fraud is a prominent subject of my new book, Faithless Execution, which traces the debacle from the president’s unauthorized, unprovoked, and ultimately disastrous instigation of a war against the Qaddafi regime; through his (and Secretary Clinton’s) recklessly irresponsible failure to provide security for the American officials they mysteriously stationed in Benghazi (a jihadist hotbed that is one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans); through the president’s shocking failure to attempt to rescue Americans under siege on the night of September 11, 2012; and finally through Mr. Obama’s carefully orchestrated deception, in which the administration tried to hoodwink the country into blaming the murders of our ambassador and three other Americans on a video rather than on his calamitous policy of empowering Islamic supremacists.

Steve’s latest report homes in on Mrs. Clinton’s infamous “What difference, at this point, does it make” caterwaul, emitted during tense questioning by Senator Ron Johnson (R., WI) during a hearing on Benghazi.

Apparently, the former secretary of state struggles to rationalize this appalling testimony in her forthcoming memoir, Hard Choices. As notorious for taking no responsibility as for committing blunders over which accountability becomes an issue, Mrs. Clinton complains that her “What difference” yowl has been distorted. It was not, she insists, an exhibition of callous indifference; it was, in Steve’s description, “an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future.” Or, as Mrs. Clinton reportedly writes:

My point was simple: If someone breaks into your home and takes your family hostage, how much time are you going to spend focused on how the intruder spent his day as opposed to how best to rescue your loved ones and then prevent it from happening again?

As Steve quite rightly observes, this is nonsense. By the time of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, the Benghazi Massacre—and, indeed, even the Obama administration’s fraudulent “The Video Did It” cover-up of the cause of the Benghazi Massacre—was several months old. We were long, long past the intruder-in-the-home phase. We were in the accountability phase—the phase of: let’s now establish what actually happened and why, so we can then figure out how to prevent a recurrence.

Any competent lawyer knows that during the investigative and trial stages that follow a public debacle—to say nothing of an act of war in which American officials were derelict in responding to a murderous terrorist attack—the obligation of the witnesses is not to redirect the questions. It is to answer the questions. Any competent trial judge would have sustained an objection to the secretary of state’s evasive answer, striking it from the record as non-responsive.

Mrs. Clinton is a crappy lawyer if she does not get that, since a first-year law student would. And she is a charlatan because the transparent two-step objective of her performance was, first, to dodge questions about her conduct and, then, to wail that the questions must cease because she has already answered them.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/20/Obama-admin-releases-apology-video-Pakistan

Obama State Dept Releases Apology Video in Pakistan- SEP.12, 2012

So what does the media have to say about the fact that the Obama administration is running ads on Pakistani television, during riots at the American embassy in Pakistan, showing Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton essentially apologizing for a controversial YouTube video about Mohammed? The ad shows Obama stating, “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None.” The video goes on to show Clinton stating, “Let me state very clearly, and I hope it is obvious, that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message. America’s commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”

This is what we call appeasement.

As rioters burn flags outside our embassy in Pakistan, it is disgraceful for the State Department to use US taxpayer dollars to rip on legitimate expression under the First Amendment. And it is an apology for American values to do so.

THEN ON SEP.13 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/clinton-anti-islam-video-_n_1880804.html

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is sharpening her criticism of an anti-Islam video that provoked protests in the Arab world.

Clinton says the film is “disgusting and reprehensible.” She calls it a cynical attempt to offend people for their religious beliefs.

But Clinton says the U.S. would never stop Americans from expressing their views, no matter how distasteful. And she says the film is no justification for violence or attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel.

Clinton said Thursday the U.S. is monitoring protests in Yemen and elsewhere. She’s urging countries to take steps to prevent protests escalating into violence.

Note: This column is adapted from a speech I gave in New York City on May 29, announcing the publication of Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Faithless Execution is about presidential lawlessness.

Specifically, my new book, which Encounter Books will release this week, is about how the Framers of our Constitution fully anticipated that a president could fail to honor his core duty to execute the laws faithfully — could fail to meet his basic fiduciary obligations to the American people.

Viewing the Obama presidency through the prism of these constitutional norms, Faithless Execution argues that we are experiencing a different kind of presidential lawlessness than our nation has ever known: a systematic undermining of our governing framework, willfully carried out by a president who made no secret of his intention to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

What is the president trying to transform?

Well, the constitutional framework he is undermining enshrines two core principles: separation-of-powers and accountability.

The first is the foundation of a free society. President Obama presumes the power to decree, amend, and repeal laws as he sees fit, effectively claiming all government power as his own. But as James Madison, the principal author of our Constitution, put it, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” And so it is.

Accountability, the second constitutional principle at issue, is how our system holds a president singularly responsible for executive lawlessness. The Constitution vests all executive power in a lone elected official — the president. Not in the broad, dizzying array of executive-branch agencies; in the president himself.

“Jim Geraghty sums up what Clinton’s Benghazi chapter really comes down to:

… is to remind people that Hillary Clinton is willing to lie, quite dramatically, boldly, and shamelessly, even in ways that can be easily checked and refuted, when her political aspirations are at stake.”

Nine days after terrorists killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya — and nine days after Clinton herself blamed the attack on a YouTube video — Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she appointed a board to investigate the attack. That, she writes, ought to count for something. Politico’s Maggie Haberman seems to agree. Haberman got the exclusive first look at Hillary’s Benghazi chapter, access that raises questions of its own.

The chapter is a mostly chronological retrospective of the attack interspersed with Clinton’s views. She points out that she ordered an investigation into what happened nine days after the attacks, and that she agreed with and implemented all 29 of the recommendations made by a review board.

Clinton hand-picked that board, which never even interviewed Clinton about Benghazi. Some review. And nine days is quite a long time for the scene of a crime/terrorist attack to get picked over and see evidence carried away or destroyed. With the 2012 presidential election just weeks after the attack, nine days was quite a long time, clearly enough time to keep the disaster from swamping the Obama campaign. Clinton had to appoint the Accountability Review Board, she had no choice. She appointed it only after she and the president and Ambassador Susan Rice had spent a fortnight blaming the attack on a video.

In addition to patting herself on the back for constructing a review that was designed not to touch her, Clinton speculates on the motives of the attackers, none of whom have been arrested yet.

“There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives,” she writes. “It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions defy not only the evidence but logic as well.”