RUTHFULLY YOURS

During the recent foreign policy crises over Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, the Munich analogy was heard from both sides of the political spectrum. Arguing for airstrikes against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the nation faced a “Munich moment.” A few months later, numerous critics of Barack Obama’s diplomatic discussions with Iran evoked Neville Chamberlain’s naïve negotiations with Adolph Hitler. “This wretched deal,” Middle East historian Daniel Pipes said, “offers one of those rare occasions when comparison with Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 is valid.” The widespread resort to the Munich analogy raises the question: When, if ever, are historical analogies useful for understanding present circumstances?

Since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, one important purpose of describing historical events was to provide models for posterity. Around 395 B.C., Thucydides wrote that his history was for “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” Thus he proclaimed his history to be “a possession for all time.” Nearly four centuries later, the Roman historian Livy wrote his history of the Roman Republic from its foundations to Augustus in order to show “what to imitate,” and to “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”

Both historians believed the past could inform and instruct the present because they assumed that human nature would remain constant in its passions, weaknesses, and interests despite changes in the political, social, or technological environment. As Thucydides writes of the horrors of revolution and civil war, “The sufferings . . . were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.” Good history must take into account that “variety of the particular cases,” but an unchanging human nature will over time and space work similar effects. The past, then, can provide analogies for the present, provided they are based on “exact knowledge,” and the “variety of particular cases” is respected.

The headline of his New York Times obituary described him as a “Polarizing Poet and Playwright,” and the obit itself began by describing him as a figure “of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others.” The Associated Press called him a “militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture.” The Washington Post celebrated “his protean place in American culture.” His legacy, according to NPR’s headline, was “Both Offensive And Achingly Beautiful.” The people at Poetry Magazine, the legendary journal founded in 1912, pronounced themselves “deeply saddened to report” his death; the Academy of American Poetry was “sad” over his loss. Over the years, the death notices informed us, he had taught at such places as Yale and Columbia and received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from PEN, and from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Warren Beatty respected him enough to give him a small symbolic role in his movie Bulworth.

Who was this literary master? His name was Amiri Baraka, and he died last Thursday at age 79. When I was a graduate student in the English Department at Stony Brook University, Baraka (who had been born Le Roi Jones) was the star of the Africana Studies Department, directly across the quad. (At his death, he was an emeritus professor there.) I never met him, but when I took an undergraduate course in modern American poetry, his work was on the syllabus. It was without question the worst stuff we read that term; in fact it was the worst stuff in that whole edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern American Poetry. I was so astonished at the sheer awfulness of his poems, in fact, that I typed one of them up, banged out three others of the same ilk off the top of my head, and passed them around to a few of my dorm friends, asking if they could tell which three I’d made up and which one I’d copied out of the Norton. None of them could. But the joke, it turned out, was on me. What I later learned was that Baraka wasn’t going for literary excellence: as he explained in a 1980 interview, his poems weren’t intended mainly to be read by other people in books; he created them so he’d have texts to declaim at public readings. (Even then, appparently, he was making a good deal of money giving public readings – much of that money, one presumes, drawn from university treasuries.)

87 year old Fidel Castro appeared in public last week for the first time in six months and the mainstream media can hardly contain themselves. This appearance coincides with the 55 anniversary of Castro’s “revolution.”

To read the media you’d think some effete and benevolent European monarch (from, say, Monaco or Liechtenstein) had made a brief cameo. Across the board the media refers to Fidel Castro as the “President” who “led” Cuba for almost fifty years. No hint of anything else happening in Cuba during that period.

You’d never guess Castro killed more Cubans in the process of “liberating” them than the Nazis killed French civilians in the process of conquering and enslaving them, that he brought the world closest to Nuclear war of any “leader” on earth and that he sunk a nation with a standard of living higher than half of Europe’s and swamped with immigrants into a pesthole that repels Haitians.

From this base Fidel Castro created an island slum, sewer and prison ravaged by diseases unknown in Cuba since 1900, boasting the highest suicide rate in the hemisphere and repelling even Haitians. This after stealing $2 billion from U.S. businessmen, $25 billion from Cubans and being lavished with the equivalent of ten Marshall plans by the Soviets, and economic feat defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics.

And, as mentioned, there’s the toll in lives. According to the Cuba Archive Project, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps, torture and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. According to the Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation. France was nation of 42 million in 1940. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1960. So my calculator reveals that “President” Castro caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people he “liberated” than Hitler caused among the French he set upon with his SS and Gestapo.

To the left there is no such thing as a good Republican. Not unless he is a dead Republican.

Dead Republicans are held up as examples of moderation who wouldn’t fit in today’s extremist party. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, once damned as deranged extremists lusting to blow up the planet, are temporarily rehabilitated and compared unfavorably to today’s Republicans and favorably to today’s Democrats.

From such exercises in posthumous political rehabilitation, we learn that Reagan was more like Obama and that whichever Republican has drawn the ire of the media this month is the rebirth of segregationist Democrats like Albert Gore Sr and Robert Byrd.

The good Republican who has the bad taste to stay alive will only enjoy a temporary vacation in the good graces of the media. It does not matter how often he pays fealty to global warming, gun control, gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens, or his willingness to appear on morning shows to bemoan the extremism of the Tea Party; the time will come when he will be dragged out of the Saturday Night Live studio and the CNN green room, hung from a tree and beaten with a stick for the enlightenment of the people.

Giving disability benefits to a grown man who wants to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.” That’s just the start of it. Hilarious but pointed news reports.

Every so often, I share news stories about the ridiculous and outrageous way in which the federal government squanders our money.

Doing interviews – at a per-person cost of $6,000 – about erectile dysfunction and sticking the tab on us.
Giving disability benefits to a grown man who wants to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.”
Squandering $400K on experimental underwear that detect cigarette smoke.
Paying 35 times the market price for some Kindles.
A $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.
Throwing $100 million in the garbage by subsidizing a leftist bureaucracy in Paris that advocates for higher taxes in the United States.
Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda.

So when I saw this New York Post story about the feds pissing away a six-figure sum on condom research, I figured this would be a perfect addition to my collection of government waste stories.

“The federal government is stretching your tax dollars — in search of the perfect condom. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will spend $224,863 to test 95 “custom-fitted” condoms so every American man can choose the one that fits just right.”

And it’s a good match with this story about Washington flushing away more than $400K on research about men not liking to wear condoms.

The U.S. military is like the highly skilled, gadget-toting contractor who promises to give your kitchen a nifty makeover in no time whatsoever. Here’s the guy you can count on to get the job done. Just look at those references! Yet by the time he drives off months later, the kitchen’s a shambles and you’re stuck with a bill several times larger than the initial estimate. Turns out the job was more complicated than it seemed. But what say we take a crack at remodeling the master bath?

That pretty much summarizes the American experience with war since the end of the Cold War. By common consent, when it comes to skills and gadgets, U.S. forces are in a league of their own. Yet when it comes to finishing the job on schedule and on budget, their performance has been woeful.

Indeed, these days the United States absolves itself of any responsibility to finish wars that it starts. When we’ve had enough, we simply leave, pretending that when U.S. forces exit the scene, the conflict is officially over. In 2011, when the last American troops crossed from Iraq into Kuwait, President Obama proudly declared that he had made good on his campaign promise to end the Iraq war. Sometime late this year, when the U.S. terminates its combat role in Afghanistan, he will waste no time consigning that war to the past as well.

Yet the Iraq war did not end when the United States withdrew. Even with Washington striving mightily to ignore the fact, the violent ethno-sectarian struggle for Iraq triggered by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion continues. In recent days, events such as Al Qaeda’s ferocious welcome-to-the-new-year assault on the cities of Fallouja and Ramadi — roughly the equivalent of a Confederate army laying siege to Gettysburg sometime during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant — have made it impossible to pretend otherwise.

Events in Afghanistan are likely to follow a similar trajectory. No serious person thinks that the war there — launched even earlier, back in 2001 — will end just because U.S. troops are finally packing up to go home. No doubt the American public will forget Afghanistan as quickly as it forgot Iraq. Yet as with Iraq war, the struggle to determine Afghanistan’s fate will continue, its duration and outcome no less uncertain.

ROBERT GATES IS AN OPPORTUNIST WITH A RATHER NASTY HISTORY ON THE MIDDLE EAST…..CALLING ISRAEL ” AN UNGRATEFUL ALLY”…”

“Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense, got considerable attention this week when, speaking in Norfolk, Virginia, he said American officials should make it clear to the government of Israel that “they do not have a blank check to take action that could do grave harm to American vital interests.” Strongly objecting to an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, he claimed, “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.”Gates has offered such views before. Jeffrey Goldberg reported a year ago, in September 2011, that Gates (then still our defense secretary) told a meeting of the “Principals Committee” of top national security officials in the White House Situation Room that Israel was an “ungrateful ally.” In return for all the United States had done for Israel, Gates said, we have received “nothing in return.” Ungrateful ally, nothing in return, blank check—do we see a pattern here? In fact an important incident from the George W. Bush administration suggests that whether or not Gates is hostile to Israel, his judgment is badly flawed when it comes to evaluating the risks Israel faces and the likely results of Israeli action to address those risks.” Elliott Abrams- http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/bob-gates-and-israel-there-he-goes-again_653750.html
For the last five years, I have waited for the other shoe to drop.

In 2008, the American people elected an incompetent and foolish president, Obama. President Obama knew that he could only trust a handcuffed politician and loyalist like Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. He then later appointed the pompous John Kerry to fill this capacity. Yet this “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” was a ticking time bomb.

Three strikes and you’re out. Let me list them:

Obama: incompetent and disinterested in policy (president).
Clinton: interested in policy but a potential rival politician, so she could not be assigned to do anything too productive (secretary of state).
John Kerry: assigned to do productive work but totally incompetent (secretary of state).

Imagine former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates–who recently published Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, in which he criticized Obama and his administration–seething. Certainly, he never would have gotten as far as he did if he hadn’t been an opportunist, but U.S. interests, not politics, was his duty. He knew that Americans were being sacrificed uselessly to make the situation “work.”

DON’T CRY FOR CRISTINA KIRCHNER THE NASTY SUPERANNUATED “EVITA WANNABE” WHO IS NOW THE PRESIDENT….RSK

On a visit to Buenos Aires in November I noted a sense of foreboding hanging over the city. With the economy in a stall, consumer prices rising and capital fleeing the country, porteños from every walk of life seemed to be bracing for a storm—and resigned to the hardship it would bring to this harbor city.

The city infrastructure looked defeated too: The wide boulevards and grand 19th-century buildings are now tired and grungy and the streets smelly. Angry graffiti and tattered posters deface walls, adding to the general feeling of lawless decay. It takes a long time to destroy a nation’s wealth but a decade of kirchnerism o—government by President Néstor Kirchner and now his widow, Cristina —seems to be doing the job.

In recent weeks things have gotten worse. The way out also looks more difficult. Three big developments in December raised the specter of descent into full-blown chaos. The first occurred when the police in the provincial capital of Cordoba suddenly walked off the job to protest low salaries. Hooligans took the work stoppage by law enforcement as an invitation to sack the city. More than 1,000 stores were looted and two people killed.

Chalk up a big victory for the First Amendment. On Friday a Wisconsin judge struck a major blow for free political speech when he quashed subpoenas to conservative groups and ordered the return of property to the targets of a so-called John Doe campaign-finance probe.

John Doe probes operate much like grand juries, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches while gag orders require the targets to keep quiet. We wrote about the kitchen-sink subpoenas and morning raids by special prosecutor Francis Schmitz that targeted dozens of conservative groups that participated in the battle to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker (“Wisconsin Political Speech Raid,” Nov. 16, 2013).

Now we learn that Judge Gregory A. Peterson ruled on Friday that at least some of those subpoenas were improper. They “do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws,” he wrote. His opinion remains under seal but we obtained a copy.

In January, the gangland shootings of two young Moroccan men in downtown Amsterdam drew renewed attention to the growing problem of violent crime among Muslim immigrants. The two men were gunned down with AK-47 assault rifles in a shooting the mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, described as reminiscent of “the Wild West.”

In March, the Dutch public broadcasting system NOS television reported that the Netherlands has become one of the major European suppliers of Islamic jihadists. According to NOS, about 100 Dutch Muslims are active as jihadists in Syria; most have joined the notorious Jabhat al-Nusra rebel group.

Belgium and the Netherlands have some of the largest Muslim communities in the European Union, in percentage terms.

Belgium is home to an estimated 650,000 Muslims, or around 6% of the overall population, based on an average of several statistical estimates. The Netherlands is home to an estimated 925,000 Muslims, which also works out to around 6% of the overall population. Within the EU, only France (7.5%) has more Muslims in relative terms.

Belgian and Dutch cities have significant Muslim populations, comprised mostly of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, as well as a growing number of converts to Islam.

The number of Muslims in Brussels—where roughly half of the number of Muslims in Belgium currently live—has reached 300,000, which means that the self-styled “Capital of Europe” is now one of the most Islamic cities in Europe.

In 2013, Muslims made up approximately 26% of the population of metropolitan Brussels, followed by Rotterdam (25%), Amsterdam (24%), Antwerp (17%), The Hague (14%) and Utrecht (13%), according to a panoply of research.