RUTHFULLY YOURS

During the holiday of Passover, Jews retell the story of the liberation of Hebrews from slavery in ancient Egypt. At the seder or special Passover meal, questions are welcomed as Jews worldwide remember Pharoah’s bondage. They pledge not to be enslaved again, nor to enslave another. In fact, the greatest loss would be to “forget where we came from” because then we would lose the message of freedom–an astounding declaration in light of the endemic slavery in the world today.

Pragmatically, Jews should never have survived the multitude of attacks and genocidal attempts on them. Yet, Mark Twain marveled that “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then . . . passed away. The Greek and the Roman followed. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts. … All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Growing support for – and pledges of allegiance to – Islamic State by diverse Islamic terrorist groups world-wide are now creating horrific humanitarian problems for Christian communities in many countries – some far removed from the Middle East.

Thirty such groups have so far been identified:

A sea change began within hours of the Israeli election returns.

Thomas L. Friedman, who has devoted much of his life to promoting Palestinian statehood, declared in his New York Times column that the idea of a Palestinian state is “not possible anymore.” That was followed by his Times colleague David K. Shipler, another longtime advocate of a Palestinian state, announcing that the “the two-state solution looks dead.”

Just a couple of elite, pro-Palestinian journalists venting their frustration?

Don’t bet on it. The American public is losing faith in “Palestine” too. Friedman and Shipler’s declarations merely echo the latest poll numbers on the American public’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll has found that Americans’ support for the idea of creating a Palestinian state has reached its lowest point in twenty years. Just 39% of Americans support it; 36% are opposed.

At long last the Department of State is investigating why a top Hillary Clinton aide with generational ties to Islamic terrorism was allowed to work in a sensitive government position while simultaneously working for a Clinton-connected private sector consulting firm.

Hillary Clinton and the senior aide, Huma Abedin, apparently conspired to keep the sweetheart working arrangement that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked employee had at Foggy Bottom a secret. Because it involves a Clinton, the story is, of necessity, complex and convoluted. And it’s classic Hillary as she tiptoes through a minefield of ethics violations, conflicts of interests, and potential national security-related breaches.

News of the probe came two days before the Benghazi bungler finally launched her long-awaited coronation parade campaign Sunday on YouTube [1].

“I’m running for president,” Mrs. Clinton said in the video. “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times. But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion.”

Yes, Clinton is a champion — of Islamic expansionism. She let four Americans die in 2012 so President Obama, in the midst of his reelection fight, wouldn’t have to reconcile the terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya with his dishonest boast that al-Qaeda was on the run under his leadership. That she hired someone of questionable loyalty to the United States shouldn’t surprise anyone.

When the Polk Awards decided to honor the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, one obvious name came to mind. Gary Trudeau.

If there is one man who represents the opposite of what the Charlie cartoonists did, it’s Trudeau. They took risks, Trudeau takes none. They lived knowing that they could be killed at any moment. There is no person on earth who would bother killing Gary Trudeau even if it was Kill Gary Trudeau Day.

Trudeau is that paradoxical creature, the establishment cartoonist, the party satirist, the hack who dares to say exactly what he is expected to say. Imagine NPR in a few black and white sketches. That’s Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Republicans are bad. Liberals are good. And then insert a topical reference.

The Polk Awards were the best forum for Trudeau. George Polk invented [1] heroic wartime exploits that got him a job at CBS. Unlike Brian Williams, Polk did serve, but he was not a fighter pilot, he serviced aircraft. In Greece, his dubious reporting attacking Truman and the Greek government was defended by his lefty colleagues by inventing even more imaginary heroics that he had never claimed for himself.

By the time they were done, Polk had singlehandedly defeated the Japanese.

How the Clintons pioneered the methods by which Obama sold his Iran deal.

Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.

What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?

It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper—lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?

A President Who Lived and Died for Liberty
One hundred and fifty years ago, on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln went to the theater.
The day began as one of the happiest of his life. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 had elated him, and he had been more buoyant than at any other time during his presidency. Three-quarters of a million men had fallen in the Civil War over which he had presided, and the conflict had almost consumed him.
“This war is eating my life out,” he once said to abolitionist Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”

The universities were ranked using a traffic-light system: red for universities that ban and actively censor certain ideas on campus; amber for universities that chill free speech, and green for universities that have a hands-off approach to free speech.

The results of the Free Speech University Rankings were staggering. Forty-seven universities were marked red, including Oxford University and the London School of Economics; 45 were marked amber, including Cambridge University, and a mere 25 were marked green. Results indicate that 80% of British universities censor free speech.

You can never know what that wacky Hillary Clinton will do next. At the outset of her latest presidential campaign, she decided to drive from New York to Iowa for her first campaign stop. Or, to be more precise, she decided to be driven to Iowa by a Secret Service agent as part of a three-car caravan in keeping with her security needs. For a former first lady and global celebrity, this is traveling light and spontaneous — let’s load up the Secret Service detail and blow this joint.

Her campaign referred to her vehicle as “her Scooby van,” evoking the lovable madcap crew of the cartoon series. This could be considered a cute little affectation, until you realize that she campaigned in a van in her 2000 Senate race, and for the same reason: to appear more relatable (the Secret Service reportedly referred to that vehicle, too, as the Scooby-Doo van). Hillary Clinton has been reintroducing herself to the public for so long that even her manufactured stabs at authenticity aren’t entirely new. Of course, the image she is trying to live down is the Hillary of the “Saturday Night Live” sketches, whose calling card is her gratingly insincere laugh and her cringe-inducing blatant calculations. It is her curse as a politician of stamina and determination, but not of natural grace, that her maneuvers to reveal her “real” self always feel like obvious maneuvers. To say that she lacks the light touch is almost as much of an understatement as saying her husband is not a monk.

His foreign-policy errors result not from incompetence but from a conscious agenda. Lots of questions arise about the muddled foreign policy of the Obama administration. Critics suggest that America’s friends have now become enemies, and enemies friends. Others cite incompetence and naïveté rather than deliberate agendas as the cause of American decline, and of growing global chaos from Libya to Ukraine. But, in fact, there is a predictable pattern to Obama’s foreign policy.

The president has an adolescent, romantic view of professed revolutionary societies and anti-Western poseurs — and of his own ability uniquely to reach out and win them over. In the most superficial sense, Obama demonstrates his empathy for supposedly revolutionary figures of the non-Western world through gratuitous, often silly remarks about Christianity and Western colonial excesses, past and present. He apologizes with talk of our “own dark periods” and warns of past U.S. “dictating”; he contextualizes; he ankle-bites the very culture he grew up and thrived in, as if he can unapologetically and without guilt enjoy the West’s largesse only by deriding its history and values. In lieu of reading or speaking a foreign language, or knowing much about geography (Austrians speak Austrian, the death camps were Polish, the Indian Ocean Maldives are the politically correct name of the Falklands, cities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are Gulf ports, etc.), Obama adopts, in the manner of a with-it English professor, hokey accentuation to suggest an in-the-know fides anytime he refers to the Taliban, Pakistan, or Teheran.