RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the 21st century, barbarism has gained ground at the expense of civilization. Democracy has been in sharp decline [2]. Terrorism increased by 35 percent [3] in 2014. ISIS’s latest video is the most horrific yet [4].

If civilization can still prevail, it first has to be able to distinguish between civilization and barbarism. Civilization has had a notoriously hard time doing that. It signed a peace agreement with Herr Hitler and declared “peace in our time.” It may be on the verge of signing an agreement with Iran that leaves its nuclear program intact and ensures it will get—for starters—$150 billion worth of sanctions relief.

The inability to morally distinguish between Israel and its barbaric enemies is, of course, a key part of the malaise. The UN Human Rights Council’s report on last summer’s war in Gaza, released this week, is a further symptom of a disease that appears incurable.

Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality.Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope.

This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet.

“Israel defeated conventional warfare time and again, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. It overcame the strategic terrorist onslaught of the Second Intifada. What’s urgently needed now is a strategy to defeat this third phase of our enemies’ efforts to destroy this country — which they pursue by waging war from within a civilian populace, and demonizing Israel when it fights back. However much we moan about the intransigent hostility, the relentless conflicts, the misrepresentation and the injustice, the cold fact is that our enemies are celebrating. And Mary McGowan Davis is one more ghastly reason for that.”

Op-ed: The skewed UNHRC report on last summer’s war will further embolden Hamas. Still, mere moaning about it, and moaning about our enemies’ evil schemes, is no substitute for a strategy

Guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show last week, I mentioned an outrageous and very direct assault on free speech by the Government of the United States. As I said on the air, federal prosecutors are demanding Reason, the libertarian mag, cough up any identifying information on readers who posted comments in relation to the Silk Road case.

That was the trial in which the Silk Road drugs impresario, Ross Ulbricht, wound up being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This would not happen, obviously, in Sweden or New Zealand or anywhere else, but even by the standards of American courtrooms it was unusual: Judge Katherine Forrest gave Ulbricht a tougher sentence than the prosecution had asked for. Commenters at Reason, who aren’t big on the “war” on drugs, were unimpressed by Judge Forrest:

Whenever and wherever tragedy strikes, politicians follow. This one has been no different. Before the smoke cleared, the Reverend Al Sharpton announced he was on his way to Charleston. The President couldn’t help himself: When asked about the tragedy he expressed consoling words for the victims and their families, but then added that what Charleston, Newtown and Aurora had in common was the ease with which the perpetrators acquired their weapons. The Press, predictably, began barraging Republican candidates on their views regarding gun control, racism and whether the Confederate flag should fly over state-owned property in South Carolina’s capital.

You almost certainly know how the expectations game is played in electoral politics, because there are only three rules:

1) If you think you’re going to win, set expectations low. Your victory then appears even bigger than “expected.”

2) If you think you’re going to lose, set expectations even lower. Your loss won’t look so bad as “expected.”

3) If you know you’re going to lose, lower expectations for your opponent by dismissing the entire event as meaningless. Their win will mean less than “expected.”

At this early stage in the game — six months before the Iowa Caucus or the New Hampshire Primary, Team Clinton is already working Rule #2 in those early states. Democratic strategist (and self-described “Clinton supporter”) Maria Cardona went on ABC’s This Week to talk to Jonathan Karl about the threat posed to Hillary by Vermont Democratic-Socialist-Independent-Democrat Bernie Sanders:

As most everyone has heard by now, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data systems were hacked sometime during the last 18 months, and a whole lot of people’s personal information was copied out. The estimates on how many “a whole lot” is have changed, and frankly I don’t trust any government numbers, but OPM now says that it was “as many as” 14 million people.

When I say “personal information,” by the way, I’m not just talking about Social Security numbers and names.

Some of the data exposed was from the background investigations of people with security clearances, collected with Standard Form 86 [1]. This form is nearly 150 pages long, and it collects everything — where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, who you know. For high-level clearances, it is then supplemented with a background investigation that looks at your credit, your potential police record, and interviews with people whom you identified on the form, and other people who show up by being connected to those people.

Hillary’s Achilles Heel has been found.

The sale to Russia of 20% of existing U.S. uranium production, and 50% of potential reserves, may well be the issue that takes down Hillary Clinton. She chose New Hampshire TV station WMUR as the venue to provide her rebuttal to Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, and managed to seriously mislead, if not lie about the timing of donations and her actions as secretary of state. Even worse, she in effect pleaded negligence, not venality, in allowing the purchase to be approved. Via Breitbart:

When asked about the specific details about the appearance of quid pro quo in the Uranium One deal brought up in the book Clinton said, “I don’t know if we have enough time in this interview to debunk all the allegations that were made by people who are wielding the partisan axe but there is no basis for any of that. The timing doesn’t work. It happened in terms of the support for the foundation before I was secretary of state. There were nine government agencies who had to sign off on that deal. I was not personally involved because that wasn’t something the secretary of state did. I mean literally we could have a whole show debunking a lot of these really wild, inaccurate allegations.”

When Michael Oren met Yitzhak Rabin as a teenager in 1970 he had never visited Israel. But he vowed to become its ambassador to the U.S.

In Romain Gary’s celebrated (if now forgotten) memoir “Promise at Dawn,” the author recalls an announcement from his mother. “You are going to be a French ambassador,” she tells him. It was the 1920s; Gary was a child. He and his mother were Lithuanian Jews, and they were nowhere near France. But by the time he wrote his memoir in 1960, Gary was a successful novelist with an appreciation for the narrative power of an unlikely dream realized. He was also a French ambassador.

In his memoir “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” Michael B. Oren remembers traveling to Washington, D.C., with a Zionist youth group in 1970 and shaking hands with the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin. “Silently, I vowed, ‘That is what I’ll be someday—Israel’s ambassador to America,’ ” writes Mr. Oren. At the time, he was a New Jersey teenager who had never even visited Israel. What follows is a “quintessentially American story of a young person who refused to relinquish a dream irrespective of the obstacles,” Mr. Oren writes, culminating in—well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it.

U.S. legislation to ease sanctions will instead primarily benefit Havana’s state-owned monopolies.

Three bills full of lofty but disingenuous rhetoric about “supporting the Cuban people” were recently filed in the U.S. Senate to ease sanctions. To have an honest debate about sanctions on Cuba, it’s important to understand how that totalitarian regime conducts business. The bills primarily benefit three monopolies in Cuba, all owned and operated by the Cuban government: Etecsa, Alimport and Gaesa.

Let’s look at each piece of legislation: