RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEPTEMBER 2, 1945: General Douglas MacArthur presides over the formal surrender of Japan aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, a ceremony which brought an end to nearly four years of war. After a steady drumbeat of costly victories in the Pacific campaign, by the summer of 1945 the Japanese empire’s military might was largely smashed on sea and in the air, and American forces had captured Okinawa, from which a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands was to be launched. But the Japanese high command held fast, determined to preserve the power of the monarchy and defend the home islands at all costs. It was only with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Emperor Hirohito assented to the term of the Potsdam Declaration to end the war. MacArthur would serve as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers during the occupation of Japan.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/slideshows/today-history-3

The ongoing migration crisis in Europe, with its drownings and other deaths, is forcing Europe’s post-borders elites into an uncomfortable position. Because they preside over polities that are still somewhat democratic — and the peoples of Europe do not choose to commit national suicide — governments there can’t abolish immigration limits altogether, much as they might want to. At the same time, Europe’s rulers are unwilling to take the steps needed to enforce the limits nominally on the books.

The result is hundreds of thousands of people from less happier lands calculating that it’s worth the relatively small risk of death to make it to Europe, where they will almost certainly be permitted to stay, whether they’re formally awarded refugee status or not.

Given the Middle East’s disintegration and sub-Saharan Africa’s general dysfunction, this means that Europe is at the mercy of the countries to its immediate south. So long as Qaddafi kept order in Libya and Turkey was willing to contain most of the Middle Easterners trying to pass through, a spineless Europe could maintain the façade of immigration limits. There was a lot of immigration even then, but the heat rose slowly enough that the frog, while increasingly restless, had not yet been induced to jump out of the pot.

Black lives matter — unless, apparently, you’re Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The left is renewing its venomous, racist attacks on Thomas in the aftermath of his dissent in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in favor of gay marriage.

Actor George Takei smeared Thomas as a “clown in blackface.” The Huffington Post called his dissent “beyond ridiculous” and tarred him as a hypocrite for opposing a court-created “right” to gay marriage:

“Clarence Thomas is married to a white woman — something that would be illegal today, if it weren’t for the Supreme Court’s historic Loving v. Virginia ruling.” As if his personal life is fair game.

Last Friday, in another low blow, New York Times reporter Adam Liptak portrayed Thomas as a lightweight whose opinions are cut-and-paste jobs from briefs submitted to the court.

But in truth, all the justices refer liberally to briefs. Thomas borrows about 11.3 percent of his judicial prose from briefs, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor lifts 11 percent and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 10.5 percent. It’s not “cribbing” or plagiarism, as Liptak’s hatchet job implies, but simply the way decisions are written.

In fact, Thomas appears to be the most productive justice, having written 37 opinions this past term, more than any other justice. That fact’s enough to dispense with New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin’s bogus claim that Thomas has “checked out” and “is simply not doing his job.”

If the 2016 presidential election ends up a contest between 1992’s surnames — Bush vs. Clinton — we will have failed in some way as a republic.

The case for Jeb Bush is not exactly clear, though he enjoys an advantage vis-à-vis Mrs. Clinton in that the case against Herself is as clear as can be: She’s inept and dishonest.

Bush was a good governor of Florida — a long time ago, politically speaking. Things were different then: His time as governor coincided with a real-estate bubble that relieved him and other Florida leaders of the need to make a great many pressing financial decisions, and larger decisions about the structure of government.

Has Hillary Clinton been lying about her email system and did she violate the laws against mishandling classified material? Coverage of Clinton’s email scandal has been focused on those questions, but shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information? We’re not focused on the details of the security damage because it’s difficult to know whether and to what extent Hillary’s communications were intercepted, and more difficult still to make public whatever our intelligence agencies may have figured out on that score.

But maybe we already know enough to conclude that Hillary’s email scandal constitutes one of the most serious American national security disasters on record. The Daily Beast has a story out speculating that the email scandal may soon spread to the White House. Interesting as that question is, this passage seems more significant:

“There’s a widely held belief among American counterspies that foreign intelligence agencies had to be reading the emails on Hillary’s private server, particularly since it was wholly unencrypted for months….senior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.”

Hillary Clinton’s second race for the presidency is only about a quarter through, but she already seems to be causing general fatigue.

The lurid revelations about the Clinton Foundation proved that it was not so much a charity as a huge laundering operation. Quid pro quo donations from the global rich and powerful fueled the Clintons’ jet-setting networking.

In between political campaigns, the foundation provided sinecures for out-of-work Clinton politicos. This is hardly proof of Hillary’s grass-roots progressivism.

Then came Clinton’s e-mail fiasco. No one knows how the current investigation of her alleged misuse of e-mail accounts, servers, and classified information will end up. But most people accept that it was an unnecessary and self-induced scandal, brought on both by her paranoia and habitual expectation of being exempt from the law.

The overlooked source of the nation’s illegal immigration problems that people are finally talking about.

On August 31, 2015 Reuters reported on Governor Christie’s August 31, 2015 statement that if elected president, he would engage Fed-Ex to track illegal aliens to make certain that aliens who violate their terms of admission are located. The title of the Reuter’s article was, “Christie defends plan to monitor immigrants like FedEx tracks parcels.” The article began with the following excerpt:

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie pushed back on Sunday against “ridiculous” criticism of his proposal to track foreign visitors the way FedEx Corp tracks packages, saying government needs private-sector expertise to tackle illegal immigration.

“I don’t mean people are packages, so let’s not be ridiculous,” the New Jersey governor told an interviewer on Fox News Sunday who pointed out that foreigners do not have labels on their wrists.

The notion that the private sector is intrinsically better than the government is wrong. As you will shortly see, more than ten years ago, a private corporation, Accenture, was given the contract to implement such a tracking system.

Governor Christie is certainly right that we must be able to find aliens who go missing in the United States. He is also absolutely correct that people are not packages. People who ship packages want those packages to get to their customers; customers want their packages to be delivered. Finally, packages are incapable of moving on their own. Packages do not hide or use false aliases or bogus addresses.

Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland has pushed President Obama’s nuclear appeasement deal with Iran over the top. With her decision to vote in favor of the deal, Obama now has the support of the 34 senators he needs to uphold his expected veto of a congressional resolution of disapproval. If enough craven Democrats back a planned filibuster to prevent a vote on the floor of the Senate, Obama will not even have to use his veto pen.

The nightmare of a financially secure nuclear armed Iran, legitimized by the Obama administration and its international partners, is about to envelop us.

Ironically, Obama warned in a speech he delivered on September 1st in Alaska that a potentially bleak future could lie ahead, in which “there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively.”

Iran has barred famed musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim from entering the country because of his Israeli citizenship, thwarting his plan to lead a performance in Tehran, media have reported.

Barenboim, the 72-year-old general music director of the Berlin State Opera House, said on Thursday he was in talks with Iran about a concert, in what would have been a major example of cultural diplomacy.

But an Iranian culture ministry spokesman, Hossein Noushabadi, said an investigation meant Barenboim could not enter the country for security reasons, though the Berlin orchestra was welcome.

“We have no problem with the German orchestra coming to Iran, but we are opposed to the person leading that group,” Noushabadi told news agency ISNA.

“Meanness” is defined as unkindness, spitefulness and unfairness. It can also suggest stinginess, as in depriving students of contrary opinions and of ignoring their need to be challenged and to think independently. The word describes today’s political and cultural environment, one characterized by divisiveness between the elite who govern and the masses that are governed. When George Bush exclaimed “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” he was referring to those who were committing acts of terror or who were harboring terrorists. Now it means Republicans, or at least it does to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike most countries, the United States is a nation of immigrants – we come from all places, races and religions. The heritage we share is the history of our founding, which was based on the concept that “all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed.” It is a heritage of ideas. Whether our ancestors were present in Philadelphia, or whether we arrived in the past decade, it is the knowledge that our basic rights do not come from government, but from a larger power, and that government is subservient to the people. It is that that distinguishes Americans. No matter our political differences, no matter whether we are conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican we share this history. We have an obligation to encourage its persistence. But today that sense of commonality seems at risk.