RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Down Under” Australia just suffered an election defeat. Here is an up front comment by Quadrant (Australia’s eminent conservative magazine) contributor Merv Bendle which is totally applicable to our own nation:

“The path forward for conservatives is clear, now that the coup executed by Malcolm Turnbull has eradicated any illusions that the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott could be an effective bulwark against the evermore intrusive power of the state as it seeks completely to colonize civil society and dominate every aspect of life.”

All of these areas of public policy share one crucial characteristic – they involve the mobilization of state power to impose vast new structures of tightly regulated behaviour upon society that would not otherwise have evolved of their own accord. They also necessitate massive bureaucracies based on the Promethean assumption that the almost infinite intricacies of social, economic, and ecological life can be grasped, modelled, manipulated, and directed by the apparatus of the state …..”

Which of the candidates debating tonight gets this and what corrective suggestions could be offered?

Just weeks ago, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel posed for pictures with anguished Syrian refugees and pledged to take in as many as 500,000 per year. But as Fox News reported, “uneasy critics inside the European power fear the huge influx could not only skew the nation’s demographics in a hurry, but could also include terrorists hiding among the war weary masses…ISIS has already said it planted jihadist fighters among the refugees, and some in Germany wonder why the terrorist army’s claims are not being taken more seriously.”

Now in a complete reversal, Germany has announced it is immediately introducing border controls in the south of the country, as announced Sunday by Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

Vox.com reports the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed “urgent security reasons.”

And when you view this clip courtesy of LiveLeak, it all makes perfect sense. Do you want to invite hooligans with sticks, stones and hurling fists into your quiet cul-de-sac?

A Shiite militia has released an ISIS-style video featuring Turkish workers it took hostage. Its message is aimed at Turkey’s Islamist leader Erdogan, who is allegedly an ISIS backer and certainly a backer of assorted Sunni Islamic terror groups.

While Western media sources aren’t listing the identity of the Shiite terror group responsible, Turkish media outlets claim that Iraq raided Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi version of Hezbollah backed by Iran. The raid resulted in a firefight between what’s left of the Iraqi army and Shiite militias.

Insurgent radical Bernie Sanders’ passionate anti-American campaign is eating away at the once-commanding lead of frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary race, according to new polling.

Although Hillary is still edging out Bernie at the national level, according to a new Monmouth University poll for the first time Bernie is now leading Hillary by 7 points in New Hampshire, the first state to vote in 2016. New Hampshire allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the primary of their choice.

Clinton still clings to a small lead among Democrats in the state. She has 43 percent support among Democrats, compared to Sanders’ 39 percent support. Sanders enjoys 49 percent support from registered Independents and new voters, way ahead of Clinton’s 26 percent.

Vice President Joe Biden, who is pondering joining the race, has 13 percent. A mere 2 percent back Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee, Larry Lessig, and Jim Webb each receive 1 percent.

— America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, American prison populations have boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has increased by only 50 percent. Why?

Liberals blame racism and the “War on Drugs,” in particular long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. This past July, in a speech to the NAACP, President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that “over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” The War on Drugs, he suggested, is just a continuation of America’s “long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system,” which has disproportionately harmed minorities.

Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a “primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon.” To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years’ imprisonment.

The president is echoing what liberal criminologists and lawyers have long charged. They blame our prison boom on punitive, ever-longer sentences tainted by racism, particularly for drug crimes. Criminologists coined the term “mass incarceration” or “mass imprisonment” a few decades ago, as if police were arresting and herding suspects en masse into cattle cars bound for prison. Many blame this phenomenon on structural racism, as manifested in the War on Drugs.

“I’m offering something different.”

Which Republican presidential candidate said these words? Was it Donald Trump, Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, one of the outsiders highlighting the fact that they have never held elective office? Or maybe John Kasich, Scott Walker or Chris Christie, one of the sitting GOP governors running against Washington?
Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. View Archive

No, it is Jeb Bush in his first campaign TV ad in the 2016 race.

Something different? Like what, a third Bush presidency?

The slogan, and the ad, epitomize everything that is wrong with his presidential campaign. In an election where outsiders are dominating, Bush’s ad screams “politician” — factory workers toiling in the background, while the candidate in his shirtsleeves talks about his experience and accomplishments in office. You could have seamlessly replaced Bush with almost any political candidate in America.

Newsflash: Hillary Clinton thinks you’re stupid. And if you still support her, then you must be stupid, too.

During a speech at Northern Iowa University on Monday, Clinton actually had the audacity to declare that sexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed.”

How noble! How feminist! Hey, Hillary, here’s an idea: If that’s really what you think, why don’t you start with believing Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and all the other women who have accused your husband of sexual assault?

I mean, is she serious? Did Hillary really think that everyone would have just forgotten about these women? Perhaps she forgot about them herself. After all, their troubles never really seemed to be all that important to this trailblazing “feminist icon.”

One thing’s for sure: Clinton’s campaign has been full of hypocrisy. She’s been quick to slam anyone who opposes gay marriage, despite having declared in 2004 that “marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.” She’s been calling for criminal-justice reform — arguing that imprisoning people “does little to reduce crime” — despite having called for more prisons and tougher sentences in 1994.

As I wrote in my new book A Time for Truth, “PolitiFact” represents a new species of yellow journalism, where liberal reporters dress up as “facts” their liberal opinions and accuse anyone who disagrees with them of “lying.”

An article published last week by the outlet is a perfect example. It purports to “fact check” my recent statement that President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal will “facilitate and accelerate the nation of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.” The reporter concludes that the statement is objectively “false.”

He does so based on three alleged “facts”:

1. In this deal, the Iranian regime has promised not to develop nuclear weapons;

2. Their promise is reliable because either (a) the mullahs are entirely truthful and honest or (b) we will somehow magically know if they are cheating and breaking the deal;

3. So therefore, since they’ve promised not to develop nuclear weapons and PolitiFact has decided to take them at their word, it is a “lie” to say that they will in fact develop nuclear weapons.

Refugees arrive in some of Europe’s poorest states, mainly Greece, Italy and Hungary, but insist that they have a right to head for more prosperous nations where welfare benefits are higher and healthcare freely available.

“Kuwait and the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries are too valuable to accept any refugees. … It’s too costly to relocate them here. Kuwait is too expensive for them anyway, as opposed to Lebanon and Turkey, which are cheap. They are better suited for the Syrian refugees. … it is not right for us to accept a people that are different from us. We don’t want people that suffer from internal stress and trauma in our country.” — Kuwaiti official, Fahad al-Shalami.

It may also be that the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere see the movement of Muslim refugees to Europe as a golden opportunity to increase their work in da’wa (Islamic proselytization).

This crisis has exposed the abject failure of the EU, the UN, the OIC or anybody else to criticize the bloated nations of the Gulf with even a tiny fraction of the abuse they pour daily on the only democratic state in the Middle East, Israel. It is a repetition of the ongoing Palestinian refugee crisis over again, with the Arab states refusing to give jobs and citizenship to Palestinian Arabs over decades, keeping them in refugee camps and laying the blame on Israel. Is it surprising that the Arab world is still on the steady downward course it embarked on in 1948?

Ben Carson has pulled into a statistical margin-of-error tie with Donald Trump in a new CBS News/New York Times poll out today.

The pediatric neurosurgeon has surged to 23 percent among likely Republican primary voters, up from just 6 percent in the same survey in July.

Trump has 27 percent, a slight uptick from 24 percent in July.

Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio all trail with 6 percent. Ted Cruz has 5 percent, Carly Fiorina has 4 percent, and John Kasich and Rand Paul have three percent each. Scott Walker only has 2 percent support, falling from 10 percent in July.