RUTHFULLY YOURS

For a couple of years Obama and the U.S. Census Bureau have been working on adding to the 2020 census a new ethnic group, or “racial category.” This new addition to the conga-line of victims of white hegemony is called “Mena,” comprising people from the Middle East and North Africa, which includes very culturally diverse peoples from Berbers to Israelis, Arabs to Persians. All sorts of soothing rationales have been put forth for this move, such as helping government and scholars “understand more about trends in health, employment and education,” as USA Today put it. But in reality the change would create even more clients for what radio hosts Larry Elder calls “Victicrats,” the Democrat Party and identity politics hustlers who gain political power and influence by claiming to champion the “people of color” victimized by “white privilege” and racial oppression.

The White House is frank about how altering the census would make this happen: impacting how the Voting Rights Act is enforced and Congressional districts are drawn; creating affirmative action plans and monitoring discrimination in housing, bank lending, and education; and identifying new recipients of government largess. That is, targeting those who would be inclined to vote Democrat once they are the beneficiaries of more government patronage. In addition, since most of these people identify as “white” on the current census, giving them a different option would support the Democrats’ narrative of a demographic shift that is reducing whites to a minority, and that will create The Coming Democrat Majority, as John Judis and Ruy Teixera called it in their 2004 book. Removing some 10 million “Menas” from the white category would confirm that thesis and comfort those still grieving over Donald Trump’s electoral refutation of that hypothesis.

More broadly, this scheme to alter the census reveals just how incoherent and corrupt are our ethnic and racial identity politics. Take the category “Hispanic.” It ignores the diversity of class, religion, culture, and language that separates these groups and create their identities. It asserts that a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, who speaks Mixtec instead of Spanish, supposedly shares an identity with a third-generation Mexican-American from California, who speaks English instead of Spanish. Such a broad term is meaningless, collapsing together Caucasians, blacks, Indians, mestizos, and mulattos who happen to have Spanish surnames.

The same is true of all the other racial categories. “Black” could mean an American descendant of slaves, or a mulatto born of a white woman and a Kenyan, or an immigrant from countries as different from one another as Nigeria and Trinidad. It ignores regional, class, and educational differences among American blacks, predicating their “blackness” solely on skin color and the assertion that they are all victims of endemic white racism. “Asian” is equally ridiculous, for it bases identity merely on inhabiting the same vast continent. It’s amazing that the people who fervently worship at the altar of diversity endorse crude racial categories that are left over from the “scientific racism” of early 20th century progressives, and that erase the incredible diversity of human cultures and individuals.

The media keep hyping the Democrats’ desperate rationalizations for blowing an election they thought was in the bag. Voting-machine tampering, a treacherous James Comey, internet “fake news,” FOX News on every bar and pool hall television set, “deplorable” racist dunces in fly-over country, and now the Rooskies have the Dems and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers in a never-ending hysterical tizzy.

The Washington Post and the New York Times, ad agencies for the Democrat Party, “report” that an anonymous intelligence officer told some Senators that the “consensus view” of the CIA is that the Russians hacked the DNC emails in order to give Trump an advantage in the election. Rational people will wait for more conclusive evidence than an assertion by an anonymous leaker of classified material. But determining the Russians hacked the DNC is easier than factually establishing their motives. If the CIA really has evidence that proves Russia’s intent to benefit Trump, it should publicize it and let us make up our own minds.

We should also note that the FBI doesn’t agree with the CIA, asserting that no such definitive evidence exists. California Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee agrees. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it,” Nunes has said. And isn’t it curious that progressives who for nearly half a century have routinely demonized the CIA as a “rogue elephant rampaging out of control,” in the words of Democrat Senator Frank Church in the seventies, now find the agency the epitome of reliability and truth?

This Russia-hacked-our-emails excuse, however, is particularly preposterous and tin-eared. Does Hillary Clinton really want to bring up computer hacking? She violated the law by passing classified materials over an unsecured server, which almost certainly was hacked by several foreign governments, including Russia. Now she wants us to believe that hacking the email chatter of her staffers and dirty-tricks henchmen is more serious and damaging to our national security than what the Russians probably got off her server?

But the Russians interfered in the election! Democracy is at risk! This is the “political equivalent of 9/11!” the Huffington Post screeches.

The left’s latest target is a Chanukah party where it will be protesting Muslims on behalf of Muslims.

If you’re confused, imagine how confused they are.

The Azerbaijani embassy of a secular Muslim country is co-hosting a Chanukah party with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But the Azerbaijani embassy had made the political faux pas of obtaining space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.

Outside the usual anti-Israel contingent of the anti-Jewish left, If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, will be screaming hate. Meanwhile some more organized left-wing Jewish groups, the Union for Reform Judaism, Women of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, along with the anti-Israel activists of Ameinu and Peace Now, not to mention HIAS, which can’t wait to bring the synagogue bombers of tomorrow to America today, are boycotting a Muslim party to protest in favor of Muslims.

Some are demanding that Trump speak out in favor of Muslims before they’ll attend the Muslim party. If they were any more mixed up, they would be tying their shoelaces to someone else’s shoes.

The Workmen’s Circle, which was last relevant when Bundists were helping the Communist butchers of the USSR hunt down Rabbis and religious Jews for the gulags, announced that it was boycotting an event hosted by a Muslim country because Trump is anti-Muslim.

When it comes to Trump, a militant atheist organization is now more Muslim than the Muslims.

Azerbaijan is not the first Muslim country to hold an event at the Trump International Hotel. It won’t be the last. Why does the National Council of Jewish Women seem more outraged about being in a hotel with Trump’s name on it than actual Muslims? Who made the Union for Reform Judaism their Imam?

But when leftists weren’t accusing Trump of being anti-Muslim, they were outraged that the Trump International Hotel was accommodating Muslim countries such as Bahrain and Azerbaijan because, like every single Muslim country on the planet, they have human rights issues. If you don’t have relations with Muslim countries that violate human rights, you can’t have relations with any Muslim countries.

Was the problem that Trump was anti-Muslim or that he was taking money from Muslims?

The deranged left couldn’t decide. Numerous contradictory letters blasted Trump for being anti-Muslim and for doing business with the Muslims of Azerbaijan. A weary Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, asked, “Do you think the president-elect knows who rents rooms for two hours?”

Trump may not, but a left that has lost its mind over Trump most certainly does.

To make the outrage even more ridiculous, the Azerbaijani embassy only picked the Trump International Hotel because of its proximity to the White House so that some of the same left-wing leaders boycotting the party could attend Obama’s Chanukah party and their party on the same night.

Jill Stein’s recount efforts in Michigan have uncovered what looks like systemic election fraud in Detroit, where roughly 95% of the votes cast were cast for Hillary Clinton. Sixty percent of precincts in Wayne County had to be disqualified from the statewide recount because of “irregularities.” According to Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, those irregularities look “organized” and “government involved.”

County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News after ballot irregularities were discovered revealed that 37 percent of Detroit precincts registered more votes than voters during the election.

Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court.

Democrat Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County. But Republican President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes or 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent.

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

G. Murphy Donovan was the former Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) studies at USAF Intelligence when James Clapper was the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on Public Television shortly before the presidential election for an extended interview with Charlie Rose. Mister Rose, like many of his peers these days, swings between hard news at dusk and bimbo chat at dawn. Indeed, Charlie is the very model of a Beltway double-dipper, a celebrity groupie who feeds at public and commercial troughs, PBS and CBS.

On any given day, Rose might be seen giggling with celebrities in the morning and then lofting softballs to political touts in the evening. The Council on Foreign Relations was the venue for the recent Clapper show. “Impartial, non-profit” think tanks are often used to provide the appropriate gravitas to administration spin. The Clapper performance, just before the November election, seemed to be of a piece with several other Intelligence officials who campaigned against Donald Trump.

And the Clapper interview, like many administration dog-and-pony shows, was not about transparency or openness or even information per se. In another day, any public chat with an Intelligence official might have been relegated to the desinformatsiya file. Today, Intelligence officials like Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan play other, and some might say sinister, if not partisan roles.

Whether the subject is Islamism, Vladimir Putin, or fake news; the name of the game at the moment is overtly political. Call it spin control.

Clapper’s appearance on Public Television was a subtle version of partisan Intelligence spin. Michael Morell, former acting director of CIA and Michael Hayden, former director of NSA have been on the anti-Trump stump since the 2016 campaign began. Recall that Hayden (aka Elmer Fudd) presided over the worst warning failure in American history and that Morell was a principal in the Benghazi fiasco.