RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:

“I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,” [says O’Donnell’s coworker]. So I’m over here, and . . . the moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she is, like, “Okay, I want to show you something.” So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.

O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.

It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.

Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.

Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.

Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood. At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.”

There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms. This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. The ongoing conflict ended just 19 months later with an Allied victory.

The United States did not win the war alone, given the far earlier and greater sacrifices of Great Britain, France, Italy, and czarist Russia.

But America’s late arrival, with some 2 million doughboys who landed in France less than three years after the start of the war, saved the teetering Allied cause. By late 1917, Germany had knocked Russia out of the war and seemed likely to swarm the sole Western front and finish off the exhausted British and French armies.

On this centennial of America’s entry into the war, debate still rages over the cause and results of World War I in a way not true of the far more lethal World War II (an estimated 60 million dead) just two decades later.

Until World War II, the conflict was initially known as the Great War, on the naïve premise that the “war to end all wars” would never have to be repeated. But World War I did not solve problems as much as it led to even greater ones.

Unfortunately, World War I ended with an armistice — at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 — and not with an unconditional surrender of the defeated. Although Germany and Austria-Hungary clearly lost the war, their countries were not occupied and monitored, as would be true after World War II.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that was supposed to bring peace is often blamed for being too harsh on the losers. But it was more complicated than that. The settlement of Versailles combined the very worst of both worlds: blaming the defeated side, but without any means of ensuring that the humiliated losers would not rearm and try their luck again.

The victorious Allies soon hosted conferences outlawing deadly weapons, declaring war obsolete, and calling for collective security through the new League of Nations.

In response, the losing Germans often blamed back stabbers for their defeat and first interpreted such utopianism as Allied guilt — and later as weakness. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany rearmed and began absorbing neighboring borderlands eager to replay the verdict of World War I.

The United States was depressed that World War I seemed to have brought no lasting peace. It returned to its former isolationism during the depression years of the 1930s, disarmed, and was determined to never again become involved in Europe’s nihilistic wars.

Yet that very disengagement weakened the European democracies’ common front. Both European appeasement and American isolationism only encouraged the new Axis Powers to become even more determined to reverse the outcome of World War I.

World War I broke out in 1914 at an age when new offensive technology — machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, mass-produced artillery shrapnel shells, submarines — had vastly outpaced the arts of defense and medical care. It proved far easier to kill than to protect soldiers. And it was the first major war that was truly global, spreading beyond Europe to areas of the Middle East and Africa.

Mass deaths — especially during the great flu outbreak of 1918 — in the trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea over four years of fighting nearly destroyed Europe. The war finished off the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In time, savage new ideologies — Fascism, Nazism, Communism — filled the void and promised to restore national pride and prosperity.

Forget all the pages of the Democratic Party platform. The only real Democratic platform left is the one sung by Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

The elected Democrats still surviving amid the trendy restaurants of Adams Morgan and the boutiques of Dupont Circle are convinced that the voters elected them and that taxpayers are paying them to get nothing done.

Not one thing.

The ordinary leftist wearing a pink hat and clutching a Resistance sign either has no job or a government job. At the pinnacle of this pathetic movement sits the Democratic member of Congress making $174,000 a year, with Nancy Pelosi and Schumer taking home $193,000, and being paid to do nothing.

Around them circulate a vast network of staffers who are also being paid to do nothing constructive.

Taxpayers are on the hook for over $4 mil for the salaries of Senator Feinstein’s staffers. Schumer needed a $3.5 million staff even before he took power. Franken’s posturing requires a mere $2.8 million in staff salaries. It’s certainly a step up from 5 minutes with a comb on Saturday Night Live.

Alcee Hastings, threw a tantrum during the ObamaCare debate. “I don’t have to be nice to nobody,” he ranted. While Hastings was accusing Republicans of abusing poor people, the former impeached judge was carrying out his own charity work by paying his girlfriend $168,411 a year.

Taxpayers are spending a fortune to subsidize a corrupt bunch of clowns who spend all their time trying to bring down the government. The Democrats are not the opposition. Opposition parties oppose, but they also work for the common good. The Democrats only oppose for the sake of opposition. Their likeliest nominees burnish their presidential credentials by voting against everything.

The Democrats are not an opposition party, but an obstructionist party.

New presidents traditionally have a honeymoon period in which to assemble their administration and put forward an agenda. As David Horowitz has frequently pointed out, President Trump was denied any space in which to assemble an administration. Instead Democrats openly and covertly worked to prevent him from assembling an administration, let alone enacting an agenda.

The distinction is an important one.