RUTHFULLY YOURS

The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.

Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.

The blatant secessionism of the AG’s premise is no longer extraordinary. Not when California’s Jerry Brown tours the world signing independent environmental treaties. Schneiderman is one of a number of blue state attorney generals who have decided that their primary focus shouldn’t be enforcing the law, but resisting the Federal government. But Scheiderman is also articulating the central tenet of the new #resistance which, despite Antifa’s antics, is more dedicated to legal sabotage than actual violence.

It’s still a paper civil war. For now.

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

Asher helped establish and oversee the project, codenamed Cassandra, that looked into Hezbollah’s wide-range of illicit activities across the globe, including weapons procurement, drug trafficking, and money laundering. Senior Obama officials, according to Asher, ignored the legal and financial instruments that he and others had provided to target a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands and was still plotting against the United States.

In response, a Twitter mob of mid-level bureaucrats and former intelligence officers orchestrated in the usual fashion attacked Asher in tandem with the media echo chamber used to sell the Iran Deal, with former political operatives from the Obama White House supplying the usual talking points to their hatchet-men. Meyer’s “on the record sources have undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” tweeted former Obama speechwriter Tommy Vietor, who has remade himself as a podcast host. Meyer’s “entire piece,” tweeted Obama lieutenant and former CIA officer Ned Price, “is based on pure speculation by these ‘1 or 2 sources’ w undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias.”

The catchphrase, “undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” is an extended replay version of the catchy slogans Team Obama used to market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Opponents and critics of the nuclear deal were “warmongers” beholden to “donors” with “agendas” whose concerns were shaped by their loyalties not to America but rather to the Jewish state. Now, the echo chamber insisted, Meyer’s sources aren’t to be trusted because they were against the Iran deal, or have associated with think tanks that opposed the Iran Deal—which means that they are secret neocon slaves of Israel, of course.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to break the glass ceiling, which she said has kept a woman from becoming president, but the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., has actually done it.

Their new president is Kay Coles James, a female, an African-American and a conservative, who fits no one’s mold. While her background is formidable — former director of the Office of Personnel Management, Virginia secretary of Health and Human Resources, and dean of Regent University’s School of Government among other accomplishments — her vision is even more compelling.

Perhaps that is because she agrees with me on the issue of liberating poor and minority children from failing public schools and building a foundation that will give them a better future.

In a telephone interview, James tells me school choice for these kids is one of her “top priorities.” The left has tried and failed to improve the lives of African-Americans through government programs. As Donald Trump said during the 2016 presidential campaign, why not try a different approach? President Trump has also placed welfare reform as a top priority in 2018. The last time it was tried, under Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, it succeeded. As president of Heritage, James can give Trump the intellectual and factual resources to make further reforms and achieve this and other goals.

Winning an argument is preferable to destroying one’s opponent. It can also produce better results.

A return to the intellectual heft of William F. Buckley Jr. and outgoing Heritage president Edwin Feulner is much needed in a conservative movement that has been hijacked by nastiness and anger. Winning an argument is preferable to destroying one’s opponent. It can also produce better results. James’ inaugural address” hit just the right tone: “Heritage has always promoted economic growth and opportunity — and why it has never wavered in opposing those who would burden our freedoms and future with the suffocating force of mindless regulations and punitive taxes.”

Who opposes growth and opportunity? The debate has been over how to get there. History shows which ideas worked and which failed.

“Success in politics is about issues, ideas and the vision we have for our country in the world,” James said. George H.W. Bush dismissed “the vision thing,” but “Without a vision the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18)