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Ruth King

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The World as It Wasn’t By Matthew Continetti

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/book-review-the-world-as-it-is-ben-rhodes-obama-reaction-trump-election/Barack Obama’s revealing reaction to Trump’s 2016 victory

Maybe you can help me out. I’m puzzling over a line in a New York Times story on The World As It Is, the forthcoming memoir from Barack Obama’s deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes. The article, by Peter Baker, is about the parts of Rhodes’s book that deal with Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.

“In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election,” Baker reports, “Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages,” including flashes of “anger,” “rare self-doubt,” and taking “the long view.” Do not think, however, that during the final weeks of his presidency Barack Obama was withdrawn or more self-obsessed than usual. People needed him. The day after the election, Baker continues, “Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff.”

For example — and here is the line that confuses me — “he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, ‘There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.’”

Say what? How does a dimly remembered Carl Sagan quote relate to 2016? Was Obama speaking in code? Was this an example of him taking the “long view” — implying that lol nothing matters because we are all cosmic dust adrift in the void? Was he suggesting the planet might be saved from Trump by an alien invasion? It sounds like the message you’d find inside an especially pretentious fortune cookie.

Obama’s words once again revealed his colossal lack of self-awareness. The passages of The World As It Is that Baker quotes in his piece reinforce the widespread impression of our 44th president as an aloof, smug, vainglorious chief executive totally divorced from political reality. The shock, disgust, confusion, and horror with which Obama and his team greeted the election results exemplified the very attitudes toward democratic procedure and populist conservatism that fueled Trump’s rise. The only lesson Barack Obama drew from the election was confirmation of his own moral superiority.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What’s Next For Conservatism? For God, For Country, and For Main Street. Daniel Oliver

By on June 3rd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/02/whats-next-conservatism/

Conservatives tend to be skeptical of joining great political movements because they tend to be skeptical of both politics and movements that are great. They prefer the little platoon, the shire, which they know to be safe—or at least probably safer than what lies beyond. Not all politics may be local, but all politics that isn’t local tends toward the totalitarian, however far short of it it may actually fall.

That sounds almost like a philosophy of government—though not a government that any American alive today has experienced. But times can change, and they have with the election of Donald Trump. Conservatives who have been asking, “Where do we go from here?” have discovered the answer may be: “Where Donald Trump is going.”

Most conservatives and many Libertarians saw the conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of modern American conservatism, as a compromise (today’s Libertarians tend to see it as just compromised). Buckley was a free marketeer who opposed radical social experimentation. But he accepted the superstate (even knowing it was a threat to freedom at home) because it was necessary to do battle with the threat to freedom from abroad: communism, the force of darkness that threatened the globe for almost half a century.

Today’s young Libertarians, who came of age as Ronald Reagan was readying history’s dust bin for the Evil Empire, think the previous age consistently overrated communism’s threat. It didn’t; and the youngsters should show more respect for the analytical ability and survivalist instincts of their freedom-loving forebears whose blood ran strong for so long—even as they should respect their forebears’ desire to preserve a culture free from, and opposed to, radical social experimentation unmoored from the truths and traditions that sustained Western Civilization for centuries.

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James Clapper, piece of work By Richard Jack Rail

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/james_clapper_piece_of_work.html

Listening to James Clapper, erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, defend his actions during the 2016 presidential campaign can make you squirm with embarrassment, even if you start by supposing he’s telling the truth.

Asked why he didn’t advise the Trump campaign about the threat of Russian infiltration of his campaign that was being investigated by the intel agencies, Clapper averred that it wasn’t his place to do that, that he was reporting to the policymakers.

One may wonder what good is a Director of National Intelligence who doesn’t do something positive in such a situation, like urge the policymakers to inform the Trump campaign if he wasn’t going to do it himself.

Actually, that’s “policymaker,” singular, since Clapper reported directly to the president. Why didn’t Clapper advise the president that the Trump campaign should know about possible Russian infiltration of his staff?

Well, that would have involved actually doing something, taking action, making things happen, staking out a position and pushing it. And that sort of thing is entirely foreign to James Clapper’s character.

Clapper is, and always has been, a professional toady. His act has never been to do anything decisive but rather to look wise, waffle sagaciously and pretend to be informed. To alert Trump to what was going on would have run against the current of Clapper’s Deep State DNA.

A contemptuous shell of a man? Sure. A total waste of taxpayer money for his salary? Certainly. So what? He had his prestige, his sinecure and his fat pension and who are you, anyway?

Clapper and his Deep State should fill you with disgust. He embodies the characterless, soulless, Gollum-type ego that buries itself in the bowels of its host and, like a termite in a log, steadily rots it from within.

Clapper or Brennan, Comey or Mueller, McCabe or Strzok, on and on, their names are legion.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Soros becomes the kiss of death for his own handpicked DA candidates By Monica Showalter

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/soros_becomes_the_kiss_of_death_for_his_own_handpicked_da_candidates.html

Is Soros money becoming the kiss of death for candidates who take it? Sure looks like it, based on the miserable poll performance of Soros’s little pawn in the San Diego district attorney’s race.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

A political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros that has pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign of Genevieve Jones-Wright for district attorney canceled all of its planned television advertising Wednesday for the candidate, just six days before voters go to the polls.

The move by the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, confirmed by two local television station managers, is a blow to the Jones-Wright campaign in the run-up to election day. The PAC had been running saturation-level television advertisements for the past several weeks over county airwaves.

The money-yanking is clearly the result of polls showing that Genevieve Jones-Wright, his 30-something handpicked candidate, is failing miserably in the polls against her opponent, Summer Stephan, another leftist who is no prize but doesn’t take Soros money and probably will enforce the law at least some of the time, when there’s no political risk.

A scientific poll conducted by 10News and the San Diego Union-Tribune shows that Stephan has a 45-25 lead over Jones-Wright.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Muslim Authoritarian Mentality By Amil Imani

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_muslim_authoritarian_mentality.html

For thousands of years, Arabs lived in an authoritarian paternalistic culture. There was always a headman, a chief, a dictator, or a know-it-all who had the answers or resources who had to be followed and obeyed. This “follower mentality” had great heuristic value. It freed the masses from the often arduous task of thinking for themselves, taking responsibility, and tackling problems. It was always easier to let someone else do all those chores and simply follow his directives. This type of mentality was ideal for Muslims who did not want to think for themselves.

Authoritarian paternalistic culture ruled the Arabs for as far back as historical records show. Arabs were always headed by an autocratic man. At times, there were councils, all male and usually advisory in function with no or little executive power. The headman embodied in himself all authority: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive.

The system was a top-down hierarchy, where all directives and decisions were dictated from the top, and all people were to serve the top and at the pleasure of the top.

A father in the family and a father figure of some kind in the larger group always ruled. The man on top, a father or a father figure, was adhered to as the authority, followed, and obeyed.

Islam is custom-made and perfectly suited for people who are accustomed to being treated like children. Being a Muslim is a bargain of sorts. The believer continues to remain in a child mentally while aging. His part of the bargain is the total surrender to Islam. In return, Islam promises to supply him surefire answers as well as a perfect roadmap for this life and guaranteed bliss in the afterlife.

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Duke Erodes Liberal Education By Peter Berkowitz

By on June 3rd, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/02/duke_erodes_liberal_education_137167.html

On May 8, the Duke University student newspaper published a stirring letter addressed to the school community that was co-signed by 101 students and former students. The letter protested the decision of the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy to decline to renew the contract of Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice of public policy and political science, and called on the provost to reverse the decision.

To no avail. On May 23, incoming Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley informed Charney that Provost Sally Kornbluth rejected his appeal.

Duke’s termination of Charney, a productive scholar with wide-ranging interests in ethics and politics who has taught at Duke for 19 years (and with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was an assistant professor), has all the earmarks of faculty and administration acquiescence to the swelling forces of campus intolerance and anti-intellectualism. At the same time, the legions of grateful students who have rallied around Charney show that a reservoir of love for learning survives at Duke — among the young.

“Professor Charney’s teaching style is wonderfully thought-provoking and challenging,” according to the Duke Chronicle letter. In his classes, the students explained, “ideas are vetted and sharpened through rigorous debate and discussion on issues ranging from physician assisted suicide to the legalization of sex work.” Charney treats all opinions equally: “No thought goes unexamined; no assertion goes unchecked.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

OBAMA: “MY ONLY FLAW IS BEING TOO GOOD:

By on June 3rd, 2018

THAT’S LINE FROM A PHILIP ROTH NOVEL….BUT HERE EVEN MAUREEN DOWD CRITICIZES HIS TERMINAL SELF RIGHTEOUSNESS. RSK
Obama – Just Too Good for Us By Maureen Dowd https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/opinion/sunday/obama-ben-rhodes-world-as-it-is.html

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of peak Spock.

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book, “The World as It Is,” Obama asked his aides, “What if we were wrong?”

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.

We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.

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The Papadopoulos Case Needs a Closer Look By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/george-papadopoulos-case-needs-closer-look/Is the former campaign adviser accused of misrepresenting his subjective state of mind, not objective reality?

Congress should be taking a very hard look at the prosecution of George Papadopoulos. To these eyes, the harder one looks, the more the Papadopoulos case appears to be much ado about nothing. That is no small thing: The “much ado” here is a purported Trump–Russia conspiracy to subvert a presidential election.

There has always been something fishy about the charge filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Papadopoulos, who was a green-as-grass 28-year-old when he made the big primary-season move from Ben Carson–campaign novice to Trump-campaign novice. Peruse the “Statement of the Offense,” filed by Mueller’s lead prosecutor on the case, Jeannie S. Rhee (who is fresh from a stint representing the Clinton Foundation — and donating $5,400 to the Hillary Clinton campaign). You find that there is collusion with Russia pouring off every one of the document’s 13 pages — meetings with shadowy figures portrayed as Kremlin operatives, apparent schemes to undermine Mrs. Clinton, ambitious plans for pow-wows between candidate Trump and strongman Putin.

Yet . . . there is no charge having anything to do with “collusion” — in the criminal-law sense of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit “cyber-espionage” or otherwise sabotage the 2016 election.

Instead, after the big 13-page wind-up, Papadopoulos ends up pleading guilty to a minor false-statements charge — one that is convoluted and, in the scheme of things, trivial. In essence, Papadopoulos is said to have lied about the timing and scope of his contact with the Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud. Mueller, Rhee & Co. allege that Papadopoulos falsely claimed that the contacts started before he joined the Trump campaign. It turns out that they started on March 14, 2016; this was some time after he “learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign” (page 3, paragraph 4) but a week before the campaign’s March 21 announcement that he was a campaign “policy advisor” (page 4, paragraph 6).

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: A New Drive for Islamic Blasphemy Laws? by Judith Bergman

By on June 2nd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12270/uk-blasphemy-laws

It is reasonable to assume that the planned report and the ensuing work on finding a definition of “Islamophobia” is meant effectively to destroy the little that remains of free speech in the UK.

The Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group has as its top priority “tackling the far right and counter jihadists”. It seems a peculiar government priority to “tackle” people who are opposed to jihad; one would assume that the British government is also against jihad.

According to British government logic, then, after Muslims stabbed and beheaded British Army soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight in London, Muslim institutions needed protection — not British ones.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims[1] has formally begun work on the establishment of a “working definition of Islamophobia that can be widely accepted by Muslims, political parties and the government”.

The AAPG on British Muslims, according to its website, was established in July 2017. It is chaired by MPs Anna Soubry and Wes Streeting and is meant to build on the work of a former AAPG: the AAPG on Islamophobia. The latter came into existence as the result of a meeting at the House of Commons in March 2010, hosted by, among others, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) — the largest Muslim organization in the UK, which claims to be representative of British Muslims — which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood[2]. The purpose of the meeting was “to discuss the growing spate of attacks in all its forms against British Muslims”. The meeting, which was attended, among others, by parliamentarians, police and public servants called for the establishment of an APPG on Islamophobia. By November 2010, the AAPG on Islamophobia had been formed, and was described by its chairman, the Conservative Kris Hopkins, as a “momentous occasion” the purpose of which was to “propose considered, evidence based policies to tackle Islamophobia wherever it exists”. However, the newly established AAPG quickly ran into trouble. It turned out that the Muslim organization appointed as its secretariat was the Muslim extremist organization iENGAGE, which has since changed its name to MEND.[3]

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Populist Government Takes Power in Italy “Populism is the new organizing principle.” by Soeren Kern

By on June 2nd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12427/populist-government-takes-power-in-italy

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

“The EU Budget Commissioner the German Oettinger says the markets will show Italians the right way to vote. If that isn’t a threat…” — Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega party

The continued patronizing by EU officials has contributed to the rise of populism in Italy and feeds popular support for the euroscepticism embraced by M5S and Lega.

Italy’s rival anti-establishment parties — the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the nationalist League (Lega) — have formed a “eurosceptic” coalition government.

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

The viability of a M5S/Lega government initially was thrown into doubt after Italian President Sergio Mattarella vetoed their eurosceptic choice for finance minister: Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”

M5S/Lega reached a compromised by nominating Giovanni Tria, an economics professor who holds politically correct views on the euro, to head the finance ministry. Fittingly, Savona will become Italy’s new Minister for European Affairs.

The new government, which was sworn in by Mattarella on June 1, will be headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a little-known law professor with no experience in politics, and two deputy prime ministers: M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, who also becomes minister for economic development and labor; and Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who also becomes minister of the interior. The cabinet will have 19 ministers in all.

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