RUTHFULLY YOURS

Claire Kozak is Editor in Chief of “The Zephyr” a publication of the Brearley School in New York City where she is now in the Senior Class.

I am, without question, a feminist. I have attended an all-girls school for nearly ten years, and I have had the remarkable opportunity to grow up in an environment that is dedicated to educating and empowering women. I believe that we should have a woman president. But when that day comes, I want that woman to be elected because of her accomplishments. Not her gender.
But Hillary Clinton’s popularity seems to be based on her identity as a woman. Since she announced her candidacy in a video where she claimed to be the voice of the “everyday American,” she has answered very few questions on substantial issues.

She’s spoken about a few key issues including campaign reform and immigration – issues where her opinion will be popular among the democratic community. But mainly, her selling point is speaking for the American people – a noble cause, but one that doesn’t tell us much about her plans besides the few she’s discussed. And yet, she continues an unusually silent glide towards the White House. In early February, President Obama’s former campaign manager Jim Messina voiced the phrase that many have now made their own, “It’s Hillary’s Turn.”

This phrase has a complicated history. In past years, it has actually referred to the political tradition of the vice president or vice presidential candidate becoming the party’s nominee. However, the phrase has been appropriated by many of Hillary’s fans to signify her rightful claim to the oval office because it’s time for a woman.

But the fact is, it’s never anyone’s turn to be president. The presidency is one of the most complex and demanding positions in the world, and when someone is chosen to lead the United States of America, it should be because they are the most qualified person for the job. Gender, race, socioeconomic status, or religion should not factor into a presidential election.
Margaret Thatcher did not become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom because of her gender. She earned the votes of the British people with the clarity of her positions. She made it very clear what her policies were, and she won that office three times. Benazir Bhutto did not serve two terms as the Prime Minister of Pakistan because she was a woman – she led her country because voters thought she was the most equipped person to do so at the time. Golda Meir was elected as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel because of her politics and previous experience as the Minister of International Affairs. All of these women leaders were highly qualified and clear in their positions.

If anyone “deserves” to be president, it should be because of his or her policies, promises, plans for the country, and political record. It shouldn’t be because the government needs to diversify. Feminism and gender equality are relevant and highly important issues, without a doubt. But we cannot elect a woman president just because it is time for a woman to be president.

I began by noting the recent debacle at the TSA. Not content with a 96 per cent failure rate when it comes to detecting prohibited items, the TSA was also entirely unaware that 73 persons on the terrorist watch list are currently working at US airports. These are the guys you see at the airport zipping straight past the security line – the baggage handlers and bathroom cleaners and concession-stand employees, the fellows with the security badges that enable them to bypass the downtrodden throng of bedraggled Americans shuffling shoeless past the federal genital-gropers. And 73 of the guys with those security passes are on the terrorist-watch list. They’re the “known wolves” – the ones who, after the atrocity, are revealed to have been in the official databases all along, as with the Boston Marathon bombers and the panty bomber and the fellows who wanted to kill Pamela Geller in Texas. Seventy-three known terror suspects managed to get jobs at US airports. I wonder how many would-be terrorists not known to the watch-list compilers are also gainfully employed at O’Hare and LAX and the rest.

One reason the TSA missed these guys is fairly obvious. As I said on the show:

You set up a lavishly funded agency to prevent terrorists from getting on the plane and the agency is not allowed to look at the terrorist watch list. The United States’ answer to any problem is to create a new acronym and place it in the alphabet soup of the federal government.

Many years ago, back when I was a student at Brooklyn College, a communications professor, whose words of wisdom still reverberate in my mind, stated, “You cannot sell a product, a service or a concept if you use more than ten words.”

Certainly an effective communicator needs to be able to boil down concepts into the simplest terms possible to effectively communicate a fundamental idea.

Advertising campaigns are constructed around pithy slogans that are short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. Most television and radio commercials adhere to this principle.

Politicians have come to understand this approach to marketing ideas, reducing campaigns to a series of slogans that are all but devoid of meaning but create emotional rallying cries.

When Al Jazeera America was announced, the Qatari propaganda network was riding high. Once known as a dump for Al Qaeda videos, the Arab Spring had allowed the House of Thani to project its power across the region, toppling governments and replacing them with its Muslim Brotherhood allies.

Qatar had been notorious for its ties to Al Qaeda, but those connections had done little for the oil-rich oligarchy. The Muslim Brotherhood however handed Egypt over to Qatar. And Al Jazeera’s propaganda had been widely credited with supplying the images and messaging that made it happen.

Qatar’s key Arab Spring asset however had been in the White House. Mubarak would not have fallen if he had retained the support of the President of the United States. Nor would Gaddafi have been toppled or Assad have come under so much pressure without US military intervention or the expectation of it.

Overwhelmingly, voters in Turkey denied President Recep Tayyip Erdoðan’s bid to turn what is largely a ceremonial office into an executive presidency with enhanced powers. According to the New York Times, voter turnout topped 86%, a high level of participation in any election. Mr. Erdoðan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) entered the election with 327 seats in the 550-seat Parliament. It emerged with 258 seats.

The other three parties are the secularist Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), inheritors of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who founded modern Turkey in 1923; the rightwing National Movement Party (MHP) and the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which includes a pro-Kurdish coalition. It was the performance of the latter, taking 13% of the vote – above the 10% threshold required to gain seats in parliament – which stunned Erdoðan watchers. Mr. Erdoðan had called for an election, expecting to pick up enough seats so he could then call for a referendum on the Turkish Constitution. The intent was to reduce the influence of parliament and enhance the power of the President. He lost, but he cannot be counted out.

Continual warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging pathogens, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction variously threaten the United States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experienced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena that bloom and fade, and that, with redirection and augmentation of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given the wit and will to do so.

But underlying the surface chaos that dominates the news cycle are the currents that lead to world war. In governance by tweet, these are insufficiently addressed for being insufficiently immediate. And yet, more than anything else, how we approach the strength of the American military, the nuclear calculus, China, and Russia will determine the security, prosperity, honor, and at long range even the sovereignty and existence of this country.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR
Upon our will to provide for defense, all else rests. Without it, even the most brilliant innovations and trenchant strategies will not suffice. In one form or another, the American way of war and of the deterrence of war has always been reliance on surplus. Even as we barely survived the winter of Valley Forge, we enjoyed immense and forgiving strategic depth, the 3,000-mile barrier of the Atlantic, and the great forests that would later give birth to the Navy. In the Civil War, the North’s burgeoning industrial and demographic powers meshed with the infancy of America’s technological ascendance to presage superiority in mass industrial — and then scientific — 20th-century warfare. The way we fight is that we do not stint. Subtract the monumental preparations, cripple the defense industrial base, and we will fail to deter wars that we will then go on to lose.

When the New York Times on Tuesday became the third major publication to run a report on Marco Rubio’s spending habits and financial struggles, the Rubio campaign didn’t quibble with any of the specifics.

Instead, his team did something unorthodox: They decided not to directly refute charges that the freshman senator is a reckless spender, has drowned in debt, and has engaged in questionable financial practices. Rubio spokesman Alex Conant suggested that they’re not even a liability but rather an asset, because the senator’s financial struggles, which he’s spoken about often on the campaign trail, make him a more relatable candidate. The attacks, they say, even make Rubio look like a victim of snot-nosed elites.

An Associated Press article on Saturday detailed Rubio’s sale of a Tallahassee home that had, for a time, fallen into foreclosure. He sold it in recent weeks for $18,000 less than the original purchase price. The AP headline: “Real Estate Dealings Have Hampered Rubio’s Finances.” Well, Conant says, Rubio can “relate to what middle-class Americans are going through.”

The fight against Islamic State needs more than 450 advisers.

President Obama all but admitted on Wednesday that his strategy against the Islamic State is failing by ordering an additional 450 U.S. military advisers to join the 3,500 already in Iraq. Alas, this looks like more of the half-hearted incrementalism that hasn’t worked so far.

The new troops won’t be used as spotters to call in airstrikes against Islamic State, much less join Iraqis at the front lines. Apache helicopters won’t provide air cover for Iraqi soldiers. There won’t be additional special forces to conduct raids against high-value targets. The highest ranking U.S. military officer will remain a mere two-star general.

Instead, the additional advisers will buttress Mr. Obama’s current strategy at the margins by putting Iraqi troops and Sunni tribesmen through a basic training course of between two and four weeks. This may be enough to show recruits how to march in drill and maintain and fire a AK-47.

Benjamin Balint’s column is a review of a book….Teaching Plato in Palestine By Carlos Fraenkel whose author is “a student of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy who now teaches at McGill University in Montreal. Balint who lives in Israel has taught at ” Al Quds University whose president is Sari Nusseibeh. It is an affront to Israel and the fact that Bard University has a program there tells one all one needs to know about how Bard’s students are taught Middle Eastern History…..rsk

One afternoon last year, I returned home from a “great books” seminar that I taught to Palestinian students at Bard College’s liberal-arts program at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. I mentioned to a friend that the classroom discussion on Plato’s “Republic” had been interrupted by a militant rally staged outside our building by students from the Islamic Jihad faction shouting into loudspeakers. “Back from Syracuse?” he asked.

Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History.

The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

In the U.S., the memory-sorting machine may be the College Board’s final revision of the Advanced Placement examination for U.S. history, to be released later this summer.

The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive. In April, the nine authors of the “curriculum framework” published a relatively brief open letter to rebut “uninformed criticisms” of the revision.