RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thug Strife I don’t get it. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big when all the executives are excited about the toy buildings that turn into robots. Hanks just doesn’t get it. He asks, “What’s fun about that?” Except I’m asking, “What’s racist about that?”

The mayor of Baltimore, who will spend the rest of her days living light-years from the word “Churchillian,” recently apologized for two gaffes. First, she walked back her statement that she gave rioters space to “destroy.” That’s not what she meant, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

It sure sounded like it to me, and the facts on the ground seemed to line up with the rhetoric (this new video of Baltimore cops fleeing rioters is pretty compelling). But fair enough. People often say things clumsily in stressful situations. But then the mayor apologized for calling the destroyers “thugs.” “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” she added. “Sometimes my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”

Really, there are no thugs in Baltimore? It’s a thug-free zone?

Dear Reader (including foreign donors who’d like to hide their direct support of this “news”letter by giving money to the Goldberg Global Initiative), I was going to write about the latest Clinton stuff but, frankly, I can’t muster the energy. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. The Clintons are to sleazy behavior what Joe Biden is to craziness and inappropriate backrubs. Sure, they get criticized or mocked, but ultimately it gets discounted because that’s just the way they are. Biden could divulge his sacrofricosis addiction on national television while explaining how the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor and within a week it would be “old news.” “Oh, that’s just Joe!”

But at least Biden’s behavior is contained to himself and perhaps whoever is foolish enough to get in his bitch’n TransAm. The Clintons run a vast enterprise which at this moment is in the finishing stages of taking over the Democratic party and, if it has its way, the United States government. No serious person of any ideological stripe denies — privately, at least — that what the Clintons have been doing over the last 15 years has been unseemly. Legitimate debates can be had as to whether it was criminal. But if the standard is the appearance of corruption, tax-status abuse, influence-peddling, access-selling, money laundering, greed, self-aggrandizement, arrogance, non-transparency, or simply flat-out lying, then no serious person can deny the Clintons have fallen short of that standard.

Sure, the foundation spends a few pennies on the dollar for latrines and textbooks. But its real purpose is to serve as a super–super PAC with better branding. But what really rankles is that the Clintons began their post-presidency in reputational shambles. Bill Clinton sold pardons, or at the very least didn’t care that it seemed like he did. That’s not my characterization; it’s Barney Frank’s, E.J. Dionne’s, Jimmy Carter’s and Patrick Leahy’s, just to name a few. Oh and Hillary’s brother was in on it as well. Hugh Rodham, a Haitian gold-mining expert of late, took $400,000 dollars to shop for pardons, too.

Not since Baryshnikov has a foreigner so captivated a New York audience. “A Conversation with H.E. DR. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran” played the other day at NYU. The show ran for just 90 minutes, but reviews were spectacular. Give this man a Tony: Zarif slayed ’em.

“Demonstrating suave fluency in English and a familiarity with American history and law,” wrote the New York Times, “Iran’s foreign minister said Wednesday that the United States would risk global ostracism if it were to scrap a signed international pact that resolves the Iranian nuclear dispute.” Zarif, the Times went on, “was easygoing and smiling, living up to his image as a diplomatic charmer to an audience that was polite and respectful.” Not to mention sycophantic.

Zarif, adds Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “comes off as practically American.” Why? Well, “He went to college in the United States, at San Francisco State University, and to graduate school at the University of Denver. As Ambassador to the United Nations, he lived in New York for five years. His English is perfect.”

“Let Democrats try to explain to Jewish supporters why they oppose telling jihadist Iran that it must accept Israel; let Democrats try to explain to the country why they want to accommodate — on nuclear weapons, of all things — a totalitarian theocracy that remains a lifeline for anti-American terrorism.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417808/corker-bill-will-not-block-obamas-iran-deal-andrew-c-mccarthy

Republicans’ effort to do something is born of frustration.

I’m in Gomorrah by the Potomac this weekend at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit. As you’d expect, one of the ideas coming in for a good deal of scrutiny is the Corker bill — the legislation proposed by Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) that purports to give Congress an opportunity to review President Obama’s imminent, disastrous nuclear deal with Iraq.

As a New Yorker, I have as my default setting: stay out of Washington. But defaults are made to be broken. From a comfortable remote, it is too easy a thing to dismiss this place as a lost cause for conservatives. From up close, though, it is plain to see that many of the bad ideas that come out of Washington — which often seems like a bad-idea assembly line — result from the frustration of doing battle, day in and day out, with both a destructive presidential administration and a Democratic party that has been commandeered by the hard Left. The Corker bill is one of those bad ideas.

As I recount in Faithless Execution, the framers had a prescient fear of ideological factions. They understood that factions would be more intent on acquiring power and imposing their pieties than on preserving the Constitution’s meticulous separation of powers, the design that guards against accumulation of tyrannical power by any single governmental component. To function properly, the officials in each separate branch must defend their powers from encroachments by the other branches — a legislator, for example, must be incentivized to defend the institution of Congress from executive usurpations. The movement Left, however, is most interested in imposing its agenda; it thus shifts power to whatever branch has the best potential to do that — which is the presidency when it is held by a leftist.

While the Obama Administration continues their pressure on Israel [2], for at least Joe Biden, it is not the first time that there has been animosity with an Israeli leader. The reality is that while some of the names change, this conflict is about Israel’s refusal to surrender to a Palestinian Arab enemy who seeks to destroy the Jewish nation.

The United States is wrong to pressure Israel – yet, this too shall pass.

History often repeats itself.

“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

How can any Israeli just not be charmed by good ole’ Joe Biden? Time and again, especially when courting Jewish voters or when appearing on behalf of his boss Barack Obama before Jewish audiences, America’s Vice President has ebulliently let us know that some of his best friends are Zionists.

He has even famously stated: “I am a Zionist.” He instantly then added straight-faced: “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” We might never have grasped this elusive truth, had he not enlightened us.

Bernie Sanders’s wife involved in real estate scam?March 27th, 2015

Socialism, as they say, works until you run out of other people’s money. That appears to have happened to Jane Sanders, the wife of Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders.

The story is banal. A woman who has her job because of her husband’s clout finagles a credulous state agency into accepting bogus financial documents. Real estate is purchased. The fraud is discovered. The wife of the powerful man is paid a lot of money to leave. Everyone else is ruined.

Movie Concept and Treatment for a screenplay. The Mobs have taken over the World. The leaders of the World have caved in, surrendered.

We never know who The Mobs are, never see them, but hear them trampling across the globe, people of all shapes and colors expressing their grievances from country to country through acts of the most unspeakable violence. There is no one around to stop them.

Cops have been told to “stand down,” to retreat before The Mobs. (As in real life in real Baltimore.)

TIGHT on President Tom Hanks. He is in LA, speaking at The Academy Awards, but also addressing the world.

Hanks: “The Mayor of Baltimore did not misspeak. She was correct. What happened is not her fault.”

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2015/05/01/10-books-to-celebrate-the-socialist-holiday-of-may-day/

May 1 marks what is known as May Day, a celebration of international workers chosen by the socialists and Communists of the Second International to recognize the Haymarket affair in Chicago’s Haymarket Square of May 1886.In order to ring in the holiday, we thought it apt to share 10 books on socialism and Communism and their impact on mankind.

1) The Marx-Engels Reader by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

This book contains the core works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which provide the intellectual basis for socialism and Communism.

2) The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

One of the most powerful arguments against all forms of collectivism, Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” is in many ways the foil to Marx and Engels, showing the disasters of central planning, and illustrating how finding a “middle path” with statism inevitably drags a people all the way there. We would also recommend Frédéric Bastiat’s “The Law” and Ludwig von Mises’ “Human Action,” among countless other titles.

3) The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Various authors

The definitive compendium of atrocities committed worldwide under Communism from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China and everywhere in between, prior to the 21st century.

4) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

“The Gulag Archipelago” gave the West a comprehensive look into the dehumanizing slavery of the concentration camps known as the gulags of the Soviet Union.

5) Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag by Armando Valladares

For those wondering what life was and to a degree still is like under Castro’s Cuba, Valladares’ “Against All Hope” shows the tyranny of the Communist regime and the unimaginably cruel treatment of its political prisoners. We excerpted one of the most sobering portions of Valladares’ book here.

6) Witness by Whittaker Chambers

An American Communist turned staunch conservative, Chambers’ “Witness” was one of the key texts in the ideological battle against Communism of the Cold War. “Witness” is incidentally one of TheBlaze’s Buck Sexton’s three favorite biographies.

7) Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

As we have written about previously, “Doctor Zhivago” was viewed as so important in discrediting the Russian Revolution of 1917 that the CIA used it as part of a plot to undermine the Communist cause, flooding the Soviet Union with copies of it during the throes of the Cold War.

8) Disinformation by Ion Pacepa and Prof. Ronald Rychlak

We have written about “Disinformation” numerous times at TheBlaze Books, but suffice it to say if you want to understand how Communists have successfully waged ideological warfare and its great impact on society to this day, you need to read this book.

9) Stalin’s Secret Agents by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein

The late M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein show just how effective the Communists were in infiltrating the highest levels of power during the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt era, based upon their study of recently released shocking intelligence documents. You will also want to check out Evans’ “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.”

10) American Betrayal by Diana West

Building on the efforts of M. Stanton Evans and others, Diana West’s “American Betrayal” — of which we have written favorably in the past — seeks to explain how it could be that there is a government-wide effort in her view to whitewash jihadism, along with a willful blindness to and even complicity with jihadist elements at the highest levels of our political system.

West finds this precedent — along with remarkable parallels — in President Roosevelt’s sympathy with and willful blindness towards the Communist threat during the World War II era. West boldly documents how damaging this was to the nation. ”American Betrayal” is an eye-opening piece of revisionist history — and we do not mean that in a pejorative sense — that has caused an unprecedented level of controversy among conservative anti-Communists.

Ms. West shared with us her own reading recommendations on these topics here.

10a) Dupes by Paul Kengor

Author Paul Kengor – he of “11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative” (reviewed here and more here) — has written the book on the manipulation of progressives in America by socialists and Communists from the early 20th century to present. This is a chilling but crucial must read that will change the way you view our nation’s history.

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

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Turkey’s stealth Islamism and authoritarian practices are no longer stealth.

It is a powerful analogy showing how theoretically “democratic” Turkey is moving in the same direction as Germany’s Weimar Republic did after 1933, in passing unconstitutional legislation.

“That [Turkey] sounds to me like the late Weimar Republic. So I would have no difficulty at all in agreeing that the logics of certain possibilities are being put together in ways that seem very reminiscent to the broader context of right-wing thought in Weimar Republic, especially after 1930.” Thus commented Geoff Eley, a British-born historian whose early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany, and, in Italy, fascism.

It is a powerful analogy showing how theoretically “democratic” Turkey is moving in the same direction as Germany’s Weimar Republic did after1933.

Historians often refer to Germany’s federal republic and semi-presidential representative democracy, which in 1919 replaced imperial rule, as the Weimar Republic.

After a period of relatively liberal democracy, President Paul von Hindenburg in 1930 assumed dictatorial emergency powers to back the administrations of three German chancellors, and finally Hitler.

The year 1933 would mark the ascent to power of the Nazi Party; its immediate measures would include unconstitutional legislation. This would be the beginning of the Third Reich.