RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If you want to understand why the government is shut down or why elected Republicans would even consider doing something as reckless as using a debt default to extract policy concessions from the White House–without necessarily even knowing which policy concessions they want–Stan Greenberg has a memo for you,” writes Francis Wilkinson, a Bloomberg View editorial board member.

Of course if you begin with the supposition that Republicans are “reckless” and ignore the fact that debt-ceiling brinksmanship is nothing new, what you want is probably to have your prejudices reinforced, not to understand. And Greenberg does deliver. His organization, Democracy Corps, “issued a report this week on six focus groups conducted with Republican subgroups–two each with Tea Partiers, evangelicals and moderate Republicans.”

According to Wilkinson, “the results somehow manage to be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.” We’d say they manage to be utterly banal and unsurprising. The utterly banal part is that Republicans turn out not to care for Barack Obama–who is, after all, a Democrat and a highly partisan one at that.

The unsurprising part–the part Wilkinson finds “shocking”–is that some of them, specifically the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans, speak in rather harsh terms about the president. If Wilkinson actually finds this shocking, he must be about 17 years old, which is to say too young to remember how liberals (including elite ones in academia, arts, entertainment and journalism) spoke contemporaneously of President Bush.

According to Wilkinson, the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans’ “default position” toward Obama “is essentially abject terror.” In truth, some of the examples he cites are actually quite anodyne: “What is he really thinking?” asks one “Tea Party Man.” Another simply says: “Background.” An “Evangelical Woman” says, “His motives behind his actions,” which would be a tautology if it were a complete sentence. An “Evangelical Man” says: “He wants to fundamentally change the country.” If our theory is right, Wilkinson isn’t old enough to remember that Obama himself said the same thing.

The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door.

For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.

The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver’s license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote.

According to Mr. Holder, this amounts to a shocking return to the Jim Crow era. He describes these modest measures to secure the integrity of the ballot as “aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans.” And he is suing the state to bring it back under the federal supervision of the Voting Rights Act for all of its future voting-law changes.

Regarding Miley Cyrus’s sketch on SNL the other night, in which John Boehner was caricatured as gay and Michele Bachmann was, to say the least, over-sexualized, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if a (conservative) pop singer did the same thing to left-wing politicians? We already know the answer, of course. The pop singer would immediately be scathingly denounced for his/her homophobia, misogyny, bigotry and hate.

However, it’s perfectly acceptable to suggest that there is something wrong with being gay — and engaging in the sexualization and objectification of women (one of the Left’s favorite topics) if the targets are conservative and the people engaged in the mockery are liberals.

And the media, naturally, overlooks this pernicious hypocrisy and double standard every time.

As someone who fled as a child with his family from a totalitarian socialist country, it always intrigues me to witness who can and cannot be ridiculed in a supposedly free society. For instance, in Cyrus’s SLN skit, replace Boehner in the video with Obama and Bachmann with Hillary. Would Cyrus ever dare engage in such a thing? Even the thought would obviously horrify her and her liberal milieu. And even if she dared to do so — and sacrificed everything in her professional life for this sacrilegious act — SNL and NBC would never allow the skit to air.

Think about this. Think about what it means that a video by Cyrus mocking Obama and Hillary the same way her SNL skit mocks Boehner and Bachmann is simply unfathomable. Consider what this reality means about the Left and its power and its tyranny — and all of it masquerading, as always, behind the face of tolerance and progress.

Obama and Rouhani spoke, but Netanyahu had the last word.

Liberals and Third Worlders are eager to celebrate events that haven’t happened on the assumption that they will. After the speeches President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani gave at the UN the other week they are celebrating the new framework for peace and security in the Middle East that is supposed to erupt from an agreement between Obama and Rouhani.

Obama has spoken to Rouhani and both are evidently enthusiastic about reaching an agreement. But knowing Iran as we do — and knowing Obama’s diplomatic strategy — such an agreement will inevitably be one that bases the new framework on a nuclear-armed Iran that would dominate the Middle East and be able to do what it has often proclaimed its national ambition: the obliteration of Israel.

Rather than celebrate, it would be better to ask, can civilization survive such an Obama diplomatic triumph?

We know after almost five years of his presidency that Obama’s diplomatic strategy is to make concessions without obtaining anything of consequence from the adversary. You need only examine the terms of, for example, his strategic arms treaty with Russia to determine that. You could, if you really wanted redundant proofs, see what he’s negotiated with Putin on Syria, the new UN small arms treaty, and every other agreement Obama’s made.

But let’s not divert our reverie with facts. If a U.S.-Iran agreement comes to pass, liberals say, Obama will have succeeded where America has failed for three and a half decades. There’s even the likelihood, we are told, that Obama will settle the Sunni-Shiite feud that has kept much of Islam at war with itself since the 7th century. While he’s at it, he’ll also make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and probably patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell.

All that is necessary is to achieve the Pax Obama is a deal that verifies Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s alleged pledge to not build atomic weapons, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes, with provisions that ensure against Iranian uranium enrichment past the point at which Iran can quickly produce a nuclear weapon.

All of this sounds so real, so easily achievable that it feeds the world’s endless appetite for wishful thinking. But standing against all this utopian dreaming are the facts. Facts that are undeniable, facts that anyone knows if they make an attempt to read or listen. All but one of those facts were presented to the UN last week by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Forty years ago yesterday, on the morning of October 6, 1973, Egyptian forces bombarded the Bar Lev Line of Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal before launching a full-scale crossing of the Canal into Sinai with 1,000 tanks and 70,000 men. They were soon joined by Syrian forces tearing deep into the sparsely-defended Golan Heights, territories lost to Israel by each of the belligerents a mere six years earlier in the 1967 Six day War. Israelis thus found themselves under lethal assault on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which soon came to lend its name to the war. (Being determined by the Hebrew lunar calendar, Yom Kippur, which came some weeks ago this year, rarely recurs on the same date in the Gregorian calendar). It also coincided with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, by which name the conflict is recalled in Muslim societies. For Israelis, it was a rude awakening from complacent confidence as well as a reminder of the vulnerability of their national existence. It put paid to the notion that the fabulous victory and territorial gains of the 1967 Six Day War would result in the losers coming to terms with Israel; that Jordan’s King Hussein, in the words of then-Israeli Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, would telephone an offer of peace and recognition. Arabs were not standing in a line to retrieve lost territory through negotiation. For the Arabs, the 1967 war had been a disaster which Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser needlessly inflicted on himself and others. Yet, no sooner sooner had the disaster become apparent, the Arab states took customary refuge in sulky and defiant non-recognition –– the three noes of the Khartoum Conference (no peace, no recognition, no negotiations). Nor, however, was Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, passively resigning himself to the status quo as some Israelis supposed.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/10723 The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most […]

A 16-year-old Jew of working-class Polish descent flees Nazi-occupied Belgium at the last minute and, arriving in May 1940, finds refuge in Britain. He joins the Royal Navy and serves for three years, fighting to defeat Hitler and save stranded relatives, several of whom die in the Holocaust.

A lifelong socialist — he had joined a socialist-Zionist youth group in Belgium before fleeing with his father — this young man goes on to a distinguished career as a writer and teacher, including a spell as a professor at Brandeis University. But he remains based in North London, deeply immersed in British left-wing circles and intellectual debate.

This is Ralph (born Adolphe) Miliband, the late father of David Miliband, Britain’s former foreign secretary, and of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party. He is also, for that voice of the British conservative heartland, The Daily Mail, “The Man Who Hated Britain.”

The headline stood atop a recent piece that portrayed Ralph Miliband as a disloyal socialist. He is accused of “availing himself” of a good British education while criticizing the nationalism he encountered on arrival. He helped his father in “rescuing furniture from bombed houses in the Blitz.” He stood reverently at the grave of Karl Marx in north London. He denounced the Falklands War, even while — The Mail insinuates — scheming to avoid death duties on the family house in fashionable Primrose Hill, and suffered from a “giant-sized social chip on his shoulder” that explained his criticism of British institutions.

Sound familiar? The rootless Jewish Bolshevik who profits from others’ losses, shows no loyalty to the society in which he prospers, and devises clever two-faced financial maneuvers that demonstrate his essential hypocrisy: All this could of course have been borrowed from the Nazi propaganda Ralph Miliband fled as a young man.

As one would expect, the Israeli media took great interest in Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations Security Council. In the Arabic media, the situation is more complex: the morning after Netanyahu’s speech, lines from the speech were cited, even in banner headlines, but Netanyahu’s words – despite their importance to the listeners in Israel, Teheran and the White House – were seen in a wider context in the Arab media, because of the complexity of the way the global picture appears to the Arab world, which is naturally centered around itself.

The newspaper “al-Quds al-Arabi”, which is published in London, devoted its main headline of the morning following the speech to Israel’s options: “Netanyahu: We are ready to act to prevent Iran from having nuclear arms”. The newspaper also added later in the article: “The Iranian-American rapprochement worries the Gulf countries”. The connection that the newspaper makes between Netanyahu’s pronouncements about Israel’s willingness to act and the fears of the Gulf countries creates the impression that the last hope of the Gulf countries – since they have given up on the Americans – is that Netanyahu will deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

But Netanyahu’s words are put into the wider context of Israeli relations with the United states: indeed, the White House is leading a policy of appeasement and negotiations with Iran, but on the other hand, Obama’s statement that “all options are on the table and the United States will demand actions, not only words” is also emphasized. This statement is intended to calm the Israelis and tone down Netanyahu’s explicit threats toward Iran. Therefore, it is not at all clear if the United States will indeed support Israeli military action if such action is carried out without the prior agreement of the White House.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4009/delegitimizing-judeo-christian-civilization The Koran and the Hadith both testify to the supposed deceit of the Jewish leaders, who allegedly hid the truth about Islam from their followers. According to the claim, if it were not for the ambition and disingenuous nature of these leaders, Islam would have been accepted by the mass of the Christian […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4006/iran-peace-dripping-nuclear-lamb They ignore the words of the Ayatollah Khamenei, who defined statesmanship as fraud and deceit hidden in smiles, and then sent Rouhani off to negotiate with the West. There are people who actually think that the Iranians, who spent so much on their nuclear bomb project, will actually give it up and abandon their […]