RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/346815/print

‘What difference, at this point, does it make?”

That was then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s angry response to a question about the State Department’s account of the attack on the Benghazi consulate in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered on September 11, 2012.

Her response was cheered by leftist commentators on MSNBC. Righteous indignation is so attractive.

But of course it makes a difference. Hillary Clinton is leading in polls for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and general election. It’s always legitimate to examine the performance of a front-runner for the presidency. And of the president himself.
You can find such an examination in the Interim Progress Report that five House Republican committee chairmen released last Wednesday.

Democrats complain that this is a partisan effort. Sure, but Democrats are free to present their own view of the facts. My sense is that they would rather squelch critical examination of Benghazi and the Obama administration’s response — as they did, with the help of most of the press, during the 2012 presidential campaign.

The Interim Report sets out copious evidence of the rash of security threats in Libya during 2012. There were more than 200 “security incidents” between June 2011 and July 2012 in Libya, it states, and 50 of them were in Benghazi.

Britain, the U.N., and the Red Cross withdrew their personnel from Benghazi that spring. The United States, meanwhile, reduced security forces despite a plea for increases from then-Ambassador Gene Cretz in March 2012.

“In a cable signed by Secretary Clinton in April 2012,” the Interim Report says, “the State Department settled on a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including Benghazi.”

Later requests from Stevens after he replaced Cretz in June were also denied.

That contradicts Clinton’s testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January 2013. She said the cable traffic never made its way to her.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346810/pigford-forever

At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford, which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up. The Pigford case represented everything Breitbart raged against in the American political order — large-scale cronyism, corrosive and cynical identity politics, unrepentant hypocrisy, and the predictable indifference of the mainstream media. A handful of conservative outlets reported on the story at the time — including NR — and a handful of liberal outlets dedicated only as much ink to these stories as it took to dismiss them. But in Breitbart’s lifetime, Pigford never cracked into “the conversation”; it never came to be seen as emblematic of a deeper corruption endemic in Big Government.

Perhaps that will now change with the publication, by no less an arbiter of “the conversation” than the New York Times, of a deeply reported 5,000-word piece on Pigford and its descendants that, if anything, reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought.

Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And “claim” might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford, it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory — and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3691/saudi-visa-express Preferential, fast-lane treatment for Saudi visa applicants should be considered on a reciprocal basis, with verifiable Saudi progress in stopping funding for Wahhabi-Salafist mosque construction; Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated imams; anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-West curriculum materials and jihadi fighters everywhere on Sharia battlefields. One of the more striking—and worrisome—aspects of the April 2013 Boston […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3687/china-militant-nationalism As we kept providing incentives for unacceptable behavior, Beijing predictably became less cooperative and more assertive. Worse, the less and less the Chinese felt the desire to engage us, the more and more we felt the need to engage them. If we do not change our policies, our indulgence may end up creating the […]

The State Dept Got Syrian MB Right….in 1947!  http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/04/28/nowhere-in-rebel-controlled-syria-is-there-a-secular-fighting-force-to-speak-of/   “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” Just before Christmas, 2012 (12/24/12) , I wrote an extensive critique [1] of US policy in Syria (with the eponymous title, “Why Is America Midwiving a Muslim Brotherhood-Ruled Syria?”).  My analysis highlighted […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346689/diagnosing-dr-biden
The second lady exemplifies a bloated class of people with irrelevant, unimpressive titles.
Doctor Biden has joined Twitter as @DrBiden. The account is “run by Dr. Jill Biden’s Office,” and it tells us absorbing things about Dr. Biden — things such as “Yesterday, Dr. Biden hosted an education roundtable” and “Yesterday, Dr. Biden honored the nation’s top teachers.” It retweets praise, too: “Thank you Dr. Biden for your work as an educator and as a voice for all educators in our nation,” reads one tribute. If a tweet is signed “Jill,” the doctoral bio informs us, this indicates that it is a “tweet from Dr. Biden.” “Jill,” if you’re wondering, is Dr. Biden’s nickname. Her formal name is “Dr.”

Wherever she goes and whatever she does, Dr. Biden is always referred to as “Dr. Biden.” “Is Joe Biden married to a physician?” wondered the Los Angeles Times in January. “You might have gotten that impression while watching television coverage of the inauguration.” Yes, you might have indeed.

Dr. Biden isn’t a physician, of course. She has a doctorate – in “educational leadership,” whatever the hell that is. This Ed.D gives her the right to call herself “Dr.” in much the same way as my Master’s degree gives me the right to put MA after my name. Perhaps my Twitter handle should be @MA(Oxon)Charles?
Or . . . perhaps not. It’s not @MA(Oxon)Charles because I’m keenly aware that my non-vocational education really isn’t that important to anybody other than me. (And, perhaps, my mother.) Dr. Biden has made a different judgment about the value of hers, and in doing so she has become another symptom of our Potemkin aristocracy, to which only those who have letters after their name may belong.

Titles of nobility be damned; as a means of signaling that one is a person of general acceptability, an advanced degree now works wonders. No doubt many will look at the second lady’s splendid moniker and think, “Gosh, Dr. Biden must be smart! She is definitely not a mechanic.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-judaism-the-western-tradition-by-david-nirenberg/2013/04/26/1088809a-8d94-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,And the Catholics hate the Protestants,And the Hindus hate the Muslims,And everybody hates the Jews.

So sang Tom Lehrer in his satirical song “National Brotherhood Week.” It’s no news that even those who preach “love they neighbor” have often combined their striving for community with the hatred of a scapegoat, the Jews. David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” is a thorough, scholarly account of why, in the history of the West, Jews have been so easy to hate. And this story goes back a very long way.

Nirenberg returns to ancient Egypt to examine traditions that portray Jews as “enemies of Egyptian piety, sovereignty, and prosperity.”This was already old in the 7th century BCE! Ancient Greeks and Romans would have their Jews, too; they found use for an “anomalous” people who stuck together and followed their own rules, who were “neither disenfranchised nor citizen, neither conquered nor conquering, neither powerless nor free.” Over the centuries, when there was trouble in the kingdom, be it corruption or military threat, famine or political chaos, pagan ideologues developed a handy solution: Attack the Jews.

Jews were useful for those who were contending for power in the ancient world, and the Egyptian model of scapegoating was often repeated. But it was the Christians who refined anti-Judaism into a core theological and political ideology. Christianity had a particular problem: to show that it had overcome Judaism — overcome its adherence to the laws of the “old” testament, overcome its tribal particularity with evangelical universalism. The idea of Judaism — together with the fact that there were still people in the world who chose to remain Jews — was an affront to that universalism. “To the extent that Jews refused to surrender their ancestors, their lineage, and their scripture, they could become emblematic of the particular, of stubborn adherence to the conditions of the flesh, enemies of the spirit, and of God.”

Throughout the centuries theologians returned to this theme when they wanted either to stimulate religious enthusiasm or quash some perceived heretical movement. Not that you needed any real Jews around to do this. You simply had to label your enemies as “Jews” or “Judaizing” to advance the purity of your cause. In the first through fourth centuries, Christians fighting Christians often labeled each other Jews as they struggled for supremacy. And proclaiming your hatred of the Jews became a tried and true way of showing how truly Christian you were. Centuries later, even Luther and Erasmus agreed that “if hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/23/jihad-blows-up-the-liberal-uto/print Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia. The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection. President Obama is not happy — and he isn’t alone. You know the place. ▪ The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder. ▪ The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists […]

http://dailycaller.com/   Despite the heated rhetoric from the Obama administration and environmental groups about the urgency of global warming, climate scientists have begun to come to terms with the lack of evidence of catastrophic global warming over the last decade. “While some climate scientists continue to resist the obvious that the climate system is more […]

New Glazov Gang — Why Eric Holder Shut The Mouth of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
by Frontpagemag.com
Nonie Darwish, Dwight Schultz and Ann-Marie Murrell unveil what the Obama administration doesn’t want you to know about the Jihad in Boston.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-eric-holder-shut-the-mouth-of-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-on-the-glazov-gang/