RUTHFULLY YOURS

Real life too often today puts satire to shame. I shall begin with “Liberal Line Dancing.”

Some years ago in Baltimore I took a stroll through a street festival near the Inner Harbor. One event I encountered was something I hadn’t witnessed in person before: line dancing. I had become immersed in the subject of dancing while researching the Sparrowhawk series, set in 18th century Britain and America. I learned that it was only in the early 19th century that individualized dance between couples was introduced and became popular, preceded by the form of highly formalized and controlled modes such as the minuet and its variants, in which the couples barely touched each other.

Until then, from Medieval times to the present, dance was largely a collective pastime. Line dancing seems to be a hybrid of square dancing, which itself has roots in contra or country dancing preceding even Shakespeare’s time, but without participants even having to touch anyone. I was obliged to square dance in high school, and had to clasp the sweaty palms of dozens of others of either gender I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Personal choice in such affairs of one’s partners was ruled out.

In liberal political, synchronized line dancing, all the players, in unison, wobble, wiggle, gesticulate, kick, turn about, swivel their hips, pantomime, roll their shoulders, and place their hands over their ears, mouths, and ears. The moves are commanded by a dance master, accompanied by a fiddler playing a monotonous tune over and over again, or perhaps with a Karaoke player. The most popular liberal line dances are called “The Shuffle,” “The Dodge,” “Duck and Grovel,” “The Wet Dog,” “The Double Side Step,” “Shake ‘n Bake,” “The Burqa Bop,” “The Muslim Moon,” “The Prayer Rug Stomp,” “The Shadada Shimmy,” “The Cover Your Butt,” “The Twirly,” and “The Hillary Rodham.”

Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884-1951) was a respected Republican Senator from Michigan from 1928 to 1951. In 1945 he was the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Harry Truman, formerly a Democratic Senator from Missouri, became Vice President of the United States when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944.

In his excellent book “Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership That Created the Free World” Lawrence J. Haas describes their cooperation and how they navigated post war policies through Congress.

You can read a review here: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/harry-and-arthur-truman-vandenberg-and-the-partnership-that-created-the-free-world-by-lawrence-j-haas

Vandenberg’s most memorable line was stated in 1948 “”We must stop politics at the water’s edge.” The wording may not be exact but the meaning was. In times of international turmoil our leaders must present a united front to the rest of the world and leave political rancor and partisanship at home.

Obama’s criticism of Donald Trump during his tour abroad was petty and nasty. But, he’s no Truman and never had the stature as a Senator that Vandenberg had. rsk

From the FSM National Security Team

Monday May 30, 2016 is Memorial Day when we honor veterans.

In this season of political partisanship and rancor we at Family Security Matters would like to pay tribute to members of the 114th Congress who have served in the military.

All legislators are willing to take a ballot for America. That’s democracy.

The following is a list of legislators in the Senate and the House of Representatives who were willing to take a bullet for our great nation.

Democrats are in italics for purposes of identification. To all we offer our gratitude for their service.

On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for having, “too much money in our politics, and rising economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation of the “American Declaration of Independence” and claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the murderous Communist dictator.

Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised, his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the opposition, political and religious. When Obama references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps mean Ho’s declaration, “All who do not follow the line laid down by me will be broken.”

Perhaps he means the euphemistically named “land reform” which may have killed up to a million people. Like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh seized land and executed property owners as “enemies of the state”. The original plan had been to murder one in a thousand. But the relatively modest plan for mass murder was swiftly exceeded by the enthusiastic Communist death squads.

Obama has consistently called for wealth redistribution. This is what it really looks like. It’s men being hung from trees or lying in dirt dying of malaria. It’s death squads coming in the night. It’s a declaration that you are to be executed because you are the wrong class in a class war. It’s a man condemned to hard labor in a New Economic Zone and a family starving to death because the regime has commanded that they must be made an example of to other peasants.

http://www.amazon.com/Exegesis-Cyrus-Skeen-Myster-18/dp/1533003475/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464297721&sr=1-2&keywords=exegesis+edward+cline
The print edition of Exegesis, the 18th Cyrus Skeen novel, is now available, as well as the Kindle edition.

It is late June, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in Stolen Words, in which he exonerated a prominent novelist of the charge of murder, even though the author had plagiarized other authors with the cooperation of the now defunct publisher. Skeen’s artist wife, Dilys, has returned from a visit to relatives back East in Massachusetts, and was preparing to work on her first painting. Skeen’s new secretary, Lucy Wentz, is quick on the uptake, and is working out fine. But now a new nemesis has confronted Skeen, an unknown person who is killing people who have committed horrendous crimes. He writes Skeen and expresses his appreciation for Skeen’s crime-fighting acumen and skills, but wants Skeen to join him in a crusade to terminate all killers. Skeen has not killed any criminal gratuitously – he has killed in self-defense only when someone has threatened to kill him or someone who is a value to him – and wonders why his admirer thinks he would be open to the idea. Then the district attorney for San Francisco demands an explanation for why Skeen’s revolver was found next to a murdered mass killer. More criminals are found dead. The unknown vigilante pins a note to each body, signed “Exegesis.” In another unusual case tackled by Cyrus Skeen, the intrepid and unflappable detective delves into the mystery with his usual panache and certitude.

Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for strategic communications, was the subject of a recent eye-opening New York Times Magazine article. The article discussed Rhodes’ prominent role in selling Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran to the public. Rhodes, who was originally interested in writing fiction before embarking on a government career, boasted of the “echo chamber” the administration was able to create among pliant media and non-profit groups to spin the deal in its most favorable light. Channeling his days as an aspiring novelist, Rhodes filled the echo chamber with a false narrative. It turns out that the “echo chamber” itself was more like a pay-to-play chamber, which merits investigation for possible illegal conduct by at least two non-profit tax-exempt organizations.

Money was dispensed through pro-nuclear deal tax-exempt organizations to buy favorable coverage in the media, including the tax-exempt National Public Radio (NPR), according to an Associated Press report. Ben Rhodes had specifically mentioned “outside groups like Ploughshares” as playing a key role in conveying the pro-nuclear deal narrative that the Obama administration wanted the public to hear.

According to the Associated Press report, Ploughshares, a left-wing non-profit organization financed by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, “gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the pact and related issues.”

Since 2005, Ploughshares has plowed about $700,000 into NPR’s coffers. Since 2010, the grants to NPR specifically mention Iran. Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report, for example, explains that the purpose of its grant to National Public Radio, Inc. is to “support national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of US nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and US policy toward nuclear security.” (Emphasis added)

Ploughshares and NPR are both 501(c) (3) non-profit organizations, which take tax deductible contributions. Both organizations are prohibited from engaging in any substantial lobbying, advocacy of legislation or “propaganda.” Although both may have crossed the line in spreading Rhodes’ propaganda regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, they have denied any wrongdoing.

In its subtlety, sophistication, and, surprisingly, its quiet pace, which requires more interaction and involvement from the viewer, Genius, directed by Michael Grandage, sets a new standard for melding a superior and literate script with a superb cast and thoughtful direction that, at least to this audience, sets a new standard.

Hollywood has become associated with the cheap, the tawdry, the overexposed (in all senses), and the CGI trick trompe l’oeil green-screen that robs the actor of real opponents or adversaries, and the viewer of credulity.

Not Genius.

Colin Firth as legendary editor of the century’s most protean writers Max Perkins does something few films before attempt: he makes editing supremely watchable and deeply professional. It is not a career that is given to easy encapsulation or animation, but Firth accomplishes that. His Perkins is a solemn soul, a deeply integritous soul, whose commitment to excellence and none less is visible in his pauses, pregnant taciturnity and hesitancies. Lovely Laura Linney is luminous and touching, managing to say more in her facial composure and difficulties than most could say with paragraphs of dialogue.

Editors elsewhere are a faceless, unacknowledged suitcase of ciphers, even as Perkins/Firth tells Jude Law/Thomas Wolfe — they are often invisible, if they have succeeded in their task to bring forth a better work from the mountain of pages presented them. (We choose to think the result is both better and truer than had it been left untouched, as many writers seem to prefer.)

Jude Law magnificently embodies the quicksilver ebullience, self-doubt, flamboyance and wit of the brilliant Wolfe. Guy Pearce is a tormented and constipated Fitzgerald, and Vanessa Kirby as his blocked, maddening and maddened wife Zelda is also fine. Nicole Kidman is amazing in her capture of the imperious but besotted Aline Bernstein, such that one cannot look away from her nuanced moment by moment histrionics-cum-bleeding reality. What a powerful ensemble is amassed here, with each person possessed of his own rhythm, his own arguable pace, yet melding intoxicatingly into this moving, enlightening, mesmerizing film, one that easily bests the lesser mere entertainments of the year for genuine emotion, heart, and intelligence.

From the candidate that a majority of Americans- including Democrats- do not consider trustworthy….her words:

‘Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?”

We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.

Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”

That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.

Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.

According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”

On the day an EgyptAir plane carrying 66 people disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that investigators will look into all “potential factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.” (White House)

And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.