RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Orwell changed the intellectual climate by demonstrating that a free spirit would oppose fascism without becoming a Communist. Is it any different in today’s intellectual climate? The media are full of lies about what’s going on in the Middle East. Censorship, more usually self-censorship, is common. A free spirit who opposes Islamism and the vile things done in its name does not become a racist, or an “Islamophobe” in that meaningless phrase. Repair that trench, then!”

Left and Right in Spain do not forget or forgive the Civil War. A so-called Law of Historical Memory banned statues and tributes to General Franco, and set up funds for identifying the victims buried in mass graves. Franco’s mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen is pure kitsch and its loss might not be regretted. The trenches where George Orwell fought are another matter — they are in disrepair and the Right would not regret their disappearance. Huesca is the site where Orwell survived a bullet through the neck, something he prophesied “will happen to us all in the near future.” Orwell’s son, Richard, 71, now a retired businessman, is trying to enlist the Left in a campaign of restoration and preservation.

There are few things the Left loves more than a college liberal “speaking truth” to conservative power. Days ago, 19-year-old University of Nevada student Ivy Ziedrich seemed to enjoy just such a moment and “made headlines around the world” when she confronted Jeb Bush about ISIS. Ms. Ziedrich had the gumption to confront Bush in the midst of a scrum of reporters and confidently recite leftist conventional wisdom about the current Middle East crisis, declaring: “Your brother created ISIS!” After all, according to accepted academic conventional wisdom, the war in Iraq is the source of all (recent) jihadist evil.

And with that statement, the clock started running on 15 minutes of fame — no, 15 minutes of public adulation. Interviews with ABC News, the New York Times, and other outlets followed, with reporters eager to hear her thoughts on the Middle East. And while Ms. Ziedrich is no expert, there is one thing she said that is all too true: “It’s frustrating to see politicians ignore the origins of our conflicts abroad.”

Progressives Want You to Think Like a Liberal—Or Else
What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively.

Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations.

Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure “correct” public attitudes about Obama’s agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion, and cultural issues.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats forfeited their majority in the House. In the 2014 midterms, they lost their Senate majority and also lost ground in state legislatures and with governorships across the country. Since early 2013, President Obama’s approval rating has been consistently below 50 percent.

How, then, do politically correct planners force the people to think and act properly when they push back?

Extra-legal executive orders can help a president bypass supposed troglodytes in Congress and among the public.

“We’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”
— President Obama

We should never allow ourselves to be intimidated. And here, in America, you are allowed to make pictures and drawings, no matter what the Sharia says. … If we react to threats over cartoons by no longer making cartoons, the terrorists have won. … The jihadis want to kill me, but others want to silence me… by legal or political harassment. All this is happening not in third-world dictatorships, as you might expect, but in Western democracies.

And may I ask: Where are the demonstrations of Muslims who do not agree with the violence committed in the name of Islam and its prophet? I have not seen any of them, have you? The majority may not commit violence, but they do not oppose it either.

A free society should not grant freedom to those who want to destroy it. We should stand with every nation and every people who are threatened by jihad. This includes Israel… whose conflict with the Arabs is not about land; it is a conflict between freedom and tyranny.

If we allow ourselves to be self-censored about anything we say about Islam, then soon Islam will start telling us how to live, how to dress, how to breathe. … That is how civilizations decay.

Freedom of speech is under threat today. Not only in Europe, where I come from. But also here, in America.

Pope Francis has suffered a serious blow to his spiritual and moral authority following the Vatican’s recognition of the “State of Palestine” in a new treaty announced on 13 May.
The Vatican’s latest slippery slide into political and legal chaos represents a clear breach of clause 11(2) of the 1993 Fundamental Agreement Between The Holy See And The State Of Israel which provides:

“The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders.”
Vatican officials openly admitted that this new treaty did not constitute the Holy See’s first breach of the Fundamental Agreement – Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi pointing out:

“We have recognized the State of Palestine ever since it was given recognition by the United Nations and it is already listed as the State of Palestine in our official yearbook”
This latest challenge to the Pope’s spiritual and moral authority – first transgressed by his predecessor Pope Benedict arises from the fact that the United Nations recognition of the State of Palestine on 29 November 2012 affirmed:

…the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967…
600000 Jews presently live in this designated territory. PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – warmly welcomed by Pope Francis this week as a potential “angel of peace” – has insisted upon their total displacement and removal as a condition of any peace agreement.

What military campaigns can we hold up as inspirational these days? If you take your cues from retiring Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison, recruits will be inspired only by battles where men, women, Aboriginals, gays, lesbians and mixed genders were in the front line
The Iraqi army deserted Ramadi in the face of ISIS. The circumstances are unclear but given their recent track record it might not give you confidence to have Iraqi troops standing between you and barbarians. I hope most women, children and inoffensive men escaped unharmed. Realistically, many must have suffered or be suffering. There were not enough warriors to defend them.

When you’re a Western wimp and your wife and children are safely tucked up in bed, thugs, pillagers, rapists and killers are waiting their opportunity. Happily, warriors are on guard. In suburban areas police are the warriors; at the borders, soldiers; on the high seas, sailors; and in the air, pilots. We need these warriors. Death, degradation and enslavement wait for those silly enough to think they can do without them.

Gloria Steinem has landed… in Pyongyang. From there she plans to head south and on Sunday lead a group of women’s rights activists in a peace march — pardon me, an “historic” peace march [1](have you noticed that everything done these days in the name of peace is dubbed “historic”?) — across the Demilitarized Zone, from North to South Korea.

Organized by a group called Women Demilitarize the Zone, this march is meant to help end the unresolved Korean War, reunify the peninsula, reunite divided families and nudge North and South toward peace.

As a self-serving publicity stunt, this exercise has already been something of a success. It has netted the 81-year-old Steinem more news coverage [2] than she usually gets these days (though not quite as much as Dennis Rodman enjoyed during his Pyongyang phase). And I think we can safely assume that for the participants in the march, it will be a gratifying tour of some fascinating parts of the Korean peninsula, including the DMZ — during which they can congratulate themselves that they are not only serving the cause of peace, but providing a feminist counterpoint to all those armed men facing off across the Zone. The governments of both North and South Korea have agreed to permit the march; peace events are planned on both sides of the DMZ, and presumably the historic peace marchers will cross the DMZ along a carefully selected route that will be misleadingly free of land mines.

Why send money to the Kremlin when three U.S. companies can do the job and protect national security?

The U.S. is hooked on Russian rocket engines for space launches. It is a dependence that sits awkwardly with America’s national-security launch program, which includes systems for reconnaissance satellites and the early detection of missile and nuclear launches. A commercial arrangement with the Russian engine’s manufacturer has also undermined sanctions against Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine while pampering President Vladimir Putin’s cronies.

With U.S.-Russian relations going from ‘‘reset” to rubbish in the past few years, why does the U.S. still rely on these engines, known as RD-180s, to power the rockets it uses?

‘Be courageous and appreciate courage in others who take action in the face of fear.’
On Saturday I attended my first commencement program in 61 years. The speaker drew me there: Ryan Pitts, addressing the University of New Hampshire’s class of 2015.

In an era when speakers are routinely disinvited from American colleges for the sin of challenging academic orthodoxy, I wanted to see how my alma mater would welcome a man who joined the U.S. Army out of high school, who twice deployed to war, and who in July 2008 was the last man alive in an observation post named Topside, above the village of Wanat in the Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan.

GOP free-for-all is better politics than the Democrats’ coronation of Hillary Clinton.
Estimates vary about how many Republicans are after the party’s presidential nomination, but the number 19 keeps coming up. Nothing in nature comes in sets of 19. The only “19” in my memory is the Rolling Stones singing about someone’s 19th nervous breakdown. Welcome to the world of GOP party officials, many on the verge of multiple nervous breakdowns over the flood tide of candidates.

The litany of anxieties is endless.

None of the 19 is standing out. Jeb is rustier than they expected. The debates will be a nightmare. Nineteen on one stage??!! There’s talk of making a debate cut to 10, but how? Dropping Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina is a nonstarter. Maybe we ditch the Ricks—Santorum and Perry; they had their shot.

A GOP donor told me recently, “Having 19 candidates is unseemly.” Politics? Unseemly?