RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ideological crack-up between Left and Right was readily apparent when thousands of students marched against guns – guns that killed 17 Florida students in a violence that would awaken passion in even the most cold blooded. What it means, however, is seemingly less significant than the symbolism. Educators and politicians who should know better encouraged students to engage in protests. Mayor De Blasio in New York said students would not be punished if they left their desks to participate in the rallies.

Surely press notices and most spokesmen congratulated the students on their public consciousness. Yet for anyone observing this event without an ideological lens, you might ask what was going on. Students were demonstrating against guns, and the NRA was generally the target, but what was the legislative goal, a modification in the Second Amendment? Guns can kill, but so can knives. A gun in the hands of St. Francis is not a weapon. Therefore, the gun owner is the critical factor in this equation. All parties agree that a person with mental illness should not have a gun. All parties agree that criminals should not be able to obtain guns. Surely on those matters alone consensus can be achieved. But this is not the real issue.

These demonstrations are actually the full-throated anger of the Left organized in large part by instructors who are manipulating students during this period of grief and rage. Suppose, for the sake of argument instructors were to call for a national rally to protest abortions and the one million fetuses killed each year. Would there be any response?

“He is a forthright man of peace who understand the dangers of pacifism in a world where evil is rife. He would applaud, and rightly, the Roman military historian Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. ‘Yes’, screamed an editorial in The New York Times, ‘John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous’. Bolton is a ‘hawk’s hawk’, an ‘extreme ideologue’ and ‘warmonger’ whose appointment ‘scares people’ and ‘puts us on a path to war’. Adds Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, ‘and it’s fair to say [sure it is, Fred] that President Donald Trump wants us on that path’. In short, ‘the time to panic is now’. Argh!!!

Hysteria has its pleasures. But if we step outside the echo chamber of this feverish anti-Trump mad house, we soon discover that John Bolton is not the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. On the contrary, he is an informed and thoughtful commentator on international affairs. The over-caffeinated chihuahuas yapping at his heels are in a panic because he doesn’t like the ‘deal’ (what some of us would describe as the craven capitulation) that Barack Obama made with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Obama shovelled more than a billion dollars in cash to the Mullahs and said in effect ‘pretty please do not make any nuclear bombs’. The New York Times, in one of its excoriations of John Bolton, wrote that ‘The Iran deal has substantially halted the nuclear program and needs to be maintained’. But anyone not blinded by ideology knows that the third thing the Iranian leaders do each morning, after proclaiming ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’, is to chivvy their scientists to get on with their work making a bomb with which to obliterate the Zionist entity and threaten the Great Satan.

Some years ago, I wrote a column about adultery and politicians. In light of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal interviews concerning their alleged (and probable) affairs with President Donald Trump, it is time to revisit the subject.

I do not agree with those—Right or Left, religious or secular—who contend that adultery invalidates a political or social leader. It may invalidate a pastor, priest or rabbi—because a major part of their vocation is to be a moral/religious model, and because clergy do not make war, sign national budgets, appoint judges, run foreign policy or serve as commanders in chief. In other words, unlike your clergyman or clergywoman, almost everything a president does as president affects hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of non-Americans. If a president is also a moral model, that is a wonderful bonus. But that is not part of a president’s job description.

But even anti-Trump conservatives still assert character matters a great deal in a president and other political leaders.

There are two problems with that argument.

The most obvious is that adultery is frequently an inaccurate measure of a person’s character. Indeed, many otherwise great men have been unfaithful to their spouse. And while it is always a sin—the Sixth Commandment doesn’t come with an asterisk—there are gradations of sin.

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history––the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda.

Progressivism, like its totalitarian cousins, is an ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism. The complexity and mystery of a flawed human nature and its actions are reduced to Lenin’s simple analysis: “Who, whom.” In the fight between righteousness and evil, who will win, the oppressor or his victim? The revolutionary is strengthened by his perceived own moral superiority, his certainty that he on the side of history’s angels. After all, he is struggling for the brave new world: heaven on earth, the utopia of radical equality and social justice, and the final banishment of misery and oppression. In such a cosmic battle, who has time for critical thought or empirical evidence?

This leftist melodrama has always been attractive for the callow young, as the hinge-year 1968 showed. Teenagers are prone to grandiose self-regard, impulsive behavior, and a preference for feeling rather than thinking. They are attracted to sentimentalism and melodrama, the emotion that validates their inflated egos rather than the thought that challenges their exaggerated self-importance.

Thinking about the $1.3 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a “t” for “terrifying”—omnibus spending bill that President Trump signed on Friday, I wonder who is most unhappy about that incontinent, 2,232-page monument to congressional irresponsibility. (A small token of its irresponsibility—and its contempt for the public—was that the bill had to be signed a mere 17 hours after being passed by the Senate. “Otherwise”—cue the scary voice and Halloween music—“the government will shut down!” Is that a threat or a promise?)

There have been all sorts of lists of winners and losers. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “We Democrats are really happy” with the bill, which will stuff enough cash into the bloated congressional gizzard to keep the government wheezing along through September. Many, nay most, on the other side of the D.C. gastrointestinal tract are not happy. “With Omnibus Signing,” as one representative headline put it, “Trump Formally Surrenders To The Swamp.”

I had myself, like other fiscally responsible Americans, hoped that President Trump would veto that bill, as he suggested he might as late as Friday morning. Still, it is well to keep in mind a fundamental truth that some canny tweeter put with pithy conciseness: “Regardless of how you feel about the #omnibus, it’s still a good day when you wake up and realize Hillary Clinton is not our president.”

The competition is fierce for the worst law in America, but our pick goes to New York State’s notorious Martin Act. Now an effort is building in Congress that could curb its worst excesses and help the innocent.

Passed in 1921 to stop “boiler-room” stock-sale operations, the Martin Act lets prosecutors call almost anything fraud, and there’s no requirement to prove evil intent in civil cases. Yet proving scienter, or the intent or knowledge of wrongdoing, has been a staple requirement of British and American law for centuries lest innocent mistakes be prosecuted as intentional frauds. The Martin Act thus gives prosecutors a huge legal advantage against defendants, though for decades it was used sparingly.

That changed in the early 2000s when then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wielded the Martin Act to bludgeon settlements out of big Wall Street firms without going to court. The law does particular damage because New York is America’s financial capital and nearly every company sooner or later does business there. Note how Mr. Spitzer’s equally unconstrained successor, Eric Schneiderman, is leveraging the Martin Act to investigate Exxon for purportedly misleading the public about climate change.

Prosecutors don’t want to give up this immense power, and legislators in New York have been loath to challenge them. But Congress has the power to act under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Legislation introduced last month by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) would address the problem by pre-empting state enforcement of civil securities fraud.

The Trump administration plans this summer to scrap a controversial Obama-era discipline rule forced on schools to close racial gaps in suspensions and arrests but that critics say pressures educators to turn a blind eye to escalating bad behavior.

The federal directive, issued jointly in 2014 by the US departments of Education and Justice, warned public school districts receiving federal funding — including New York City — that they could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical “disparities” in discipline by race. On average, the administration noted, black students are suspended at three times the rate of their white peers.

The directive also discourages student arrests and holds districts liable for the actions of “school resource officers … or other law enforcement personnel.”

The one-size-fits-all federal policy, which recommends group counseling sessions and other alternatives to traditional discipline, has been foisted on several hundred school districts serving millions of students through investigations and threats of investigation that have continued into the Trump administration. More than 300 school districts remain under federal scrutiny, including NYC schools.

“The scope of it is breathtaking,” said Max Eden, an education policy expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

He says surveys show schools serving predominantly minority students have been hit hardest by the resulting breakdown in discipline, with violence and chaos mushrooming out of control in urban districts.

THESE WERE ALL POSTED ON RUTHFULLY

The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First Does the necessity of self-defense leave ‘no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation’?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-north-korea-first-1519862374

Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal U.S. policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-iran-nuclear-deal-1516044178

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-iran-nuclear-deal-1516044178

How to Defund the U.N. A few of its agencies do useful work. American taxpayers shouldn’t pay for

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-defund-the-u-n-1514233054

The Hague Aims for U.S. Soldiers A ‘war crimes’ inquiry in Afghanistan shows the danger of the International Criminal Court.By John Bolton

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hague-tiptoes-toward-u-s-soldiers-1511217136

The Iran Deal Isn’t Worth Saving The idea of ‘decertifying’ the agreement but staying in it is too cute by half. Trump should cut cleanly. John Bolton

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iran-deal-isnt-worth-saving-1506637940

This is a story that will not die easily, because there are actual dots that connect and lead – or give the appearance to leading – to the Clinton Global Initiative and Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state office.

The Uranium One scandal is a kickback, bribery, and corruption affair that sent several Russian and American officials in the uranium industry to jail. But the connection between the Russians and the Clinton Foundation has always interested investigators because you can draw a line from Russian donations to the foundation and the decision to sell the Uranium One mining company to Russia.

Now the undercover FBI agent who broke the case wide open is saying he has given fresh testimony to the FBI on the Clintons and Uranium One.

The Hill:

Campbell said he was asked specifically about whether donations to the Clintons charitable efforts were used to influence U.S. nuclear policy during the Obama year, and that agents questioned him extensively about claims the Russians made to him that they had routed millions of dollars to an American lobbying firm in 2010 and 2011 with the expectation it would be used to help President Clinton’s charitable global initiative while major uranium decisions were pending before Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

“They were looking into the Clintons, and the information that I provided to them about the Clintons and about what was said and confirmed by Russian leadership seemed to be very important to them,” Campbell said, appearing in shadow during the interview to protect his identity.

Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton did not return calls Thursday seeking comment. The Clintons have long denied donations influenced any policies.

Campbell worked as an FBI undercover informant from 2008 through 2014 inside Russia’s nuclear industry, helping to uncover a bribery, kickback, money laundering and extortion scheme that sent several Russian and U.S. executives to prison.