RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not many years ago, an ad for a newspaper warned that, “If you miss a day, you miss a lot.”

Now you don’t need a day to miss a lot. Mere seconds of ­inattention can get you behind the curve. What, you didn’t hear about the latest predator to fall on his sword?

The gusher of startling events puts us neck deep in the curse of interesting times. We are in the midst of cultural reckoning over sex, could be on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea and may experience an economic boom as Congress moves closer to historic tax reform.

Then there’s the White House, where the dynamics of upheaval are entering a crucial phase. Although many deplorables believe they finally have a government looking out for them, much of Washington and the American left are preparing to dance on the grave of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Their celebration got an early start Friday with the guilty plea of Gen. Michael Flynn and his pledge to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. The news persuaded James Comey, the insufferably self-righteous former FBI boss, and the Democratic media that the clock is ticking on Trump’s time in the Oval Office.

That is one way to look at Flynn — if you assume he has beans to spill. He was close to Trump but it’s worth noting that Flynn pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI, including about a phone conversation he had with a Russian official last Dec. 29 — seven weeks after the election.

That’s the same call that got Flynn fired after less than a month as Trump’s national security adviser because he lied to the vice president about whether the conversation covered sanctions.

So it’s clear that Flynn is a serial liar, but decidedly unclear whether he knows anything that would put Trump in jeopardy. It’s important that the content of his conversations with Russians are not the ­basis of his admitted crime and do not appear to be illegal.

Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise.

I would make sure to call it a “counterintelligence investigation,” putting no limitations on the special counsel — just as with the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been unleashed to conduct into Trump “collusion” with Russia. That is, I would not restrict the prosecutor and investigators to digging for specified criminal violations. Or, indeed, any criminal violations. I’d just tell the special counsel, “Have at it” — with unbound authority to scrutinize the negotiations surrounding the eventual Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Would I really expect the special counsel to find that Obama officials conspired with the mullahs to obtain nukes for Tehran? No . . . but hey, as the “Trump collusion with Russia” crowd says, “You never know.” Meantime, under the guise of investigating this highly unlikely “collusion,” I’d want the special counsel to scrutinize closely any variances between what Obama-administration officials were telling Congress and the public about the negotiations and what they were telling the Iranians; to probe any side deals the administration agreed to but failed to disclose to Congress; and to consider whether any laws or policies were violated in such matters as President Obama’s payment of a cash ransom in exchange for American hostages held by Iran.

Why would I do this? Well, because I disagree with Obama-administration foreign policy, of course. Under the Mueller “collusion” precedent, it is evidently now American practice to criminalize foreign-policy disputes under the pretext of conducting a counterintelligence investigation.

It is difficult to come to any other conclusion based on the guilty plea that Mueller just pried out of Michael Flynn.

Let’s think about what has happened here.

The Justice Department did not, as the pertinent special-counsel regulations require, identify specific crimes it suspected had been committed by Trump-campaign officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disclosed no factual predicate calling for a criminal investigation from which Trump’s Justice Department would be ethically required to recuse itself.

Kurt Lewin, the 20th century German-American psychologist, is recognized as the founder of social psychology – the study of how the personality, attitudes, motivations, and behavior of the individual influences and is influenced by the group.

Lewin studied group dynamics and organizational development and challenged the prevailing “nature vs nurture” debate on behavior. Departing from conventional psychological theory, he developed a mathematical equation of behavior which claimed that an individual’s immediate situation – not necessarily past influences – was a strong determinant of behavior.

Lewin’s equation, B = f (P,E) contends that behavior is a function of the person in his environment, what he called that person’s “life space” or “field.” Lewin theorized that neither nature nor nurture was enough to explain an individual’s behavior – that it was the interaction between the individual and his constantly changing environment that produced the result.

There are fields and vectors in mathematics. Force-field analysis examines all the factors/forces that influence a person or group’s behavior. Lewin believed that a person’s behavior exists as a function of his total field/environment (life space) which is dynamic and constantly changing. It is the psychological equivalent of the famous Heraclitus quote, “No man steps in the same river twice.”

Lewin introduced the concept of “genidentity” defined as identity through and over time. Since no two lives have the same life experience, no two lives can be living in the same reality. This multiple-reality construct denies an objective reality and embraces reality as a subjective perceptual phenomenon.

Consider this example: A man is walking down the street. There are four people nearby. The first person says there is a man walking down the street. The second person says there is a person walking down the street. The third person says I’m not sure who is walking down the street. The fourth person says there is a woman walking down the street.

Former Trump-administration national-security adviser Michael Flynn is expected to plead guilty today to lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Flynn, who is reportedly cooperating with the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, is pleading guilty in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to a one-count criminal information (which is filed by a prosecutor in cases when a defendant waives his right to be indicted by a grand jury).

The false-statement charge, brought under Section 1001 of the federal penal code, stems from Flynn’s conversation on December 29, 2016, with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. At the time, Flynn was slated to become the national-security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. The conversation occurred on the same day that then-president Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. It is believed to have been recorded by the FBI because Kislyak, as an agent of a foreign power, was subject to monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mueller has charged Flynn with falsely telling FBI agents that he did not ask the ambassador “to refrain from escalating the situation” in response to the sanctions. In being questioned by the agents on January 24, 2017, Flynn also lied when he claimed he could not recall a subsequent conversation with Kislyak, in which the ambassador told Flynn that the Putin regime had “chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of [Flynn’s] request.”

Furthermore, a week before the sanctions were imposed, Flynn had also spoken to Kislyak, asking the ambassador to delay or defeat a vote on a pending United Nations resolution. The criminal information charges that Flynn lied to the FBI by denying both that he’d made this request and that he’d spoken afterward with Kislyak about Russia’s response to it.

The explosion of sexual harassment and assault claims, some going back forty years, is the inevitable consequence of the sexual revolution. Long before Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades led him to impeachment, our culture had normalized public sexual behavior and mores once hidden away in the private realm, and kept there by laws, morals, and customs. Like many of our social pathologies today, our sexually saturated public culture and the unleashing of sexual predators are the bitter fruit of the free love movement of the Sixties.

Those who didn’t live through that period cannot imagine how quickly and radically our society was transformed. And that change was encouraged by certain species of dubious Pop-Freudian psychological ideas that had been combined with left-wing theories of political revolution. This synthesis was predicated on the delegitimization of the “bourgeois” virtues, morals, and values that had created the “false consciousness” empowering capitalist oppression. “If it feels good, do it” and “Fuck authority” became the most important personal and political imperatives.

Thus sexual liberation became an instrument of political “liberation,” and both revolutions enabled personal liberation, a weird mash-up of radical individualism and communist collectivism. Listen to Herbert Marcuse, denizen of the Frankfurt School and guru of the New Left:

The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.

So too another popular intellectual of the Sixties, renegade classicist Norman O. Brown:

The life instinct, or sexual instinct, demands activity of a kind that in contrast to our current mode of activity can only be called play. The life instinct also demands a union with others, and with the world around us, based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.

One can see this political justification for “free love” in the 1969 Wellesley commencement address of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on the most consequential theorist of modern left-wing activism, Saul Alinsky. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” Rodham said. Her three sexually charged adjectives reveal the by then preposterous union of the sexual and the political revolution that starts with “questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government,” Rodham continues, and enables “human reconstruction,” a phrase echoing the leftist “new man” necessary for achieving the collectivist utopia of social justice and equality.

Do these kneeling football players know anything about truly oppressive regimes?

Watching the now weekly spectacle of football players bending their knees in protest when the National Anthem is played makes me wonder if they have ever given a scintilla of thought to the bended knees of broken women as they are sold in the slave markets of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and now Turkey, where “the Islamic State has merely transferred its slave business into Turkey – including a market in Turkey’s capital Ankara. This means ISIS is involved in the slavery industry in a European country.” Moreover, does Kaepernick know that black Africans owning other black Africans has existed in Mauritania for generations and continues to this day?

Has he ever read the searing accounts by North Koreans describing the misery of life in that totalitarian regime? Do his football buddies shed tears for the murder of North Koreans who defect and are shot by their own government, as happened the other day? When these helmeted athletes speak of injustice, do the names Farzana Iqbal and Samia Imran come to mind? These Pakistani women were “honor-killed” by members of their own family because they dared to marry men of their own choosing. Samia’s mother carried out the murder of her own daughter, while Farzana was stoned to death by twelve male relatives, including her father, brothers, and cousins. No one was prosecuted for these heinous crimes.

I dare Colin and his partners on the football field to rail against this ongoing racism, injustice, and evil.

Have these players ever spoken out about the decimation of young blacks in the streets of Chicago, where gangs rule? If they are truly interested in helping, why not work to get the corrupt Democrat machinery out of the inner cities and finally clean up the urban ghettoes so mothers can wheel their baby carriages without fear of being caught in a drive-by shooting?

I wonder as I look in disbelief if these players, who are generally selected more for their brawn than for their brains, even understand what they are doing. According to Doreen S. Felix over at the New Yorker the kneel, having symbolized a protest directed at alleged police brutality against black Americans, has morphed into outright opposition to Trump or even just a gesture “of free speech itself.” Then again…”it’s a reaction to Trump’s ‘buck-breaking’ rhetoric,” or it’s “about broken alliances, presumably between the team owners, many of whom donated to the Trump campaign,” and finally, “it has become ‘about the pride of the N.F.L.'”

In the muddled minds of these men who make millions of dollars throwing a ball around, it is breathtaking to see how they squander what could be their finest moment. It is a disgrace on so many fronts. The only apparent effect of all this knee-bending is that the NFL has lost one million viewers.

A New York Times article by Billy Witz highlights that “Kaepernick was … cleaning up a mess of his own … when photos surfaced of him wearing socks … that featured cartoon pigs wearing policeman’s caps.” But is this really a surprise, given that his “conversion to social activism occurred once he began dating activist DJ Nessa Diab, who has frequently spoken about perceived racial injustices and ‘Islamophobia’ in the U.S.”? Diab is an ardent supporter of Black Lives Matter and Muslim activism. Could one say a vulnerable football player just got played by a savvy operator?

Men accused of sexual taint continue to be beheaded by the media, falling like aristocrats trundled to the guillotine. The latest in the tumbrel full of miscreants to go under the blade is Matt Lauer, who was fired from NBC’s Today show for sexual misconduct. Apparently, Lauer’s tribe numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

Or more.

But just as it seems every man is a predator and every woman has been wrongfully fondled, there is a small cloud on the horizon that augers a storm. The cloud may portend a new revolution.

Revolutions often begin with questions about truth and reality. What is the truth behind the accusations? Are men automatically guilty if accused? Should we consider whether women can be as predatory as men? Are all the accusing women innocent victims? Are none of them looking for power or money?

Maybe there is a little room for realistic cynicism.

As Angelo Codevilla recently pointed out, “Men, but mostly women, have been trading erotic services for access to power since time began.” As he observed sexual power plays during his eight years on the Senate staff, “Access to power, or status, or the appearance thereof was on one side, sex on the other. Innocence was the one quality entirely absent on all sides.”

Codevilla’s point is that all sexual transgression, including bargaining and power mongering, is held to be entirely the fault of men. But not all can be blamed on what radical feminists see as an inherently detestable and predatory patriarchy.

Women can be just as predatory as men, sexually and otherwise. Though assigned invisibility by most contemporary feminists who have a vested interest in the myth of women as always and forever victims of men, Phyllis Chesler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both cool-headed analysts, have shown that women can be as cruel and heartlessly manipulative toward men and other women as men can be toward women and other men.

“Mr. Rubio may be setting himself up to run as a social conservative hero in 2024, or even 2020 if President Trump declines to run, and the child credit obsession is a down payment on that brand. Yet voters looking for a candidate who understands what makes America—and American families—prosper will have to look elsewhere.”

The GOP is pushing forward on tax reform, though a receiving line of Republican holdouts are slow-rolling progress. One who deserves special mention is Marco Rubio, who contributed nothing to ObamaCare repeal and now aspires to dilute the tax bill. Voters ought to remember this when he’s next pitching himself for President.

On Wednesday Mr. Rubio and his political sidecar, Mike Lee of Utah, announced that they’ll file an amendment to the tax bill to change the $2,000 child tax credit. They want to make the credit refundable up to a person’s payroll tax liability, among other expensive tweaks. To pay for the changes, Messrs. Rubio and Lee would increase the corporate tax rate to 22% from the bill’s 20%.

If Mr. Rubio thinks payroll taxes are too high, he can propose a payroll tax cut. But then he’d have to weather the political fight of going after funding for Medicare and Social Security. So instead his back-door plan is to expand a refundable credit, which delivers checks to folks who owe no federal income tax. This is a disincentive to work and we would have thought antithetical to conservative principles.

More destructive is his increase in the corporate tax rate, which is the most pro-growth plank in the bill and could significantly increase what Americans earn since much of the tax falls on labor. A point or two more may seem like no big deal but it might be the difference between making the U.S. more competitive than the OECD’s roughly 24% average—or not. And that’s a mere average. One competitor for investment is Ireland’s 12.5% rate.

Mr. Rubio knows this, or ought to, yet his press release could have been written by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. “Right now, 70 percent of the tax cuts we’re considering would go to businesses,” the Rubio-Lee dispatch says, “and only 30 percent to individuals.” This is a false choice—individuals earn income at businesses—and apes the left’s class-war politics.

There was never going to be justice for the American war dead of the Benghazi attack. The jihadist strike on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities was too bound up in the politics of the 2012 presidential election. Moreover, the prosecution of the lone defendant charged in the attack was a product of the progressive ideological insistence that acts of war can seamlessly be downgraded into mere penal offenses, adjudicated with all the due-process strictures that implies.

This bull-headed conceit is a fiction, and thus the experiment is a failure.

It is not my purpose to make a competing “I told you so” claim that Ahmed Abu Khatallah should have been designated an enemy combatant and consigned to military detention and trial. Yesterday, after an eight-week trial in civilian federal court in Washington, Khatallah was acquitted on the most important charges against him — the charges that arose out of the murders of U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, State Department employee Sean Smith, and CIA security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Despite these 14 acquittals, he was convicted on four charges involving material support for terrorism, destruction of property, and carrying a firearm during a violent crime. There is no reason to believe that the outcome would have been more just — or even that we would have an outcome yet — had the case been assigned to the existing, deeply flawed military-commission system.

Instead, in positing two points, I want to restate a plea that we stop playing with fire and move beyond the deadening “military v. civilian” debate — Is it a war or is it a crime? — that has undermined American counterterrorism for 16 years.

Point One: The identification of our wartime enemy must be made with more precision — which is to say, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) under which we have been operating since October 2001 badly needs superseding. It is the AUMF that determines who can properly be regarded as an unlawful enemy combatant. Only unlawful enemy combatants may be detained, interrogated, and prosecuted outside the civilian justice system. It is not clear that the AUMF would have supported Khatallah’s designation as an enemy combatant, notwithstanding his murderous jihadist attack on U.S. government facilities. Part of that is because of the way the Obama administration distorted al-Qaeda, but another part is the increasing obsolescence of the AUMF.

At present, many if not most of the jihadist organizations we confront did not even exist when the AUMF was enacted (although most carry the DNA of al-Qaeda, as that network existed 16 years ago). The problem has long been obvious, even if we remain willfully blind to it: Our enemy is not a particular jihadist network; it is sharia-supremacist ideology, drawn from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which spawns virulently anti-American, anti-Western jihadist factions. The factions come and go, their names changing over time — al-Qaeda, ISIS, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or in the Arabian Peninsula, and on and on. The constant is the ideology. It is what catalyzes the jihadists and knits their ever-evolving forces together.

We need a designation of the enemy that homes in on the ideology and brings within its sweep all these conforming groups. The current AUMF, to the contrary, is circumscribed by a long-ago event (9/11) and the entities (whether terrorist organizations or nations) that were complicit in it.

Point Two: To repeat what I have been arguing for over a dozen years, we need a national-security court. At the moment, we have two models for prosecuting enemy-combatant terrorists: the civilian justice system and the military-commission system. Neither one of them is a good fit. Khatallah’s case underscores the incurable deficiencies of civilian prosecution for acts of war that occur outside U.S. jurisdiction — as did the 2010 trial of Ahmed Ghailani, who was acquitted on 284 of the 285 terrorism counts arising out of his participation in al-Qaeda’s 1988 bombings of American embassies in eastern Africa. Yet, the military justice system is also inadequate to the task of addressing a non-traditional enemy who crisscrosses between the civilian sphere and combat operations.