RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “Palestinians” are a hate group. Across the board in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere, they call for killing Jews and destroying the State of Israel.

The #Resistance is a hate group. It refuses to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, even to the point of questioning his physical and mental fitness to be President, and includes in that mantra the implied accusation that Dr. Ronny Jackson, who examined Trump, is lying. It is willing to say anything to damage Trump, no matter how irrational and unproven.

Antifa is a hate group. The visual evidence is ample. Masked thugs attack individuals who want to see and hear someone the group disapproves of; destroy property with glee, and calls “fascist” (as though the thugs knew what real “fascists” were in the past) anyone who opposes them. Antifa thugs should take Pogo’s complaint to heart;”We have seen the enemy and he is us.” Not that doing such would give them second thoughts. Their minds are the property of leftist ideology.

Democratic congressmen who oppose President Trump comprise a hate group.

Any group that does not disavow its unremitting, obsessive hatred for Trump is a hate group.

Yet it will not be classified as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty LawCenter (SPLC). This and other groups get a free pass because they hate Trump and spew their hatred to another level of ranting insanity. My argument is that any government authority that suppresses freedom of speech across the globe is a “hate group,” any group that offers “resistance” to freedom of speech is a “hate group,” any individual who rants irrationality against President Trump is a one-man “hate group” and could said to be in the grip of “Trumpophobia.”

Like the saliva of an IndonesianKomodo dragon injected into a bite victim, the toxin is supposed to cause a fatal and a certain, helpless death. The dragons are attracted to the putrefaction of the bodies of their victims. Much as the Democrats are.

Articles have surfaced that claim that the SPLC is by definition a “hate group” itself, because its chief purpose today is to establish and publish lists of names that hate groups can target for hateful action. This is a charge which cannot be denied by the SPLC. Virtually the only time it makes news headlines today is when it has declared certain individuals – such as Pamela Geller, Richard Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali – and numerous blogs that critique Islam, as “Islamophobes” or as “hate groups.” They commit “hate crimes” and must be sent to the slammer. Never mind that Geller is under a constant fatwa to behead her, that Spencer was poisoned in Iceland, and that Hirsi Ali survived the worst of Sharia for a woman, female genital mutilation.

So, what is a “hate crime”?

In 1959 I made a record, a song that reflected the virtues of bourgeois culture: “We’re Not Going Steady.” The lyrics were pure “bubblegum,” silly yet nostalgic. “We’re not going steady because we’re never alone, I can’t even love you, love you on the telephone.” I was reminded of my foray into the rock world as I watched Kendrick Lamar and the half time entertainment at the College Football Championship. All I could think is how culture has been debased in six decades.

During the 1940’s-50’s Sinatra sang “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” and Lloyd Price sang, “I Want to Get Married.” At the height of the cynical sixties, a generation later, when middle class values were under attack, Dusty Springfield sang, “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” and Meat Loaf argued “I want you, I need you but I’m never goin’ to say I love you. Two out of three ain’t bad.” The tie between love and sex was severed.

Still it is hard to imagine how far down the proverbial rabbit hole we have gone. For rappers sex is raw. Women are objects, to be treated as ho’s. Deviancy has been defined down to kindergarteners who mouth vile lyrics as if they are the Gettysburg Address.

Ten years ago, at the home of Robert Agostinelli, the financier and National Review trustee, I met Bill Browder. Browder, too, is a financier, and he was soon to be famous as a truth-telling foe of the Putin regime. “Any relation?” I asked him. He said, “To Earl Browder?”

I thought this was puzzling, because who else could I have meant? Anyway, it transpired that Browder was indeed related — he is the grandson of Earl Browder. “My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America,” Bill remarked, “and I became the biggest capitalist in Russia.”

Earl Browder was head of the CPUSA — the American Communist party — in the 1930s and ’40s. Bill Browder created his hedge fund, Hermitage, in 1996. The Kremlin turned on him hard in 2005, declaring him persona non grata. He had been a thorn in the side of Putin’s oligarchs. In 2008, the authorities arrested Browder’s fearless and whistleblowing lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. They tortured him to death. Real slow, over the course of a year.

That began Browder’s career as a human-rights activist.

At the end of 2016, I read an obituary of Felix Browder, Bill’s father. I then realized why Bill had asked me, those years ago, to be more specific — to be more specific when I asked, “Any relation?” Felix Browder was one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. I don’t know from mathematicians. But others do, and they sometimes ask Bill, “Any relation?”

Earl Browder and his wife, Raisa, had three children, three boys. The first, Felix, became chairman of the math department at Chicago. The second, Andrew, became chairman of the math department at Brown. The third, William, became chairman of the math department at Princeton. And there is more Browder talent where that came from.

Let’s go back to Earl. He was born in 1891 in Wichita, Kan., which is also the home of the Kochs, those illustrious capitalists. America obviously gives birth to many types. Earl’s father was a schoolteacher and a populist — who was kicked out of the school system on account of his populism. He then opened a café. This establishment served, among other people, black people, which was uncommon and scandalous at the time.

Browder went bust, and his children had to leave school and go to work. Earl did this before he was ten. He would educate himself in other ways.

A radical, Earl first went to the Soviet Union in 1921. The dream of Communism excited people from all over the world. He was in the Soviet Union in 1926 when he married Raisa — Raisa Berkman, a lawyer from Leningrad. Their first two sons were born in Moscow. In 1932, Earl returned with his family to America, setting up shop in Yonkers, N.Y. The third son, William, was born in ’34.

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch already knew that ex-FBI Director James Comey would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton when she announced she would accept any FBI recommendation, according to new documents turned over to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

Comey announced that he would not recommend charges against Clinton during a press conference on July 5, 2016.

Lynch had previously stated that she would the accept the “determinations and findings” of the FBI’s investigation, suggesting she was completely out of the loop.

That revelation and others were found in 384 pages of text messages exchanged between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that the Justice Department turned over to HSGAC on Friday. Strzok and Page are the two FBI officials who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations. In one particularly damning text, the two discussed needing an “insurance policy” in the event Trump were to become president.

Unfortunately, in the cover letter accompanying the texts, the FBI notified Congress that they “failed to preserve” five months’ worth of the pair’s text messages exchanged during the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

The texts that we have are illuminating. As Sharyl Attkisson reported at The Hill, the timeline of the text messages indicates that Lynch knew that Clinton would not face charges “even before the FBI conducted its three-hour interview with Clinton, which was supposedly meant to gather more information into her mishandling of classified information.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, arrives in court dressed in a headdress, tunic and short white trousers (strict fundamentalist style, purportedly emulating Muhammad). His overgrown beard is dyed orange. He sits smugly, legs dangling, and talks with his attorneys while prosecutors play video footage of the Twin Tower attacks in the ultrasecure courtroom.

Walid bin Attash, who helped select and train hijackers, and Ramzi bin al Shibh, a member of al Qaeda’s Hamburg cell, wear camouflage jackets and headdresses, as if they were still in the Afghan mountains. But the camo is hunting gear from Sears—the Guantanamo Military Commission won’t let them wear anything realistic enough to be confused with the guards’ uniforms.

Ammar al Baluchi, KSM’s nephew and a courier for Osama bin Laden, dresses like a prince in a fictional epic: maroon, fez-like headcap, fancy, dark velvet vest. A richly embroidered prayer rug is slung over the back of his chair.

Mustafa al Hawsawi, a money man, looks like a martyr dressed for the grave, in white linen and a shawl embroidered with Palestinian flags. One way or another, all five are projecting versions of the fantasies common to radical Islamists.

This weeklong December hearing, which I attended as an observer, marked the U.S. government’s first formal presentation of evidence against the five living men most culpable for 9/11. It came during the fifth year of pretrial motions. The trial, now projected to take place in 2019, will no doubt be followed by many appeals. By the time it’s over, justice will have been delayed by decades. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Kenneth Marcus has worked for years inside and outside government to advocate for civil liberties. He has also been involved for years in Jewish community advocacy.

Now Marcus, the founder and president of the Louis S. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, is up for a prestigious job at the Department of Education — assistant secretary for civil rights. On Thursday, the Senate Health and Education Committee approved Marcus along party lines, and now his nomination goes to the full Senate.

In recent weeks, my inbox has been cluttered with statements pushing a narrative that what’s keeping Democrats from backing Marcus is his role in fighting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

What’s remarkable is that both sides of the BDS equation — the movement’s supporters and opponents — are colluding unintentionally in advancing the narrative.

Groups that back BDS have argued against Marcus’ nomination, pointing to his aggressive tactics while heading the Brandeis Center to counter anti-Israel activities on campus by defining them as an attack on the civil rights of Jewish students. Two organizations, Palestine Legal and Jewish Voice for Peace, have lobbied hard against Marcus.

“Marcus not only poses a danger to those who advocate for Palestinian human rights, but to all students and to the spirit of the university itself,” Jewish Voice for Peace said in a statement following the committee vote.

Which makes sense — interest groups nudging their issue to the center is not new. What is not immediately clear is why organizations ostensibly committed to making BDS go away are giving their issue oxygen.

A coalition of 60 pro-Israel groups wrote a letter Jan. 15, before the committee vote, urging the panel to approve Marcus across party lines. It included a statement from Jeff Robbins, a Democrat and Clinton-era U.S. delegate to what was then the U.N. Human Rights Commission, noting that the nomination “has been bitterly criticized by the fringe and unhinged groups who operate something of an anti-Semitism lobby. Democrats in the Senate would do well not to fall for it.”

But why bring it up when Democrats in the Senate barely seem to be paying attention to criticism of the nominee’s posture on Israel or anti-Semitism? Notably, no major centrist or liberal group signed on to the letter; the signatories trend conservative and hawkish in Israel, including Americans for a Safe Israel, CAMERA and the Zionist Organization of America. I asked the publicist who is touting the letter why the groups are making Israel a central issue when there is little evidence it is a central issue. She said she would canvas the signatories, but by press time she did not come up with a reply.

On Dec. 5, I logged into the Senate Health and Education Committee website and listened to hours of Marcus being grilled and praised. Not once did BDS come up.

Yet now The New York Times has taken up the narrative, framing Marcus’ Israel advocacy as central to the controversy over his nomination. “An Advocate for Israel Draws Fire as He Nears Confirmation to Civil Rights Post” was the headline Thursday on its website.

Only twice did I hear a reference to Marcus’ Jewish advocacy during his committee appearance. The first time, in introducing Marcus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., picked from a pile of endorsements before him a letter from Hillel International describing Marcus as “a longtime champion for civil rights and for college students.”

Hours after Houthi militants in Yemen launched a new missile at Saudi Arabia on December 19, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, took her blue seat at the horseshoe-shaped table of the Security Council. “Thankfully,” she said, “the missile was intercepted before it could hit its intended target,” which apparently was a palace in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “But the very fact of this attack is a flashing red siren for this council.” Backed by Iran, Haley said, the Houthis have fired missiles at civilians before. “Unless we act,” she warned, the latest one “won’t be the last.”

Haley’s remarks came during the most intense week of her yearlong tenure at Turtle Bay, at a time when most of the rest of the U.N. preferred not to discuss Iranian threats and instead wanted to jabber about Israel — in other words, to ignore literal missiles and instead lob figurative ones at President Trump for his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On December 18, as the 14 non-American members of the Security Council rushed to approve a resolution condemning Trump’s decision, Haley cast her first veto.

“It was an unfortunate moment but a proud moment, knowing we were in the right,” she said the next day, in an interview with National Review at her office across the street from U.N. headquarters. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Everyone knows this. We have to acknowledge the truth. Once you get the truth out of the way, you can do so much.”

Ambrose Bierce once defined “diplomacy” as “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” Haley nevertheless has become America’s great truth-teller, flouting diplomatic conventions to speak plainly and with toughness about the provocations of Iran, the rights of Israel, U.S. sovereignty, and much more. Before Trump tapped her for the United Nations, she was the young and attractive Republican governor of South Carolina with a bright future in domestic politics.

A year later, she has transformed herself into a hero of many foreign-policy conservatives, even drawing comparisons to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor who in 1975 famously denounced the U.N.’s efforts to equate Zionism with racism. Moynihan’s moment of moral clarity propelled him to the U.S. Senate, where he served four terms. Haley’s future is anybody’s guess: Will she succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state? Does she harbor presidential ambitions? It remains as bright as ever, even as it now appears headed in new and unexpected directions.

Haley’s parents are Sikhs from the Punjab. The birthplaces of her three siblings trace the family’s journey around the globe: India, Canada, and the United States, where her father took a job as a biology professor at Voorhees College in South Carolina. The future ambassador was born in nearby Bamberg in 1972 as Nimrata Randhawa. She soon became known to everyone as “Nikki,” a childhood nickname that means “little one.” Accounts of her youth often mention her participation as a four-year-old in the Wee Miss Bamberg pageant. Traditionally, the town had picked two winners, one black and one white. The judges didn’t know what to do with Nikki, whose father wore a turban and her mother a sari. So they disqualified her.

Is there a “three strikes and you’re out” law for political narratives?

Democrats and their media allies were back at the Collusion Reclamation Project this week. The new and improved version is: The NRA did it.

As we have recently recounted, the first breathless attempt to suggest a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to subvert the 2016 presidential election centered on Carter Page. A tangential foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Page featured prominently in the Steele dossier. Anonymous Russian sources reporting to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele placed him at the core of an espionage enterprise that entailed hacking Democratic-party emails and negotiating a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement with Putin operatives to give Russia sanctions relief.

That storyline appears to have gone by the boards with the revelation that the dossier — already in disrepute as salacious, unverified, and convincingly refuted in key particulars — was actually an opposition-research project funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Facing libel lawsuits, Steele himself has taken the position that his third- and fourth-hand hearsay information was “raw” and “unverified,” passed along to American law enforcement because he thought it should be investigated, not because he was vouching for its truthfulness. His collaborator, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, has similarly offered nothing meaningful in the way of corroboration in testimony before Senate and House investigators. At the moment, the more pressing question about the dossier involves not the contents of its sensational allegations but whether they were used by the Obama Justice Department and FBI in obtaining a FISA-court warrant to spy on Page and the Trump campaign.

The collapse of the dossier led the media to cobble together a new foundation for their rickety collusion tale. We were treated to gin-mill chatter between an even more obscure Trump-campaign figure, twentysomething climber George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat. Papadopoulos told his companion that he’d heard from Kremlin-connected sources that Russia had emails that could be damaging to the Clinton campaign. Australian intelligence thought so little of the exchange that they waited months to alert their American counterparts, and the FBI thought so little of it that they waited for months — i.e., until after the election — to interview Papadopoulos.

Similarly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller thought so little of it that he let Papadopoulos plead out to a process crime of lying to FBI agents. It is no wonder: While his story is titillating for the media and Democrats because it feeds the Trump-Russia banter, it is a body blow to a prosecutor trying to establish a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy (which you may vaguely remember as the original “collusion” claim). At best, Papadopoulos’s version of events means the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of Clinton emails. More likely, Papadopoulos’s contacts were bluffing — neither he nor the Trump campaign got emails from Russia and there is, to date, no proof that the Kremlin had them in the first place. There being no actionable collusion evidence, Mueller was in no position to induce Papadopoulos into a collusion-based guilty plea.

Twinkle, twinkle, pussyhat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

The Women’s March and the Pussyhat Project—its sea of pink pussy hats tipped to Donald Trump—has reached its first birthday! But wait . . . instead of wearing party hats to a celebration, this weekend’s events were more like the Mad Hatter’s un-birthday: the Feminist Wonderland has begun to unravel.

After only one year, pussyhats are old hat. Along with the founders of the Pussyhat Project, the organizers of the Women’s March are peddling new wares and new reasons for women to come together in “support and solidarity for women’s rights and political resistance.”

What happened to the pussyhats? The question reminds me of when the Mad Hatter riddles “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” and then we, like the March Hare and Alice, are swallowed whole into the confusion that ensues, with no way to rationally answer a nonsensical question.

The riddle we might ask the Pussy Hatters is “Why are the pussyhats ‘all hat and no cattle?’” It’s difficult to imagine how this weekend’s march in Washington, D.C. could have been anything near last year’s spectacle. Besides, how could it possibly be as inclusive if the women aren’t all wearing their matchy-matchy vulva headgear?

Pussy Hatters must have gotten a real bee in their bonnets when they began to contemplate some of last year’s ridicule: As I said a year ago, “it seems they forgot the lesson of the infamously retired ‘flesh’-colored crayon.” And now, though they still assert that their choice of Barbie-pink represents femininity, their skewed sensibilities tell them the color is not very inclusive of female anatomical diversity.

The Women’s March chapter in Pensacola, Florida posted to its Facebook page that “the Pink Pussy Hat is white-focused and Eurocentric in that it assumes that all vaginas are pink.” Madly enough, not only do they worry that their hats might be mistaken to represent only white women’s vulvas, they state that since “not all women have pussies,” they don’t want to appear they are promoting “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism”: you know, the feminist crime of excluding men who identify as women.

Now hold onto your own hats here, because then they literally instruct that women tuck in those vulvic corners, and wear any kind of hat that doesn’t look like a pussy!

Playwright Tennessee Williams said that he found “no refuge but writing” and couldn’t resist gilding even his paintings with words. On one self-portrait, the author scrawled “very flattering”; on another, he signed the canvas on the white undershirt he is wearing.

The pictures—one is from 1939, the other isn’t dated—capture Williams’s face and his bare shoulders, in a simple representational style, against a vivid blue background. They are part of a wide-ranging exhibition on the writer of plays such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening Feb. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Williams started painting as a young man and made it a lifelong hobby. The exhibit also includes an undated oil portrait by Williams of Pancho Rodriguez, his lover at the time he was working on “Streetcar.”

The poems of Hart Crane entranced Williams, but in 1936, a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s dark drama, “Ghosts,” literally propelled the would-be-poet from his seat and into pacing back and forth. The drama “took the top of his brain off,” said Carolyn Vega, an associate curator in the department of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, who organized the exhibition.

The Morgan exhibit focuses on six plays Williams created between 1939 and 1957, from the threshold of fame to the height of his powers. He left behind a prodigious trail of journals, letters, poems, short stories, one-acts and full-length plays. The exhibit also includes first editions, posters, programs and photographs from his plays—including a 1947 image of a then-little-known Marlon Brando and his co-stars on the first day of rehearsals for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which made Brando’s name. CONTINUE AT SITE