RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last days of the Obama presidency are being filled with “legacy” talk. Critics have catalogued all the domestic and foreign policy disasters Obama will leave in his wake, from Obamacare to the rise of ISIS. The president himself has held a revival-tent rally and made various public statements that describe an alternate universe in which his manifest failures are transformed into epochal achievements. But in the long view, what do the Obama years represent about our political order and its future?

We can start with the complete discrediting of the mainstream media, the culmination of a degradation that started, like most of our political, social, and cultural diseases, in the sixties. The biased, politicized coverage of the Watergate scandal and the war in Vietnam marks the point when journalism moved from the usual liberal prejudices into activist advocacy. The open contempt with which most of the press covered Ronald Reagan and his presidency was another milestone, in contrast to the generally favorable coverage of Bill Clinton, followed by the malicious, sometimes vicious treatment of George W. Bush.

The candidacy of Barack Obama both climaxed this decades-long abandonment of journalistic ethics and integrity, and raised the press’s advocacy to levels of worshipful praise that would have embarrassed the foppish courtiers and groveling sycophants in Louis XIV’s Versailles: he was a “rock star,” the Democrats’ “Tiger Woods,” a politician “it’s hard to be objective when covering,” who made one reporter’s leg “tingle,” and whose very trouser-crease astonished another; one “so impressive, so charismatic,” “something special,” possessing “chiseled pectorals,” a “keen analytical intelligence,” “prodigious talents,” an “amazing legislative agenda,” and “huge achievements”; “one of our brightest presidents,” a “huge visionary,” “our national poet,” “the most noble man who has ever lived in the White House”; the “political equivalent of a rainbow,” “a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy,” “something special, a man who makes difficult tasks look easy,” the “visionary leader of a giant movement”; a president “able to game out scenarios before the experts in the room,” “a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph,” Hegel’s “world historical soul”; “the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect American,” a president “better than the body politic deserved,” and “a great speech writer” whose words comprise “one of the most moving, inspiring valentines to this country that I’ve ever heard.”

Add the media’s ongoing deranged, duplicitous coverage of president-elect Donald Trump, and Rich Noyes’ catalogue is a fitting epitaph for the mainstream media. Except with their fellow progressive cultists weeping and cowering in “safe spaces,” they have no credibility or journalistic dignity left. Their collective suicide is Obama’s legacy.

Furor has arisen over President-elect Donald Trump’s charges that our intelligence agencies are politicized.

Spare us the outrage. For decades, directors of intelligence agencies have often quite inappropriately massaged their assessments to fit administration agendas.

Careerists at these agencies naturally want to continue working from one administration to the next in “the king is dead; long live the king!” style. So they make the necessary political adjustments, which are sometimes quite at odds with their own agency’s findings and to the detriment of national security. The result is often confusion — and misinformation passed off as authoritative intelligence.

After Barack Obama won the 2008 election, George W. Bush intelligence adviser John Brennan stayed on as Obama’s homeland-security adviser. He is currently the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Under Obama, Brennan loudly criticized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. Brennan praised his new boss for his superior approach to combating terrorism.

Brennan, who had served a year as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Bush, later assured the nation that enhanced interrogation techniques had helped “save lives” and were an important tool in combating terrorism.

In 2010, Brennan inexplicably declared that jihad was “a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” rather than the use of force against non-Muslims to promote the spread of Islam, as it is commonly defined in the Middle East.

Brennan assured the nation that the Obama administration’s drone assassination program had not resulted in “a single collateral death” — a claim widely disbelieved even by administration supporters.

The organized hysteria on the Left gets shriller, but sillier, by the day.

Those who are ignorant of history, George Santayana remarked, are condemned to repeat it. It’s not quite true, of course.

Santayana’s elder tradesman, Heraclitus, was right when he said that you cannot step into the same river twice. Whether or not you know anything about it, history, that great river, keeps meandering on. It does not double back.

But Santayana’s oft-quoted remark does have a salutary invigorating effect. Much like that “self-evident half-truth” (as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield put it) that “all men are created equal,” Santayana’s admonition might well exert, on susceptible souls, the goad to learn more about mankind’s adventure in time, which is a good thing. There are patterns to be observed, continuities (and discontinuities) noted, metabolisms of power registered and understood. So even if Santayana overstated the case, the failure to study history — for a culture as well as for individuals — is a sort of existential threat.

Or, to put it positively, a study of history is a prophylactic learning experience.

One of the things one learns, I believe, is that Karl Marx was not always wrong. For example, when he amends Hegel’s declaration that history repeats itself, Marx notes “he forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

It tells us something about Marx that the only two choices he he can envision are tragedy and farce. Is there no tertium quid?

Perhaps we are about to find out.

Hysteria tends to feed on itself, so it is no surprise that the #NeverTrump/#AntiTrump brigades have been vying to outdo one another in histrionics. Hundreds of thousands of protestors are about to descend upon Washington, D.C., to dispute the results of an open, democratic election. In many cases, the antics remind one of nothing so much as a distraught toddler who follows his mother around the house and falls down in a tantrum whenever he has her attention. It’s funny when it’s a two-year-old. When the source of the tantrums are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, it is still funny, but also pathetic.

Still, it is worth noting that the minatory rhetoric seems to increase in volume daily. One example: a group called “DisruptJ20” aims to “shut down the inauguration.” David Thurston, a spokesman for the group, stated: “We want to see a seething rebellion develop in this city and across the country.”

Does he have any idea what he is talking about? What about the long tradition in this country of the peaceful transfer of power? “We are not in favor of a peaceful transition of power,” Legba Carrefour, another “DisruptJ20 representative, said. He added: “[W]e need to stop it.”

What are we to make of such melodrama? Are we living through a reprise of 1968? Or, as some have suggested, of 1860, when the country descended into civil war?

As I write, 47 Democratic congressmen have announced that they plan to “boycott” the inauguration (John Lewis doesn’t count: he boycotted when George W. Bush was elected, too, as no Republican is “legitimate” for that race-baiting charlatan).

Democratic opposition to Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees is consistently shrill, but the inability—or unwillingness—to make distinctions may backfire. Not everything deserves emergency footing, and eventually people tune out. Witness the meltdown over Tom Price’s investment portfolio.

The Georgia Republican and orthopedic surgeon is on deck to lead the Health and Human Services Department, and at Wednesday’s Senate hearing and in the Democratic trade press he stands accused of abusing his office for personal profit. Mr. Price’s net worth includes about $300,000 of stock in health-care-related companies, and over the years he’s sponsored legislation, sent letters or otherwise taken policy positions that reporters are now flyspecking for evidence of insider trading.

To take the latest non-bombshell at face value, Mr. Price took a position in 2015 in a company called Zimmer Biomet that makes hip, knee and other replacements. The same year, HHS proposed changing how Medicare pays for such devices. In a letter Mr. Price cosigned, he warned that the new system “could have a negative impact on patient choice, access and quality,” and he asked HHS to delay the project. In 2016 he cosponsored legislation to do so.

According to the daisy-chain allegations, the HHS proposal would reduce reimbursements for joint replacements, and therefore harm Zimmer Biomet’s profits, and therefore Mr. Price intervened. But the rule went forward in 2016 despite Mr. Price’s criticism, and he has been consistent as someone with health-care expertise in scrutinizing all HHS regulations he believes undermine patient care.

About 5,000 bills are introduced in every Congress and far more “dear colleague” letters are posted. This background noise is rarely market-moving, and Members of Congress are not prohibited from trading. Politicians aren’t insiders in the classic definition, meaning they don’t work for companies and owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Many Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, such as Tom Carper and Mark Warner, also hold health-care shares.

In any case, the Zimmer Biomet purchase was made by Mr. Price’s Morgan Stanley broker and became known to him only for financial-disclosure compliance. The broker bought 26 shares whose total value has risen by about $300 in the months since. If Mr. Price really is self-dealing, he’s doing a lousy job.

The larger question is whether politicians, or any nonprofessional investor for that matter, should hold individual securities. As a matter of financial literacy, most small investors should opt for index funds, eliminating the familiar day-trading peril of buying high and selling low, with low transaction costs to boot.

The political danger is the appearance of conflicts of interest, which is why Members would be wise to not actively trade, whatever the law allows. Chief Justice John Roberts recently had to recuse himself from a patent case because he discovered after oral argument that the petitioner was a subsidiary of a company whose stock he owned, which means the outcome could flip in favor of the Supreme Court’s judicial liberals. Why public officials think they can beat the markets is a mystery, even if such trades don’t interfere with or compromise their public duties.

If Democrats were praising index funds and divesting their own portfolios, they’d be more credible critics. Inflating Mr. Price’s boring investments into scandals guarantees that when something does merit outrage, fewer people will believe it.

The most important statement in the Justice Department’s damning report on the Chicago Police Department has nothing to do with police behavior. Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force. But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice” (the phrase comes from a 1994 federal statute) of unconstitutional police conduct. “Statistical evidence is not required” for a “pattern or practice” finding, the DOJ lawyers announce, citing unrelated court precedent. Nor is there “a specific number of incidents” required to constitute a “pattern or practice,” they proclaim.

Having cleared themselves of any obligation to provide “a specific number of [unconstitutional] incidents” or a statistical benchmark for evaluating them, the DOJ attorneys proceed to ignore any further obligation of transparency. The reader never learns how many incidents of allegedly unconstitutional behavior the Justice Department found, nor how those incidents compare with the universe of police-civilian contacts conducted by the Chicago Police Department. No clue is provided regarding why the DOJ lawyers concluded that the alleged abuses reached the mysterious threshold for constituting a pattern or practice. Instead, the report uses waffle words like “several,” “often,” or “many” as a substitute for actual quantification. This vacuum of information hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from trumpeting the report as yet another exposé of abusive, racist policing. EXCESSIVE FORCE IS RIFE IN CHICAGO, U.S. REVIEW FINDs, read the headline on the New York Times’s front-page story, which went on to note that the excessive force was “chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.”

The report does disclose that the DOJ attorneys reviewed 425 incidents of less-than-lethal force between January 2011 and April 2016. But what proportion of total force incidents those 425 events represent or how many of those 425 incidents the federal lawyers found unconstitutional isn’t revealed. As to how many stops and arrests were made over that same time period that didn’t involve the use of force, the reader can only guess.

We also learn that the federal civil rights team identified 203 officer-involved shootings between January 1, 2011, and March 21, 2016. How many of those were bad shootings? Fifteen? One hundred? The reader is left in the dark. The massive New York Police Department averaged 48 shootings a year from 2005 to 2015. The per-capita rate of officer shootings in the NYPD is therefore much lower than in the Chicago Police Department, which is about a third the size. But Chicago’s crime rate is much higher than New York’s; CPD officers confront many more armed and resisting suspects. It would have been useful to know how the ratio of officer-involved shootings to criminal shootings in Chicago compares to other cities. We don’t even learn how many of those 203 officer-involved shootings in Chicago were lethal.

The absence of any quantified evidence for DOJ’s judgment of systemic abuse is all the more significant, since it was only yesterday that Chicago law enforcement was the darling of the left-wing academic establishment. In 2010, the New York City Bar Association held a forum on the New York Police Department, during which Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan and Yale University law professor Tracey Meares both touted the Chicago department as a model that the big, bad NYPD should emulate. (I participated on that bar panel as well.) Meares and her Yale colleague Tom Tyler have used the Chicago Police Department as a laboratory for their concept of “procedural justice and legitimacy.” The Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing incorporated the procedural justice idea from Chicago into its May 2015 report; the Justice Department distributes the Chicago procedural justice curriculum to other departments, according to Time magazine. John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor David Kennedy worked with Chicago on his theory of violence reduction. Garry McCarthy, who was superintendent of the Chicago Police Department during the period covered by the DOJ’s report, presented himself as a “reform” commander focused on community relations, and he was received as such by academia and the media. The Chicago PD’s extensive collaboration with academic researchers was the hot topic during a November 2015 conference of the American Society of Criminology, reports Time.

https://quadrant.org.au/

Yea, we must surely be at the End of Days, when improbable amities and alliances will blossom hither and yon, as they have been doing these past two months in Washington. Consider the portents:

After decades of making excuses for Moscow, the Western left now presents the Kremlin as the greatest threat to all mankind.
After decades of denouncing the imperialist machinations of the CIA, the spy agency is now the go-to source of geopolitical wisdom and must be trusted absolutely by all intelligent people everywhere.

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this article, the White House announced on Tuesday that Oscar Lopez-Rivera’s sentence would be commuted.

As Barack Obama begins the last week of his presidency, speculation about potential candidates for an eleventh-hour presidential pardon has inevitably heated up. And one name that has been bandied about should send a particularly unpleasant chill down the spines of law-abiding Americans everywhere: Oscar Lopez-Rivera.

Lopez-Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981, after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy and arms trafficking in connection with his leadership of the FALN, the notorious left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated more than 130 attacks on U.S. soil from the mid 1970s through the mid 1980s, killing six and wounding many more. Most members of the FALN, which purported to fight for Puerto Rican independence but maintained deep ties to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, were long ago captured and imprisoned, and many of them have already served their time and been released. But Lopez-Rivera remains unrepentant about his crimes, and he’s hardly been a model prisoner: In one of two failed attempts to escape, he conspired with others inside and outside his prison to kill his way to freedom, attempting to procure grenades, rifles, plastic explosives, bulletproof vests, blasting caps, and armor-piercing bullets. After the FBI thwarted this plan, another 15 years was added to Lopez’s original 55-year sentence.

Then, in 1999, President Bill Clinton stunned the world by offering clemency to twelve FALN members, including Lopez, without notifying the families of the FALN’s victims beforehand. Eric Holder, at the time a deputy attorney general in Clinton’s Justice Department, had been trying to free the imprisoned radicals for two years. When then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s staff thought freeing the terrorists might help her pick up the significant Puerto Rican voting bloc in her N.Y. Senate race, they reached out to Holder for an assist. Holder came up with a statement the terrorists would have to sign expressing remorse for their actions, Mrs. Clinton met with an advocate for the group who passed along documents to assist with the clemency, she gave the documents to her husband, and just two days later President Clinton made the surprise announcement.

The plan quickly began to implode when both branches of Congress overwhelmingly condemned it and the administration failed to get all twelve terrorists to agree to its conditions. As a 30-day deadline to accept the offer approached, eleven of the twelve prisoners signed on, walking free as a stunned nation watched. Lopez-Rivera was the only prisoner to decline the administration’s offer.