RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama is known for telling some whoppers — “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” is perhaps the most infamous – so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he told a final one as president right before leaving office last week.

At his final press conference, Obama promised that he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed. “It traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery, and it became sort of acceptable to restrict the franchise. . . . This whole notion of election-voting fraud, this is something that has constantly been disproved. This is fake news.”

The argument over whether or not there is voter fraud will rage on, in part because the Obama administration has spent eight years blocking states from gaining access to federal lists of non-citizen and other possibly illegal voters. Even so, there is abundant evidence that voter fraud is easy to commit. The Heritage Foundation’s website contains hundreds of recent examples of people convicted of stealing votes.

But Obama’s first statement, that the U.S. is unique in trying to enforce ballot integrity, is demonstrably false.

All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting. Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption.

In 2012, I attended a conference in Washington, D.C., of election officials from more than 60 countries; they convened there to observe the U.S. presidential election. Most were astonished that so many U.S. states don’t require voter ID. Lawyers with whom I spoke are also astonished to see Obama link voter ID with the Jim Crow era. As John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog wrote:

President Obama says the effort to ensure ballot integrity “traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery.” This is idiotic. When Democrats imposed Jim Crow laws across the South in the wake of Reconstruction, they relied on poll taxes and ridiculously difficult or ambiguous tests — administered only, apparently, to African Americans who hadn’t finished a certain grade level — to maintain Democratic Party control. Voter ID had nothing to do with it. But no one ever said that Barack Obama knows anything about history.

And if Obama knew much about geography, he might notice that our neighbors require voter ID. Canada adopted voter-ID requirements in 2007 and saw them reaffirmed in 2010; they have worked smoothly since, with almost no complaints. Mexico’s “Credencial para Votar” has a hologram, a photo, and other information embedded in it, and it is impossible to effectively tamper with it. “Mexico’s paper ballots have a level of sophistication equivalent to legal tender,” Catherine Engelbrecht, of the nonprofit True the Vote organization, told me. “They’ve found a balance between security and access to the polls that has restored confidence in their once tainted elections.”

The media have been clucking their disapproval at the “darkness” of Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. “Uniquely dark vision of the U.S.,” read a New York Times headline on Saturday. The Washington Post reported that “Trump delivered a dark inaugural address” — adding, somewhat contradictorily — “in which he pledged fealty to all Americans.” A New York Times op-ed by a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton decried Trump’s “dark, counterfactual picture of ‘American carnage’: an economy in decline, communities under siege by ‘the crime and the gangs and the drugs.’” A New York Times editorial, “President Trump’s Dystopian America,” scoffed at how President Trump “waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation’s cities. ‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,’ [Mr. Trump] vowed,” the Times wrote incredulously.

The press unleashed an identical outpouring of criticism for Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which was likewise said to adopt a counterfactually bleak view of the nation.

Are you scratching your head and wondering, Since when did liberals and the Left embrace a sunny, light-filled vision of the United States? If so, you’re not misremembering things. These are the same liberal elites who have been telling us for decades that America is shot through with an ever-expanding array of hatreds and injustice that disenfranchise large portions of the population and force them to live in fear.

While the conceit of an endemically bigoted and unjust America is longstanding, you need look no further than Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, D.C., to refresh your memory. One sign bobbing in the crowd read: Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them. Ashley Judd unceremoniously pushed Michael Moore off the stage to declare at high volume: “I am not as nasty as racism, misogyny, white privilege, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and white privilege.” (The “nasty woman” theme pervaded the march.) Judd yelled that “blacks are still in shackles and graves just for being black.” Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) announced that “black women are struggling every day for justice and equality.” Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator from California, said that “if you are a black mother trying to raise a son, you know black lives is a women’s issue.” Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood was “standing up for the rights of immigrants to live without fear.” A rapper called for an end to “white supremacy, white privilege, and white wealth” and “thanked God for Michelle Alexander” (who argues that white Americans have manipulated the criminal-justice system in order to reinstate slavery and segregation).

These thoroughly representative members — and products — of the cultural elite are the same people who have given us “safe spaces” and “allyship” on college campuses, under the preposterous notion that any American college student who is not white, male, and heterosexual is “unsafe.” The Left has developed a typology of American students as victims, their allies, and their presumed oppressors. When black students at Bard College in 2015 called for an end to “systemic and structural racism on campus . . . so that Black students can go to class without fear,” they were not making a joke. Of course they were treated as truthsayers by Bard president Leon Botstein and Bard’s bureaucrats. When black Princeton students announced that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” adopting the words of civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been beaten in the 1950s for trying to vote, no one laughed in the face of these fantastically privileged Princetonians. The press, the campus-rape bureaucracy, and an army of federal regulators proclaim that terrified college co-eds are living through a rape tsunami, which can be eradicated only by campus kangaroo courts.

So rapidly does American oppression metastasize into new forms, in the eyes of the Left, that the Left is constantly forced to coin a new vocabulary for it: microaggression, intersectionality, institutional racism, white privilege, cis privilege, implicit bias, etc.

The media’s contempt for Trump’s use of the phrase “carnage” to describe the rising violence in the inner city is particularly ludicrous. The press has slavishly amplified the Black Lives Matter claim that we are living through an epidemic of racist police shootings of black men. A New York Times editorial from July 2016 was titled “When Will the Killing Stop?” That same month, President Barack Obama asserted that black mothers and fathers were right to fear that their child will be killed by a cop — remarkably, he made this claim during the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin.

“Stop killing us” is one of the less profanity-saturated slogans aimed at cops during Black Lives Matter marches. A Black Lives Matter manifesto released last summer called for an end to the “war on black people.” A New York Times op-ed contributor, Roxanne Gay, writes: “As a black woman in America, I do not feel alive. I feel like I am not yet dead. . . . I don’t know how to feel like my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.”

They’re at it again. The minority population of women determined to make the rest of us look like mental patients is marching around in their vagina costumes in the deep-blue cities again (where the voices of the rest of America are suppressed and ignored).

Please recall that these are the same women who claimed to be offended by the use of the word “pus*y,” and yet one of the rallying projects for this march was to knit your own “pus*y hat.” And they wonder why no one takes them seriously.

Frankly, with this few brain cells and their inability to comprehend irony, they deserve smaller paychecks. Perhaps the worst thing about these marches (and it’s hard to pick just one terrible, awful, horribly bad thing because there are so many) is the fact that the “women” they represent are not diverse at all. They are the women of the left (Democrats) only. No other women need apply (and according to them no other women exist). The media is out in force declaring it to be the biggest march in history with all women everywhere united against Trump and for all the left-wing agenda items! If that is true, then who were the women who voted in massive numbers on Election Day against all those things? Who was this march missing?

Women like the New Wave Feminists who are pro-life were disinvited. Other pro-life women’s groups were told not to come. There were no women’s gun rights groups in attendance. I didn’t see any Catholic women’s signs. So the only women these marches included were women who march in lockstep with left-wing, Democrat ideology.

Newsflash for the terminally slow: THIS IS WHY YOU LOST. You ignore and excoriate the multitudes of the women on the planet who disagree with you at your peril. There are millions of us out here. Instead of talking to us, you ban us. Instead of reaching out to see if we can find common ground, you treat us like we do not exist, and when we smoke you in an election, you blame it on the Russians!

We are mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, and daughters and we have women’s reproductive organs (that we don’t like to run around exposing). We disagree with you broads in every way politically and so we are silenced and banned. We aren’t losing any sleep over it because this is seriously not our scene.

What an embarrassing display of vulgarity and naked partisanship. This was a march against Trump and for abortion. That’s it.

A brilliant inaugural address the founders would have applauded.
Absorbing the reaction to Donald Trump’s inaugural address yesterday, I thought about a famous passage from Act II of The Tempest. A few of the shipwrecked men are taking stock of their situation on Prospero’s enchanted island. It soon becomes clear that the island appears very different to different characters.

Friday afternoon, I wrote a brief piece about the inauguration for the Financial Times (requires registration) in which I described Trump’s address as “gracious but plain-speaking.” My, how the readers of the FT disliked that!

To be fair, the legacy media in America hated Trump’s speech, too, as did — and this is the more interesting thing — the anti-Trump Right. The Chicago Tribune described the speech as “raw, angry and aggrieved,” “pugnacious in tone, pitch black in its color.” OK, par for the course. But Andrew Ferguson, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said that “the candidate who campaigned as a sociopath shows signs he may yet govern as one.” (“Sociopath”? Caligula was a sociopath. Donald Trump?) Sure, Chris “Old Reliable” Matthews, ready as ever with the Godwin Expedient, described the speech as “Hiterlian.” But just about every mainstream outlet from The Weekly Standard on down referred to the speech as “dark.” I was a bit taken aback to hear a politically mature friend describe the speech as “disgusting,” “nasty,” “borderline unAmerican” and then go on, listing Godwinwards, to invoke “beer halls” (you know what that means!) in connection with the speech.

So what do you think, is the ground tawny? Or does the ground look lush and lusty?

I said that Trump’s speech was gracious. Here’s how he began:

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent.

“Raw”? “Angry”? “Nasty”? “Disgusting”?

Granted, that was merely the prelude. The rest of the short speech (it was only about 1400 words) is what I called “plain-speaking.” Trump negotiated the transition from gracious prelude to forthright substance with the word “however”:

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

During the primaries, my favored candidate was Ted Cruz, partly because I thought he was the most serious about bringing the bipartisan, leech-like Washington gravy train to an abrupt halt.

At first, I regarded Donald Trump as just another big-government operator who would not reform Washington so much as find ways to exploit it for his own benefit. So far, I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised. Sure, it is early days. But he has spoken of making staff cuts of 20% and a budget cut of 10%. And, in what is the real kernel of his inauguration address, he gives the rationale: his administration will not just be Washington business as usual, in which new leeches come to town to replace the old leeches, but will actually endeavor to alter the basic, perverted metabolism that has taken root in Washington. The aim, he said, was not simply to transfer power from one party to another — chaps with different hats but the same grasping hands and insatiable appetite for your money — but to transfer it from Washington to where Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson and the rest thought it should be, to We the People.

Will Donald Trump be able to accomplish this? I do not know. But I applaud the ambition.

I recently received this shocking letter from a man who has served as a contractor in Afghanistan. It reveals the appalling extent of sharia compliance in the United States military.

My name is John Craig. I have been a contractor in Afghanistan for over five years as a mechanical engineer. Recently I have been dismissed by the command of Bagram Air Field and lost my job. I am in Kuwait and in route to go home and find another job.

The reason I was expelled from the base is because I had two copies of the Koran. One was a hardback study book and the other a paperback Koran; it is my interest to study the religion in and of itself and take notes.

Well, what happened was that I wrote notes and highlighted throughout the books and came to the conclusion that the doctrine itself is that of murder, rape, and extortion. That is my personal view of the religion.

Well, dumb me, I wrote on the paperback Koran in black marker right on the front – RELIGION OF MURDER. That is what I think of it. The Command M.P. (military police) did an inspection in our rooms and were searching for General Order 1 violations; it’s normal procedure finding drugs, alcohol, and pornographic material. Well, in this search, they found my study Korans (under my bed) out of sight and out of view of others, and called me in to investigate why I had marked on the Koran RELIGION OF MURDER.

I went to the police station and wrote an essay on my reasons for having the books and why I wrote that. I explained to them that this was all for personal study and not meant for sharing with others, especially with Muslims. I do not preach, evangelize or try to talk to Muslims about their religious beliefs. I am simply there trying to make a living for my family and have no intention of ever sharing my beliefs.

The Command did not see it that way. The following day, the leadership of my company called me in and read a letter from the Air Force Colonial Command, stating that I was permanently barred from the military base there in Afghanistan and that I was to leave immediately. The charge was that I was “in possession of prohibited material.” So it did not define my marking on the book; it just said I had something that was in violation of their General Order 1.

The colonel said that my presence there was a security threat and a disruption of the good conduct of personnel on the base and that I had to leave. In addition, I will not be able to work anywhere with the military, either there or in Kuwait or Iraq, or with any other branch in the military service.

‘You’re so vain, you prolly think this march is about you,” read a sign at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. I thought to myself: This is about him, isn’t it?

I put that question to Breanne Butler, the march’s global coordinator, who insisted the answer was no: “This isn’t a march on Trump,” she said. “It’s a march on Washington,” including Congress, the Supreme Court and “any other representatives.” The message, according to Ms. Butler: “Hear our voices, we’ve been silenced. You need to take us into consideration. . . . We are America.”

That sounded a lot like the message voters were sending when they made Donald Trump president: They felt marginalized and voiceless. Ms. Butler, a 27-year-old New Yorker on sabbatical from her job as a pastry chef, said she hopes progressives and Trump voters can acknowledge their differences and find common ground, although she later called Mr. Trump’s election “a symptom of a bigger disease,” namely “complacency.”

Complacency didn’t seem to be a problem for the self-proclaimed “nasty women”—and men—who made the pilgrimage to the capital. They numbered perhaps half a million. And if Ms. Butler’s title, global coordinator, seemed grandiose for a march “on Washington,” it wasn’t. She had a hand in organizing more than 600 marches in every state and on all seven continents—yes, even Antarctica.

In Mr. Trump’s hometown, an estimated 400,000 people marched down Second Avenue. Women in Japan marched for higher education; in Ethiopia, for clean water. The Antarctic march took place aboard a boat.

The marchers in Washington seemed to have a million messages. One big theme was reproductive rights. “Get your policies out of my exam room,” read one sign defending Planned Parenthood. Others read “Save ACA, live long, and prosper,” “My body my business,” and “Reproductive rights are human rights.” Many women carried signs depicting the female anatomy or wore crocheted pink cat ears—a pun on a vulgar term Mr. Trump once uttered.

There were plenty of other pet causes. “Racial justice = LGBTQ issues,” read one sign. A popular poster featured a woman in an American-flag hijab and the words “We the people are greater than fear.” Forty-year-old Pablo Rosa, who immigrated to the U.S. when he was 13, carried a sign that said “Mexico owes US nothing.” Other posters called Mr. Trump “the Kremlin candidate” and “Putin’s pawn,” pleaded to “protect our planet,” and proclaimed: “Public education is a civil right.”

The mood on Saturday was upbeat—surprisingly so, given the divisions that emerged during the march’s planning. Leading up to the march several posts on the organization’s social media pages erupted in controversy. ShiShi Rose, a social media administrator for the march, wrote an Instagram post titled “White Allies Read Below.” She instructed that “no ally ever got very far without acknowledgment of their privilege daily” and informed white women that they “don’t just get to join because you’re scared too. I was born scared.”

The comments exploded. “This makes me not want to go now,” one woman wrote. “This is all for all women! Not just black, white but brown, Muslim etc.” Another observed that “women were suppressed throughout history. This is an event about women banding together, not tearing each other apart because you’re bitter.”

When I asked Ms. Butler about such exchanges, she said they had concerned her initially. But after reading one of the posts, she concluded its author had a point: “We aren’t taking your history into consideration, and we need to.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump made a smart move in visiting the CIA on his first full day on the job, but he and his staff are going to have to raise their game if they want to succeed at governing. This was not a presidential performance.

The visit made sense to repair any misunderstandings from the campaign and transition when Mr. Trump sometimes seemed to attack the entire intelligence community for the leaks that Russia tried to help his campaign. Those leaks were almost certainly put out or authorized by the Obama White House or senior intelligence officials appointed by President Obama. The rank and file didn’t do it.

“I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country towards making us safe, towards making us winners again,” Mr. Trump told employees assembled in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall for those have died in the covert service. “I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job, and we’re going to start winning again and you’re going to be leading the charge.” So far so good.

But Mr. Trump also couldn’t resist turning the event into an extended and self-centered riff about the size of his campaign rallies, the times he’s been on Time magazine’s cover and how the “dishonest” media misreported his inaugural crowds. He all but begged for the political approval of the career CIA employees by suggesting most there had voted for him.

Such defensiveness about his victory and media coverage makes Mr. Trump look small and insecure. It also undermines his words to the CIA employees by suggesting the visit was really about him, not their vital work. The White House is still staffing up, but was it too much to ask National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s staff to write up five or 10 minutes of formal remarks that had something to do with the CIA?

I watched U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on TV in Israel, alternating ‎between Hebrew- and English-speaking channels, so as not to miss any detail or piece of ‎commentary.‎

The buildup to the momentous event had been dramatic. Until late in the race, it ‎appeared that Hillary Clinton was going to strut away with the Democratic nomination ‎and beat Republican candidate John McCain with one hand tied behind her back.‎

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, an unknown senator from Illinois emerged and ‎proceeded to crush her vision of re-entering the White House as its master, not simply first lady.‎

Mrs. Bill Clinton was understandably livid to see the effect that Obama had on her party ‎and its supporters. Not only was he everything she was not: tall, dark, handsome and ‎charismatic; he also outranked her in minority status. She may have had hopes of ‎becoming the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. But he was black.‎

In addition, though Clinton had a political record that could be critiqued — and a spouse ‎whose blatant infidelities led to his impeachment, but not to her divorcing him — Obama ‎possessed a picture-perfect nuclear family and no visible blemishes on his enigmatic past.‎

Both had been Saul Alinskyites in their youth, but Clinton had long since sold her ‎radicalism to the highest bidder, exchanging ideology for financial opportunism and ‎power lust. Obama, on the other hand — considerably younger than his rival — was still in ‎the throes of his late mentor’s teachings. ‎

For Clinton, America’s greatness and abundance were there for exploitation. Obama ‎viewed the country and its institutions as a lump of unappealing clay he was anointed to ‎pummel and remold in his image. His motto of “hope and change” disguised this agenda, ‎but it invigorated a disgruntled public hungry for Utopia. Neither Clinton nor McCain ‎stood a chance.‎

When Obama was sworn in — his hand disturbingly on the Bible whose passages he had ‎spent 20 years hearing in sermons preached by his anti-American, anti-white and anti-‎Semitic pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright — I longed to join in the festivities. ‎

Indeed, it was a truly historic occasion for a country in which segregation was still ‎practiced in my lifetime, to be electing a black president. As cameras zoomed in on Oprah ‎Winfrey weeping tears of joy, I wanted to join her. I wished to be cheering, rather than ‎mourning what I anticipated was going to be a concerted effort to destroy the great ‎United States from within and appease its external enemies to the point of endangering ‎Israel.‎