RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday (11/29/16), in an essay published at Pajamas Media, I urged POETUS Trump not to name either Generals Petraeus or Mattis to his cabinet, based upon the proven failure of the see-no-real-Islam COIN doctrine these men concocted, and implemented in Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Today (11/30/16), M.G. Oprea, writing at The Federalist, gushes, in her headline, that General James Mattis, who remains under serious consideration for Secretary of Defense by POETUS Trump, “Could Bust Our Deathly Political Correctness About Islam.” Ms. Oprea then proceeds to make a factually-challenged distinction between the Islam of her title, and “Islamism,” deeming the latter “political Islam,” a basic error given the designed, intractably political nature of Islam, and its quintessence, the Sharia. Notwithstanding this erroneous conception, she continues apace linking to a brief extract from a Heritage Foundation speech General Mattis gave last year (2015) which also alludes to “political Islam,” and “whether it is in America’s best interest.”

Mattis elaborated on these remarks during a March 2015 extended interview with Peter Robinson, which included the same “political Islam” comment, prefaced by the General’s more revealing observations on the alleged “root” of Islam’s—not Islamism’s—“problem.”

The problem with Islam goes back to the days of “The Prophet” [note: Mattis’s reverent usage]…when he dies and it splits into two halves and at that point they’ve got an internal war…that’s kept waxing and waning over the years…between the Sunni and the Shia…obviously it’s in a waxing phase

Thus Mattis’s formulation of Islam’s central “problem” ignores nearly 14 centuries of brutal, often genocidal jihad war—initiated by Muhammad, Islam’s prototype jihadist—against non-Muslims, ongoing to this day, which included decimation of Iraq’s residual Assyrian Christian population, during the General’s own tenure. Mattis essentially regurgitates the Muslim apologetic narrative which rivets on the alleged “breach of Islam’s political innocence”—the internecine struggle which punctuated Muhammad’s succession, including the assassinations of three of the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who followed Muhammad, and the ensuing violent Sunni-Shiite sectarian carnage after Caliph Ali’s killing, which persists to this day.

Despite reflexive mainstream media contempt for the practice, on the campaign trail, President-elect Trump frequently invoked iconic U.S. World War II Generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to “emphasize the need to strengthen the U.S. military, talk less and do more to protect America.”

Mr. Trump, albeit unfortunately, in somewhat mangled fashion, also referenced MacArthur/Patton era predecessor General Pershing’s successful early 20th century campaign against the Filipino Moro’s jihad “insurgency.” The irrefragable truth which our president-elect inartfully alluded to was that Pershing “materially reduced” Moro jihadist attacks in the rural Philippines (~1911), employing, as described in Pershing’s autobiographical account:

[A] practice that Mohammedans held in abhorrence … The bodies [of slain jihadists] were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would be assassins.

Retired Army Major General Jerry Curry, who served as both President Carter’s deputy assistant defense secretary, and acting press secretary to the secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, writing August 5, 2016, after the GOP convention, opined on the Trump-Patton connection:

Mr. Trump has more than the normal amount of fire in his belly. Like General Patton, he is not happy unless he is fighting and winning. The American people deserve to be led by someone like him. It is time the political elites in Washington realized this and subordinated themselves to the will of the American people.

According to military historian Rick Atkinson, a young George Patton “caught the eye” of General Pershing during the 1916 U.S. Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa, Pershing declaring, “This Patton boy! He’s a real fighter.” Patton, the consummate “fighter” and “winner,” having sojourned in North Africa, also shared his former commander Pershing’s unbowdlerized early to mid-20th century American wisdom about Islam, observing:

One cannot but ponder the question: What if the Arabs had been Christians? To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab [Muslims]. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. Here, I think, is some text for an eloquent sermon on the virtues of Christianity.

Tragically, these informed, experience-based understandings shared by Generals Pershing and Patton have been replaced with the self-delusive (and self-destructive) see-no-real-jihad/Sharia-based Islam “COIN” Counterinsurgency doctrine, jointly “catalyzed” — and evangelized — by two men President-elect Trump is considering in earnest for his cabinet: Generals Mattis and Petraeus.

From the drama over Donald Trump’s cabinet you’d think the only position in government is Secretary of State. Yet Mr. Trump will need advice elsewhere, not least in taming the regulatory state. Newt Gingrich said he won’t serve in a Trump cabinet but would like to contribute. How about tapping the former House Speaker to lead a Gingrich Commission to modernize and shrink the federal government?

The models for this project would be the Hoover Commissions of the 1940s and early 1950s. President Harry Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover to look for ways to streamline government in 1947, and Dwight Eisenhower did it again in 1953, and about 70% of the proposals were adopted in the two Administrations. Congress combined several agencies into what is now the General Services Administration, which reduced paperwork and federal procurement costs.

There’s also the 1980s Grace Commission, which made nearly 2,500 recommendations on everything from farm-credit rules to Pentagon hardware. The Grace Commission accomplished less than its predecessors thanks to a Democratic Congress, but it provoked a public debate about the role of government.

A Gingrich Commission would have an opening for greater progress with a GOP White House and Congress. There’s always a chance that the effervescent Mr. Gingrich would careen off course by proposing a military base on the moon. But he talks all the time about updating government for the 21st century, and he published a book on “winning the future” that covers everything from education to balancing the federal budget. This would be a chance to do it.

The feds over the decades have piled program atop program regardless of results, and a commission could highlight failures and duplications. Unlike previous eras, much of the work has already been done by think tanks or other commissions. The commission could work fairly rapidly, perhaps in a few months.

For example: Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda has identified some 80 welfare programs run by 13 federal agencies, and inevitably many overlap in benefits and eligibility. That seems ripe for a closer look. President-elect Trump has singled out civil-service reform as a priority, and Paul Light of New York University has suggested ideas on these pages that the Gingrich Commission could review.

Over the next year Congress and the new Administration will be preoccupied with daily squalls and the rough and tumble of passing legislation. There’s no time for research. A Gingrich Commission could do that work and serve up ideas to plug into the budget over the next two years and beyond. Government is at its lowest standing with Americans in decades, so even progressives should support an effort that might improve its functioning and lay the basis for more public confidence.

The day before Thanksgiving in New York, I bumped into a Trump adviser who actually knows what is going on inside Trump Tower, as opposed to rumors inhabiting the media such as this Tuesday headline: “Trump’s Team Frays Over Romney.” The message I got was different: “It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be just fine.”

In the seven days since Thanksgiving, President-elect Trump has named the respected schools reformer Betsy DeVos from Michigan as Secretary of Education. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a committed reformer of ObamaCare, is Secretary of Health and Human Services. Elaine Chao, who was George W. Bush’s reformist Labor Secretary for eight years, is the new Secretary of Transportation.

Two businessmen will enter the cabinet. Former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary and Wilbur Ross, an investor in distressed industries, will be Commerce Secretary.

Going deeper into the policy weeds, Mr. Trump selected Indiana Medicaid reformer Seema Verma to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The main Supreme Court adviser visiting Trump Tower has been Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Bob Woodson, one of this generation’s smartest and most productive black conservatives, has been in to discuss with Mr. Trump how to make good on his campaign promise to champion the inner cities.

If instead of these individuals, the visitors to Trump Tower had been the alt-right activists of so many progressive night sweats, it would have been reported across the New York Times’ front page and on CNN round the clock, as if Godzilla and Mothra were trundling up Fifth Avenue.

Instead, the Trump transition has been talking to and appointing some of the most accomplished and serious individuals in Republican and conservative politics. Donald Trump isn’t pulling rabbits out of a hat. Somebody at team Trump has a first-rate Rolodex.

More #winning:

From the earliest days of his campaign, Donald J. Trump made keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States his signature economic issue, and the decision by Carrier, the big air-conditioner company, to move over 2,000 of them from Indiana to Mexico was a tailor-made talking point for him on the stump.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor and the vice president-elect, plan to appear at Carrier’s Indianapolis factory to announce a deal with the company to keep roughly 1,000 jobs in the state, according to officials with the transition team as well as Carrier.

Mr. Trump will be hard-pressed to alter the economic forces that have hammered the Rust Belt for decades, but forcing Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies, to reverse course is a powerful tactical strike that will hearten his followers even before he takes office.

“I’m ready for him to come,” said Robin Maynard, a 24-year veteran of Carrier who builds high-efficiency furnaces and earns almost $24 an hour as a team leader. “Now I can put my daughter through college without having to look for another job.”

This was one of those campaign promises the How Not to Do It Left assured us would be impossible to keep. But the Circumlocution Office failed. Leave it to the New York Times to put a “progressive” spin on the decision, and compare Trump, favorably if indirectly, to Bernie Sanders:

It also signals that Mr. Trump is a different kind of Republican, willing to take on Big Business, at least in individual cases.

And just as only a confirmed anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could go to China, so only a businessman like Mr. Trump could take on corporate America without being called a Bernie Sanders-style socialist. If Barack Obama had tried the same maneuver, he’d probably have drawn criticism for intervening in the free market.

The Muslim terrorist group Islamic State has claimed responsibility for U.S. green card holder Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s brutal car-and-machete attack at Ohio State University.

On Monday morning 18-year-old Artan drove his car through a crowd of pedestrians at OSU’s Columbus campus. He exited the vehicle and then began hacking away at people with his knife. A police officer at the scene shot and killed him. Media reports indicated 12 people were injured in the attack but none suffered life-threatening injuries. Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs promptly said “I think we have to consider that it is” a terrorist attack.

Sure enough, on Tuesday Islamic State claimed responsibility for the terrorist assault. The group’s Amaq News Agency stated the OSU attack was perpetrated by a “soldier of the Islamic State.”

Artan did in fact follow the express directives of Islamic State. In September 2014 the group issued this order to its followers:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

On Facebook, Artan referenced jihadist mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki and wrote: “I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE. … I can’t take it anymore. America! Stop interfering with other countries … [if] you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks.”

As soon as details about Artan began trickling out it was obvious to anyone not wearing politically correct blinders that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism. KARE11.com reported “Artan was a Somali refugee and Ohio State student who left his homeland with his family in 2007. They lived in Pakistan before coming to the U.S., where Artan became a permanent resident in 2014.”

Somalia and Pakistan are “two epicenters of the global jihad,” writes Robert Spencer. If President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to place a temporary moratorium on immigration from jihadist-friendly countries had been in effect “Monday’s jihad attack at Ohio State University would never have happened,” he adds.

Under President Obama, Somali refugee resettlement has surged by an astounding 250 percent. As Jim Stinson writes at LifeZette:

Somalia is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. Over 99 percent of Somalians are Muslim, according to Pennsylvania State University. Mass Muslim migration to Western nations in recent years has generated major concerns about cultural assimilation, vetting procedures, and, ultimately, instances of radicalization and violence.