RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today is my son’s first Independence Day.

He doesn’t know that, of course, because he’s only three-and-a-half months old. But my wife and I do, and we’ve attempted to mark the occasion nevertheless — in loco filius, if you will. As such, Jack will be dressed today in a special onesie (stylized picture of a milk bottle, “Come and Take It” tagline); he will wear his Old Glory sun hat; and he will be involved in all the festivities that the family has to offer. Naturally, none of this will make even the slightest bit of sense to him; as a matter of fact, today will be the same as is any other day in the life of a baby, just with more people around and a surfeit of BBQ. But you have to start somewhere, right?

Because Jack is three months old, it is acceptable for his parents to treat July Fourth as an excuse for the purchase of kitsch. But what about after that? What about when he is five? Or twelve? Or nineteen? As a native Brit, I am accustomed to the self-deprecating instincts that are the hallmark of British society, and I am acquainted, too, with the reflexive aversion to patriotism that is all-too customary in the birthplace of Western liberty. In consequence, I know that if I were to leave my son befuddled by America’s Independence Day proceedings, he would probably stay that way in perpetuity. And that would be a tremendous, unconscionable shame — a shame that, frankly, would reflect poorly on me.

Once they reach a certain age, we expect our children to know what is what. As soon as they start speaking, we begin to teach them right and wrong; once they are old enough to be trusted with responsibility, we monitor closely how it is being used; and, in a process that is hopefully never-ending, we make sure that they know as much about the world around them as they are capable of taking in. It is in pursuit of this lattermost goal that we designate national holidays. In May, we celebrate Memorial Day, lest we forget what we owe our ancestors. In January, we observe Martin Luther King Day, that we might bring to mind the most uncomfortable parts of our nation’s past. And on July Fourth we arrange an ostentatious display of patriotism, in resounding commemoration of the moment that a ragtag bunch of philosopher-king rebels set their revolutionary ideals before a candid world, and changed human history forever.

In certain quarters it is fashionable to disdain these occasions, and, in so doing, to treat the past as if it were wholly disconnected from the present. Indeed, staunch defenders of the American Founding are often told that to embrace modernity it is necessarily to jettison the antique. “Why,” it is asked, “do we celebrate these flawed men and their pieces of parchment? After all, John Adams couldn’t even have imagined Tinder.”

Though narrow, this critique is indisputably correct. John Adams could not have imagined Tinder, and I daresay that he had no conception of high-frequency trading, of synthetic fibers, or of advanced robots either. But, ultimately, that is irrelevant. The beauty of the American Founding was not that it provided a detailed roadmap that could predict the minutiae of the future in glorious perpetuity, but that it laid out for all people a set of timeless and universal ideals, the veracity and applicability of which are contingent upon neither the transient mood of the mob nor the present state of technology. Among those ideals are that “all men are created equal,” and that they “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; that “Governments are instituted among Men” in order to “secure” their “rights”; that legitimate power derives “from the consent of the governed”; and that if any such government is seized or corrupted by tyrants, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” At times, the United States has failed disastrously to live up to these principles, and, on at least one occasion, significant forces within the union have rejected them outright. But that an ideal has been violated in no way undermines its value, and it seems patently obvious to me that the country has been blessed by having had an eloquent North star to which its downtrodden could point from their moments of need.

“Had the meeting in Phoenix never come to light, which was clearly the intention of Lynch and Clinton, the fix with Hillary would have been in. As it stands, Hillary’s fate will depend on whether she escaped the FBI interview in good shape, the integrity of that agency’s director, and the utter indifference of many Americans to her criminal dishonesty. Finally, it will depend on the Obama administration’s tolerance for blatant political intrigues. If the past is any guide, that tolerance is quite high. ”

Sifting through the facts slowly emerging from the tattered veil of secrecy surrounding the tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, it is likely that the popular narrative that the Attorney General was ambushed is false. In all likelihood, General Lynch had an important agenda that needed to be communicated immediately to Team Hillary.

Last week I wrote a piece reasonably speculating that Lynch’s meeting with Clinton meant that the FBI would shortly refer charges to Justice, and that Lynch met Clinton to break the bad news and reassure him that nothing would come of it under her watch. Since that article was published new information has come to light, but none that would undermine its central premise. That Hillary Clinton was finally interviewed by FBI agents on Saturday strongly suggests that not only was Lynch’s meeting with Clinton prearranged, but reinforces the idea that their discussion improperly focused on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary.

Coincidences are often the fodder of conspiracy theorists and for good reason should be evaluated carefully. But that doesn’t mean that stunning coincidences are not good evidence. Circumstantial evidence is essentially another name for coincidence, and properly presented is a good as any other kind of evidence and sufficient to decide a case.

The meeting of Clinton’s and Lynch’s planes in a Phoenix airport at the same time of day, far from their own home bases, with both of them following busy schedules is strangely coincidental in and of itself. That we now know the “chance” meeting occurring five days before Clinton was to be interviewed by the FBI (something that both parties to the Phoenix encounter already knew) is one coincidence too many. To believe this encounter happened purely by chance is either to discount logic, or to take a political side.

The mainstream media predictably are doing their best to avoid logical conclusions that hurt their candidate, and so predictably have spun a narrative to explain it. In this telling, the meeting was not only by chance, but forced upon Lynch by Clinton, who left his plane with his security detail and set upon her plane. This account appears to be backed by leaks that suggest Lynch’s FBI escort was surprised and upset by the encounter — not only because it presents inherent security problems when two groups of heavily armed agents approach each other without a prearranged plan, but because as FBI agents they understood that the encounter at least appeared improper.

The sun blazed down on Norfolk’s old-fashioned fife-and-drum parade on July Fourth of 1822, but the weather deteriorated for the afternoon picnic. The skies of coastal Virginia turned heavy and black; the rain fell in sheets. Some guests ran for cover, while the rest dined on soggy food, sang above the howling wind and drank a toast to…Latin America?

Before the party started, the hosts had carefully hung the flags of Peru, Argentina, Chile and Colombia alongside the Stars and Stripes. The Mexican flag was probably there too, whipping and snapping in the wind.

There was nothing unusual about this interest in our hemispheric neighbors. Newspapers of the era printed long transcripts of holiday toasts every summer in the weeks after Independence Day. A sample of several hundred indicates that well over half of July Fourth gatherings in the decade following the War of 1812 raised their glasses to Latin America.

Why, on their most patriotic of holidays, were so many Americans looking south of the border, speaking not of walls but of brotherhood?

The answer lies in the cosmopolitan vision of the American founding. The audacity of the Revolution lay not simply in the fact that 13 disparate colonies had defied the mighty British Empire but in the conviction of Americans that the rest of the world should care. When Parisians stormed the Bastille in the summer of 1789, Americans exulted, thrilled to think that such a powerful country was following in their footsteps. (The ardor soon cooled as bloodied heads toppled in the streets of Paris and a slave rebellion erupted in Haiti.)
When another wave of rebellion swept across Latin America from 1810 to 1825, Americans erupted with joy once again. By the 50th anniversary of the U.S., most of the western hemisphere was independent, from the U.S. and Mexico to Venezuela and Brazil. It was a “jubilee of nations,” a Kentucky congressman crowed, “the birth-day of a hemisphere redeemed.” U.S. patriots hailed Latin America’s wars of independence as thrilling equatorial reprises of 1776.

The international ardor rang loudest on July Fourth, but it reverberated year-round. Appalachian farmers read poetry about Andean independence. Sailors wore cockades for revolutionary Montevideo. Parents even named their sons Bolivar, after Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan political and military leader sometimes called the “ George Washington of South America.”

‘Does not, then, the Almighty clearly impress an awe of the persons and authority of Kings upon the minds of their subjects, hereby proving Government of Divine origin?” So asked the Reverend J. R. Walsh in a pamphlet printed in 1829. “For, otherwise, by what principle could any one mortal command subjection from so many millions of fellow creatures”?

That was a question very much upon the mind of King George IV, whose coronation provided the inspiration for the Reverend Walsh’s essay: That king’s father, George III, had been treated with a notable lack of awe by his American subjects, who gave him the shoe and set up their own republic, without any king at all. This experiment in awelessness, all the smart people of the late 18th century assured one another, was doomed to failure: Awelessness was next to lawlessness, they believed, and a people without a king to tell them how to behave or a king’s church to tell them why to behave were doomed to anarchy.

Here’s to 240 years of glorious anarchy.

Awe was very much on the minds of those early republicans. George Washington, whose name appears frequently in sentences containing the word “awe,” wrote that one of the purposes of our northern fortifications was to “awe the Indians.” Thomas Paine, who had no great awe of the state, wrote of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms: “Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.” You’ll find a man’s heart where you find his awe: Walter Bagehot, founder of (that other) National Review and later editor of The Economist, lived to learn: “A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe,” he wrote, “and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.” Edmund Burke believed that even when addressing the defects of the state, we should treat it “with pious awe and trembling solicitude,” hence his hesitancy about the American Revolution and his detestation of the French one. The libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard would later argue the opposite, that failed revolutions are valuable to the extent that they “decrease the awe in which the constituted authority is held by the populace, and in that way will increase the chance of a later revolt against tyranny.”

When the Reverend Walsh connected awe with divinity in government, he had in mind Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” Burke had in mind a kind of holy terror, too, though one that less closely resembled the apostle’s fear of the Almighty than it did Thomas Hobbes’s fear of bellum omnium contra omnes. But in many ways those come down to the same thing: Without someone to keep them in line — to keep them in awe — what’s to keep the people from running amok?

The American Founders did not contemplate a world without awe of government, but they did intuit that a free, self-governing, democratic republic could get by with a good deal less of it. George Washington famously rejected an offer to make him king and thought that calling the president “Your Excellency” might be a bit much, too. We hear a great deal now about the “dignity of the office” and the need to have “respect for the presidency,” if not for the president himself, but nobody ever really says why. Why should we be awed at the chief bureaucrat of the federal administrative apparatus? Why should we hold in awe our employee? “Only I can fix” is Donald Trump’s illiterate shorthand for the idea that presidents are, like kings, products of divine election. George Washington never said anything like that; he didn’t need to convince anybody that he was the man for the job, and he knew that the job was governing, not ruling.

In his radio address to the nation on July 4, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged the growing global threat to human freedom and to democracy. He spoke of the new tyrannies that have “been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad and definitely, they are threatened here.”

To commemorate the American principles of human freedom and democracy, he announced the holiday “as a beacon for the world in its fight for freedom.”

On July 4 1941, FDR stated that “it has been that childlike fantasy itself that misdirected faith which has led nation after nation to go about their peaceful tasks, relying on the thought, and even the promise, that they and their lives and their government would be allowed to live when the juggernaut of force came their way.”

FRD challenged those Americans who were satisfied with the country’s neutrality while the “new tyrannies,” Nazi Germany, their Italian and Japanese allies and the Soviet Union – have already invaded and plundered other nations. He argued that suggestions “that the rule of force can defeat human freedom in all the other parts of the world and permit it to survive in the United States alone is a fallacy, base[d] on no logic at all.”

FDR was right. But the the U.S. set on the fence while lost millions lost their lives and the Nazis set in motion the systematic annihilation of the Jews.

The physical devastation and severe punishment of the “new tyrannies,” Germany and Japan, and elaborate efforts to rid their culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of their dictatorial ideologies paved the way to human and political freedoms.

But the denazification program did not go all the way and completely ignored the Arab/Muslim world. Its ideologues, especially the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood organization, which already then had branches on five continents. The group collaborated with Nazis but was not disbanded. This was a tragic mistake that since has caused death and devastation everywhere, including in America. But unlike FDR, President Obama is unwilling to identify this enemy.

The U.K. has shown its contempt for anti-democratic international unions by leaving the EU. Let’s do the same and leave the U.N.

The U.N. is generally thought of as having evolved from the silly and impotent League of Nations, whose primary achievement was permitting — through naïveté, cowardice, and inaction — the Japanese invasion of China and the start of the Pacific half of the Second World War. Actually, the U.N.’s origins were nobler: It supplanted the League, but it began as an organization of the Allied powers against the Tripartite German–Italian–Japanese Axis.

The U.N.’s first communiqué was the 1942 “Declaration of United Nations,” wherein the Allied governments pledged that they,

Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world,

DECLARE:

(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.

(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.

This, in essence, is the founding document of the U.N. But its point was completely misunderstood by the writers of the U.N.’s charter: The United Nations Charter declares its goal as the preservation of peace. The Declaration of United Nations declared its goal as the preservation of freedom. This divergence is the essence of the failure of the U.N., and the source of its corruption.

A civilized world would say, To hell with world peace — give us world freedom. North Korea is at peace. Laos is at peace. Burma is at peace. Turkmenistan is at peace. But anyone in his right mind would choose rather to go back in time and live in London during the blitz than live in Turkmenistan, Burma, Laos, or the DPRK. Or any other of the grossly unfree countries that populate the U.N.

American slaves were at peace in the South, but I suspect they preferred the state of affairs during the Civil War.

Of course, the U.N. claims protecting human rights as a parallel goal to pursuing world peace. That’s the job the U.N. Human Rights Council is charged with. Cuba is a current member of the U.N. Human Rights Council. So is Russia. So are China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. So are Qatar, Indonesia, and the Republic of the Congo. And Venezuela.

As July 4 approaches, new polling data reveal non-Muslim Americans are increasingly cognizant of the threat Sharia — Islam’s totalitarian religio-political “law” — poses to their basic liberties. Overwhelmingly, they reject its encroachment in the United States.

But polling data also reveal that an ominous, growing proportion of American Muslims wish to impose Sharia on America.

Opinion Savvy polled a random sample of 803 registered voters — 98.2% non-Muslim, and 1.8% Muslim (with age, race, gender, political affiliation, and region propensity score-weighted to reduce biases) — from June 19 to June 20, 2016. They asked:

Do you believe that the United States government should screen, or actively identify individuals entering the United States who support Sharia law?

Seventy-one percent affirmed:

Yes, supporters of Sharia should be identified before they are admitted into the US.

The group answering “yes” was then asked:

Once identified, do you believe that individuals who support the practice of Sharia law should be admitted into the United States?

Eighty percent responded:

No, supporters of Sharia should not be admitted into the US.

The next query, which addressed only foreign visitors, elicited an even more emphatic demand for fidelity to bedrock First Amendment principles. It asked:

Do you believe that the United States government should require all foreign individuals entering the United States to affirm that they will uphold the principles of the constitution, such as freedom of religion and speech, above all personal ideologies for the duration of their stay in the country?

Seventy-eight percent insisted:

Yes, visitors to the US should be required to agree to uphold the constitution, regardless of their personal ideology, as a condition of their visit.

The unblinkered assessment of Sharia validates its broadly shared rejection by non-Muslim Americans, but also illustrates how increased U.S. Muslim Sharia support represents a dangerous trend.
Time Is Running Out for American Muslims

The Sharia, Islam’s canon law, is traceable to Koranic verses and edicts (45:18, 42:13, 42:21, 5:48; 4:34, 5:33-34, 5:38, 8:12-14; 9:5, 9:29, 24:2-4), as further elaborated in the “hadith” — the traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and the earliest Muslim community — and codified into formal “legal” rulings by Islam’s greatest classical legists. Sharia is a retrogressive development compared with the evolution of clear distinctions between “ritual, the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc.,” within Western European Christendom.

Sharia is utterly incompatible with the conceptions of human rights enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

For me, these names matter: Christopher Stevens, US Ambassador to Libya, Sean Smith, career diplomat, Glen Doherty, former Navy Seal, and Tyrone Woods, former Navy Seal. All died in the service of the United States. They left behind loved ones who are owed the truth, and the sincere support of a grateful nation. But are we grateful?

In the last few days much of what I have heard has been disgusting. Comments like “it’s over” or “it is merely a partisan ploy to keep Hillary from the White House” or “mistakes happen in war, let’s move on.”

I’m not sure what makes me sicker; the notion that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama allowed to die a US ambassador and brave Americans trying to protect him. Or the notion that both of them, Hillary especially, tried to cover up the mistakes, and activities that allowed Americans to be slaughtered, just to protect their campaigns, and legacy. Or the recognition my fellow citizens and much of the media are willingly providing political cover, excuses and support for Hillary Clinton – just so their candidate can win the presidency.

To be sure, there were lots of mistakes made – from the Arab Spring to the disastrous efforts at nation building in Libya. But at the end of the day, leaders must always be mindful these immortal words of the late, great, Harry Truman, “the buck stops here” For better or worse, whether complicit, or buffoonery, knowing, or not, the captain of the ship, or leader of the enterprise is always responsible, and in this case, it was President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Watching CNN broadcast Congressmen presenting the final Benghazi report, you would think the investigation concluded without key revelations or damaging evidence how badly our leaders failed those they swore to protect – fellow Americans. The ticker tape message floating across the bottom of the CNN screen seemed designed to mislead; it conveyed all was well for Hillary and no new discoveries found against her. Beyond dishonest and biased reporting – shameful is a good word – is the callous disregard for their fellow citizens who were murdered, and their families.

It is more clear than ever that the media are so “in the tank” for Hillary that they will abandon any semblance of journalistic ethics to twist, obfuscate, refuse to report or spin whatever it takes to help her win. And hell be damned to the families of those who died in Benghazi; they are inconvenient truths, mere stepping stones to be kicked aside on the campaign trail. CNN isn’t alone. The major newspapers and other broadcast media, as well as social media, are all doing the same thing. The democrat message machine is in full production trying to taint the Congressional Report as partisan, unfair, untrue, while providing all loyal party members brooms to sweep the entire affair under the rug.