RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anyone able to quit the city has done so, leaving the urban wasteland of a humbled metropolis to the feral dogs, the desolate ruins of abandoned suburbs and all the other relics of a shining future that has come and gone. Poverty is never pretty, the policies that inflict it on a community even less so
Detroit was the second American city I ever visited. It was fifty years ago, and it was then at the apogee of its prosperity. It never occurred to me—I don’t suppose it ever occurred to anyone else either—that half a century later it would be an inhabited ruin, a dystopian novel come to life, a city that has taken a book by J.G. Ballard not as a warning but as a blueprint.

Not long ago I was invited to a conference in Dearborn, still the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. I could see Detroit in the far distance from my hotel window, dominated by the dark round towers of the Renaissance Center. The Renaissance Center—I like that: it testifies to Man’s permanent temptation to magical thinking. If one gives a thing a name, it will become or act like that name. In Britain, we give the vertical concrete prisons in which we incarcerate the young unemployed, the schizophrenic, the domestically-abused single mothers, the asylum-seekers, and the psychopathic drug dealers, the names of great writers—Addison House, Jane Austen Tower—in the hope that it will educate them and refine their behaviour.

The left is a victimhood cult. It feeds off pain and fetishizes suffering as a moral commodity to be sold and resold in exchange for political power.

The cult’s credo is that its solutions to human suffering take precedence over freedom or democracy. It exploits suffering when it can and creates it where it can’t. Its social media has ushered in the Warholian era of victimhood where everyone can be a famously oversharing victim for 15 trending minutes.

Forget about meritocracy. This is the victimocracy.

The victimocracy’s foot soldier is the crybully. The crybully is the abuser who pretends to be a victim. His arguments are his feelings. He comes armored in identity politics entitlement and is always yelling about social justice or crying social justice tears.

Oops! As a byproduct of an internal dispute at the far left think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), it has been revealed that Palestinian advisers were brought into the Ferguson, Missouri demonstrations to advise the rioters. Exactly who paid for them to apparently fly halfway around the world (or otherwise build “strong relationships”) and stick their noses into an American political dispute is unclear, though it has been bandied about that George Soros has played a major role in funding the #BlackLivesMatter movement that is ginning up black anger, and presumably 2016 election turnout for Hillary.

The dispute that led to the shocking disclosure involved the invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at CAP. The left wing journal, The Nation, chronicled the dispute and let slip the incriminating information. Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton write:

“I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride — humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised. Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faith of the entire human race. I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.

These days our men and women in uniform are usually treated with kindness and respect. Nobody begrudges someone in uniform getting to board a flight first, or getting comped a first-class seat. Even those on the left who think that people in military service are misguided dupes of evil militarists no longer indulge the open scorn and calumny prevalent in the Vietnam War era, when a uniform was a target for spittle and charges of “baby-killer,” when in 1971 John Kerry appeared before the Senate and accused U.S. troops of rape, torture, and mutilation. Yet under the surface of progressives’ seeming respect and sympathy there still lurks a subtle contempt for the virtues and values that make our warriors worthy of our gratitude and admiration.

American leftists have long indulged a stealth pacifism that naturally conditions their attitudes toward the military. After all, the U.S. is the source of global disorder caused by its corporate hegemons, who use the military to protect their access to the global resources and markets they plunder for profit. Better to appease an enemy than to unleash these capitalist legions. Remember the “no blood for oil” slogans during the protests against the Iraq War in 2003? Or the exaggerated coverage given to civilian casualties or the occasional brutality typical of every war ever fought? Or the national media attention given to anti-war protestors like Cindy Sheehan, while the numerous heroes who won Silver Stars and Navy Crosses were usually ignored?

With additional comments by Adam Andrzejewski founder of Open the Books , (www.openthebooks.com/) a project of American Transparency.

In 2014 under the aegis of Family Security Matters, Nancy Kennon and I published a comprehensive study of every Congressional and Senatorial election, including incumbents and challengers, highlighting all their top issues. We found almost unanimous bi-partisan concern with protecting our Veterans and their rights.

It stands to reason that all Americans would cherish those who, in the words of Hannah Sennesh, a Holocaust martyr and poet, would have “the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake” and for duty and country.

This was a welcome development from an earlier time during and after the Vietnam war, when veterans were derided and not accorded the respect they were due.

A young veteran John Kerry testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971, that American troops “…had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…” and accused the U.S. military of committing war crimes “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

An aspiring young William Clinton, to justify his draft resistance, wrote “so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military.” To be fair, as president he proposed reforms in VA health care programs and expedited hearings on Veterans’ Affairs early in his administration. In 1994 he appointed Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer a physician trained in emergency medicine and Public Health, as Director of U.S. Veterans Health Administration to update and modernize the VA health system. This was another case of good intentions with poor implementation and very limited success.

Under President George Bush, a scandal erupted in 2007 detailing the systematic neglect, and frustration, and deteriorating facilities that veterans faced at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, ostensibly the top medical facility for veterans. What made this more poignant is the fact that so many were veterans of both wars initiated by the president. The scandal provoked caterwauling outrage and hearings to condemn the deplorable Army hospital environment. They led to negligible reform and the venerable hospital closed its doors in July 2011 after 102 Years of healing troops and veterans.

While the stigma and the libel against veterans ended, almost pari passu with the end of the draft in 1973, another national tragedy and scandal ensued.

It was like a wake inside the Department of Homeland Security’s D.C. headquarters on Tuesday, according to a source inside the DHS. The previous evening, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Obama administration’s immigration amnesty plan again, holding that the president has “no statutory authority” to take such unilateral action.

The court upheld the preliminary injunction issued February 16 by federal district court judge Andrew Hanen. Assuming the administration abides by the court order, the amnesty plan remains on hold.

Texas led a coalition of 26 states that filed suit against the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program that President Obama announced last November. They challenged the program on the grounds that it violated both the notice and comment requirements of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.

DAPA would grant “lawful presence” to more than 4 million illegal aliens and give them Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) — renewable, three-year work permits. Moreover, as the government admitted in its opening brief, granting “lawful presence” status would make them eligible to receive “social security retirement benefits, social security disability benefits, or health insurance under Part A of the Medicare program.” The government did not deny the district court’s finding that such aliens would also become eligible for earned-income tax credits and entitled to numerous state benefits such as unemployment insurance and driver’s licenses.

The president’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) is the most extraordinary display of presidential lawlessness in recent memory. On Monday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly blocked that lawlessness from proceeding further.

Last November, President Obama announced that he would be halting enforcement of congressional statutes for certain illegal immigrants residing in the United States — some 5 to 6 million, by most estimates — and extending to them work permits, among a number of other benefits. He justified this politically as a necessary response to congressional inaction, and legally as “prosecutorial discretion.”

It was neither, as Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen made clear in February, when he granted an injunction blocking implementation of the action to Texas and 25 other states, which had sued the administration. The president “is not just rewriting the laws,” Hanen wrote; “he is creating them from scratch.” The Obama administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit to stay the injunction, but in May, a three-judge panel refused.