RUTHFULLY YOURS

From time to time, something will leap out to me as an illustration of the fact that blacks and whites often inhabit separate realities. I’ve often told the story of the editorial in a black neighborhood newspaper in Philadelphia warning African-Americans to flee urban areas in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections because George W. Bush was planning to — this was presented as unquestionable fact – use nuclear weapons against the inner cities to suppress the black vote. This wasn’t somebody ranting on Twitter — this was in print, in a regularly published newspaper that was, in the early days of the 21st century, still a going concern.

I’ve come to call this sort of thing (with apologies to Richard Hofstadter) the paranoid style in African-American politics. Mild versions of conspiracy theories play a large role in mainstream American politics in the form of folk beliefs about how government works, the role of lobbyists and campaign contributions, and the like. For right-wing populists, it’s the “Establishment” and the “donor class,” for left-wingers it’s the Koch brothers, Big Oil, Big Money, Big Bigness, etc. We’ve all heard the story of how we could be running our automobiles on seawater if not for the fact that the petro-billionaires are suppressing the technology. The closer you get to the fringes, the more prominent the role of conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that conspiracy theory plays an outsize role in mainstream African-American political discourse.

Years after the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the American people, the health-care industry, and the courts still struggle to navigate the law. Its heavy regulations and new tax burdens have generated numerous consequences, many of which are harmful to patients and families. Although supporters point to the millions of newly insured under the law, the truth is, that as many as 90 percent of those are estimated to have enrolled into Medicaid, second-class coverage that, according to a 2014 Merritt Hawkins report, most doctors do not even accept.

Even worse, the government’s Department of Health and Human Services reported in December 2014 that 51 percent of doctors on official Medicaid state lists are not available to new beneficiaries. Meanwhile, millions of other families have lost their previous private insurance directly because of ACA decrees. For new private coverage, insurance premiums have continued to skyrocket. Most alarmingly, the premiums of what were low-cost high-deductible plans are accelerating faster than any other coverage after the passage of the ACA, directly countering the promise of more affordability when the bill was passed. Choice of doctors and hospitals through the government’s exchange-based coverage has also narrowed compared with pre-ACA individual market plans.

Ahead of President François Hollande’s visit to the White House this morning, a French diplomat told CBS News that the French leader will deliver a clear message to the American president: “The imminent threat from ISIS is an emergency that requires urgent action.” So far, Obama has refused to acknowledge that the Islamic State’s bloody assault on Paris demands a change in his approach to the threat. “We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through,” the president told reporters just three days after the massacre. Yet now, some of the administration’s closest supporters are challenging the weakness of the president’s effort to degrade and destroy ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh).

On Sunday, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think we have got to be much more aggressive and much more unified in the effort to take on ISIS.” “I think that the resources applied to that mission, frankly, have not been sufficient,” observed Panetta. “We need to increase the tempo of our air strikes, we need to organize ground forces, particularly the Sunnis and the Kurds, and arm them so that they can take territory back from ISIS.” Doing more to stop ISIS is urgent, Panetta explained, because “they are a clear and present danger, not only to Europe, but to this country as well.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed a similar sense of urgency, saying “we have to be prepared” for an ISIS attack on the U.S. homeland. “I’ve never been more concerned,” Feinstein said. “I read the intelligence faithfully,” she added. “ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding.” Her comments served as a direct rebuttal to the president’s statement, just hours before the Paris massacre, that “from the start our goal has been first to contain [ISIS], and we have contained them.”

On the Glenn Beck show, Friday, incoming Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin explained in two words how he will push back against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate the coal mining in his state: “pound sand.”

The governor elect’s plan to use the 10th amendment to thwart President Obama’s goal of destroying the coal industry is beautiful in its simplicity.

“The powers not given to the federal government are the responsibility of the states and of the people. Every time this has been adjudicated in the past 150 + years – it has been tested in the courts – it has come down on the side of the states,” Bevin explained.

“Never in the history of the world has there been more consumption of coal than there is right now,” he noted, adding that Kentucky, with its rich coal resources, should be allowed to get in on that.

“To my way of thinking, we will tell the EPA and other elected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state – to pound sand.”

From Afghanistan to Iraq and around the world, the military manages to always get Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings to all the force. That’s admirable. Not nearly as cheery is the state of the American armed forces and Washington’s lackluster effort to deliver the troops, equipment, and maintenance the military needs.

The annual edition of the Heritage Foundation Index of U.S. Military Strength rated the state of the armed forces as marginal. Meanwhile, Washington’s treatment of its responsibilities for providing for the common defense has been anything but stellar. “The best thing that could happen for all the services, at least in my view, would be for us to have predictable, on-time budgets,” complained the outgoing Secretary of the Army John McHugh last month before he fled the Pentagon. He continued: “The challenges that all the departments face are significant, but we would be better postured to meet them, even with declining resources, were we assured that we would have a budget on time. That it would be a figure that is known, that we could plan for, and that our industrial partners can plan for as well.” It has been years since Congress and the president passed a defense budget—let alone got one done on time.

With the death of Jihadi John less than two weeks ago in a Raqqa airstrike, the Islamic State lost one of the most recognizable masked men of their P.R. jihad: an executioner who would introduce the West to murder ISIS-style, an English-speaking killer eager to behead Americans and Brits.

But even before the passing of Kuwait-born, London-raised Mohammed Emwazi, ISIS had incorporated other English-speakers into their videos — with American or Canadian accents.

And unlike some of the Jihadi John videos where the knife-wielding Emwazi isn’t shown actually beheading his victims, a recent ISIS video shows a masked American beheading a Kurdish prisoner.

An ISIS member with an American accent tells President Obama they’re beheading Peshmerga prisoners in revenge for airstrikes.
The Peshmerga Killer

This fair-skinned jihadi appeared at the end of a late October video that was mostly in Arabic, spoken by a narrator walking through the decimated compound near Hawija, Iraq, where Kurdish and U.S. forces rescued dozens of Iraqi prisoners facing imminent death.

Then the 15-minute video cut to four Peshmerga prisoners in orange jumpsuits kneeling before the rubble, and the black-clad killers wielding knives behind each Kurd.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) styles itself as America’s largest Muslim civil rights advocacy group. Its executive director, Nihad Awad, recently took advantage of a reporter’s inflammatory article on a likely miscommunication with a presidential candidate to tweet to his English audience, “Exactly what #ISIS wants: #DonaldTrump’s recent call to force American Muslims to carry special ID.”

Moments later, Awad more directly reflected CAIR’s real status as a front for the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood when in Arabic he expanded upon those comments to compare the U.S. to Nazi Germany. The IPT translated the comments:

“It actually happened. The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is calling for forcing American Muslims to carry ID’s classifying them on the basis of their religion. Exactly like Hitler did.”

The timing could have been worse, but not by much. Exactly one month before the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, a federal appeals court reopened a discrimination lawsuit filed against New York City over a counterterrorism program begun in the wake of 9/11.

The 2001 World Trade Center attack was the second time the buildings had been hit in eight years—a car bomb was detonated underneath the complex in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000. Follow-up plots to bomb the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations and the FBI’s New York office were thwarted by an informant who had infiltrated the terrorists. But after 9/11, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stepped up the city’s offense against Islamic extremists bent on killing innocent Americans.

Among other things, the New York Police Department developed a Counterterrorism Bureau that collaborated with law-enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. and around the world. Most of the conspirators in the 1993 and 2001 attacks came from places like Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They settled in Arabic-speaking neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey, where some were radicalized in mosques and through Islamic organizations. The NYPD has long used confidential informants to infiltrate the mafia, gangs and drug rings, and it determined that an effective way to stop future terror attacks would be to employ the same tactics. Thus a so-called Demographics Unit was created in 2003 to identify specific “venues of radicalization” and “locations of concern” and provide early warning of any terrorist activity.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, Americans are not in a particularly thankful mood. That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest Pew Research center study of our attitude toward government.

Trust in government is near historic lows. Yet our expectations from government are very high. Diminished trust and elevated hope yield the dominant sentiment of this presidential election year—not anger, but rather profound frustration.

The research I’ve just summarized applies to both political parties. It isn’t exactly news that Democrats see a major role for government in most areas. But so do majorities of Republicans in 10 of the 13 areas covered in Pew’s study. Nor is it news that 57% of Republicans are frustrated with government. But so are 59% of Democrats.

Americans are critical of their elected officials. Only 23% say that our leaders care what people like me think; only 22% see these officials as putting the country’s interests ahead of their own; only 19% think that they try hard to stay in touch with the voters. Overall, Americans regard their elected officials as intelligent but selfish and dishonest.