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What Do Our Movies Say about Our Decadent Civilization? By Ross Douthat

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Last fall, American pop culture celebrated “Back to the Future Day” — marking the date, 10/21/2015, to which Marty McFly leaps forward from the Reagan ’80s in Back to the Future Part II.

It was a slightly daft commemoration of a pleasant but hardly memorable sequel, and it felt almost like a way for people not to come to grips with the most striking thing about Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary: that we’re now as far from the Reagan 1980s as the teenage Marty was from his parents’ 1950s, and yet the gulf of years separating us from 1985 feels far narrower than the distance from the Eisenhower era that the original film used to such great effect.

The power of the first Back to the Future depended not just on an arbitrary 30-year period, that is, but on how radically America had changed across those decades: Marty’s adolescence and his parents’ courtship lay on opposite sides of (among many other things) rock ’n’ roll, civil rights, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, drug culture, the moon landing, feminism, the apocalyptic ’70s, and, finally, the conservative turn that made this magazine’s 30th anniversary a happy one.

Whereas if you remade Back to the Future now and sent Martina McFly back to ’85, you would have a lot of jokes about life without the iPhone, some shocking shoulder pads, and some sort of “comic” critique of Reagan-era unenlightenment on same-sex marriage. But you wouldn’t have the sense of visiting a past that’s actually another country.

Since National Review spans the same 60 years as the McFly-family saga, Back to the Future offers a useful prism through which to view our situation as the magazine turns (a youthful) 60. For NR’s first 30 years, the history that William F. Buckley Jr. wanted to stand athwart often proceeded at a breakneck pace. But during its second 30, and especially since Communism’s fall, there has been a general slowing, a sense of drift and repetition, a feeling that American society is somehow stuck in place.

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Harry Stein How the Clintons Changed America Sex, culture, and the presidency

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Ruth Marcus, the reliably liberal Washington Post columnist, wrote a piece the other day that came close to being brave. Given the source, for much of the paper’s readership its very headline was surely a stunner: TRUMP IS RIGHT: BILL CLINTON’S SORDID SEXUAL HISTORY IS FAIR GAME. Yes, Marcus noted, Trump may be everything progressives say he is, “racist, sexist, narcissist, for starters . . . . But he has a point about Clinton playing the ‘woman’s card,’ and about the male behavior that’s more concerning: her husband’s . . . . (I)n the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said . . . . Trump has smeared women because of their looks, Clinton has preyed on them, and in a workplace setting where he was by far the superior.” “Ordinarily,” she added, “I would argue that the sins of the husband should not be visited on the wife . . . . But Hillary Clinton has made two moves that lead me, gulp, to agree with Trump on the ‘fair game’ front. She is (smartly) using her husband as a campaign surrogate, and simultaneously (correctly) calling Trump sexist.”

What’s the problem with such a piece? It is at its essence a dodge, an attempt to avoid a far more serious indictment by copping to a lesser charge. In fact, Bill Clinton was not just a workplace harasser, or even a serial adulterer; he was, and remains, someone credibly accused of sexual assault. And what goes unmentioned—for this obviously could be catastrophic for Hillary’s campaign—is that she has been his willing cohort, the energetic enabler who sought to destroy his accusers to protect their joint political and financial interests.

In this regard, the piece is emblematic of what the Clintons have done to their fellow liberals and Democrats, in the media and beyond, over the past couple of decades—they turned them into serial equivocators and liars. Never mind that progressives continue to see (and often define) themselves as morally and ethically superior: in the fight to save Bill Clinton’s presidency there could be no adherence to larger truths, or moral consistency, or commitment to time-tested standards; all were sacrificed in defense of Clinton’s political survival.

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13 Hours Honors the Sacrifice of the Men on the Ground in Benghazi By Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

‘Things change fast in Benghazi,” we are told near the opening of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and the dynamism with which the film presents the events of September 11, 2012, makes the quote ring true.

As the film starts, we land with former SEAL turned private-security-officer Jack Silva (The Office’s John Krasinski) in the middle of a post-Qaddafi Libyan hellscape. Benghazi is dominated by local security forces and militias indistinguishable from one another that can and will switch sides on the turn of a dime. We are reminded constantly that everyone is a bad guy “until they’re not.”

As anyone familiar with the Benghazi attack will know, a disaster is looming for the security contractors and their CIA liaisons on the ground. Only our own State Department remained seemingly unaware of the cauldron of tribal extremism that Benghazi had become — as the film shows, Foggy Bottom had all but abandoned or disavowed knowledge of the CIA outpost in the city. “We have no f***ing support,” one of the few U.S. security personnel on the ground declares as he attempts to talk his way past a militia roadblock.

That doesn’t stop Ambassador Chris Stevens from giving the CIA station chief (played by David Costabile) and Global Response Staff (GRS) forces led by “Rone” (The Departed’s James Badge Dale in a long-overdue leading tough-guy role) a hopeful pep talk about the future of Benghazi and Libya in general. Stevens is an idealist and an optimist, a “true believer” as he’s described during security prep for his arrival on Monday September 10, 2012. What Silva finds is a heavily under-equipped consulate with an under-prepared security detail, “Real dot gov s***,” he laments.

When the assault on Stevens’s compound starts just after sundown on September 11, (and notably, without the film’s showing protests) we are thrown suddenly into the middle of the chaos, with the “Ambo” (as the ex-special forces agents refer to Stevens), Foreign Service officer Sean Smith (Christopher Dingli), and the security personnel at the consulate hunkering down and begging for backup. As the first wave of the attack roars by, Bay is at his kinetic best, like an anxious kid with his hand on the detonator.

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Did North Korea Really Test an H-Bomb? There’s more to this test than North Korean bravado. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

After reports of a small, magnitude 5.1 seismic event in the vicinity of North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site on Tuesday, the state-controlled North Korean news service announced a successful test of a miniaturized hydrogen bomb — which it called a “hydrogen bomb for justice.” A North Korean television anchor said the test elevated North Korea’s “nuclear might to the next level.”

It is very unlikely that this was a test of a true H-bomb, a thermonuclear device in which a primary fission reaction ignites a much larger secondary fusion/fission reaction. The technical challenges of constructing a true H-bomb, which could be over 1000 times more powerful than North Korea’s previous three nuclear tests, are far beyond North Korean capabilities. The real meaning of this nuclear test, regardless of its type, may be an attempt by North Korea to get a nuclear deal similar to Iran’s before President Obama leaves office.

It is possible this was a test of a “boosted-fission” nuclear weapon. In such a device, a small fusion reaction of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, is initiated in the core. This reaction releases a flood of high-energy neutrons that causes a more efficient fission reaction by the weapon’s enriched uranium or plutonium fuel resulting in an explosive yield several times higher. Boosted fission enables states to construct smaller and lighter nuclear weapons and to make more efficient use of scarce nuclear fuel.

North Korea has been claiming for several years that it was engaged in nuclear-fusion research. In 2010, North Korean officials even said that their nation had mastered nuclear fusion. In January 2013, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that a “new higher level nuclear device” that North Korea was threatening to test might be a boosted-fission nuclear device. Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un said his country had developed a hydrogen bomb.

Although most experts dismissed North Korea’s nuclear fusion claims as bravado, a boosted-fission nuclear test would be the next step in the development of a North Korean nuclear-weapons program. Building such a device would be technically challenging. India, which has a more advanced nuclear-weapons program than North Korea, reportedly conducted a failed test of a booted-fission nuclear device in 1998.

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Mrs. Clinton Is Professor Click Being a Democrat means never paying the price. By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

A group of state legislators in Missouri has, after a great deal of nagging by your favorite roving correspondent and many others, come around and made a public statement that Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri should be fired.

Professor Click, you’ll recall, is the petty commissar who assaulted a student journalist (who has since filed a police complaint) who was covering one of the daft, diaper-filling protests on the Mizzou campus. The protest was happening on a corner of the campus that not only is a public space but a public space recognized as such in Missouri state law, with access to it guaranteed. Professor Click attempts to intimidate the student, physically blocks him, and then swats at his face before calling for “some muscle” to forcibly remove him. So far, neither the university nor the campus police department, which are manifestly run by miscreants and moral cowards, has seen fit to do anything about the case.

When Rolling Stone published its breathless account of what turned out to be an entirely fictitious rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, some critics (ahem) were denounced as monsters for asking such straightforward questions as “Why wasn’t a violent gang rape, purportedly committed on a bed of broken glass, followed up by a police report, which surely, given the details, would have produced physical evidence supporting prosecution and conviction?” In the Missouri case, there was not only a police report but video of the incident, shot by the victim of the crime himself. One can only imagine what would have happened if there were a similar video of, say, a white, portly Mizzou football coach physically laying hands on a young black woman going about her legally protected and legitimate business on the campus.

But, so far, not one thing of any consequence has happened to Professor Click.

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Look for America’s Enemies to Take Advantage of Obama’s Last Year By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Changes of administrations usually mark dicey times in American foreign policy. But transitional hazards will never be greater than in 2016.

Over a span of just a few months in mid 1945, new president Harry Truman lost all trust in Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin — in a way that Truman’s predecessor, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never had during nearly four years of World War II.

Ensuing American foreign policy jerked from a pragmatic Lend-Lease alliance with a duplicitous Communist superpower to a tense Cold War.

President John F. Kennedy was young, idealistic, cocky — and without the military reputation of his predecessor, the much more experienced former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after JFK’s inauguration in 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev predictably began testing Kennedy’s mettle as commander-in-chief, from Berlin to Cuba.

Kennedy’s eventual restoration of American deterrence during the Cuban blockade marked the scariest phase in Cold War history.

By 1980, as lame duck Jimmy Carter neared the end of his first and only term, the Russians had sought to absorb Afghanistan. Communist insurrections kept spreading in Central America. China went into Vietnam. The new theocracy in Iran still held American diplomats and employees hostages.

Most aggressors had logically accelerated their risk-taking before the newly elected, mostly unknown (but volatile-sounding) Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

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Colonel Kemp et al: Israel’s Vital Defensible Borders (video)

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

“The Middle East is imploding in waves of violence whose impact has reached Israel.

To the north, radical Islamists in Syria linked to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are approaching Israel’s border on the Golan Heights and threatening Jordan as well. At the same time, Iran is sending thousands of rockets with increasingly accurate guidance systems to Hizbullah in Lebanon to again attack Israeli cities.

To the east, Israel faces an array of potential threats from hostile forces that include Iranian Revolutionary Guards, pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias, and radical Islamist terror armies.

To the south, the Islamic State is in Sinai, threatening both Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are working feverishly, with Iranian assistance, to rebuild their rocket capabilities to enable renewed attacks on Israel.

Israel must have defensible borders to protect itself against a broad range of current and future threats from radical Islamist forces.”

A compelling video from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in which that doughty student of war and defender of Israel Colonel Richard Kemp features, inter alia:

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Who Actually Represents American Muslims? by Samuel Westrop

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Activists participating in CAIR’s lobby day included Abdullah Faaruuq, a Muslim cleric, who, in response to the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui, told Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword and go out and do your job.”

“[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.” — Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly.

Very few American Muslims seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate voice for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them.

CAIR has been denounced by anti-racism groups, the federal government and by other Muslims. When legislators meet with CAIR, they help CAIR impose itself upon Muslim communities as a self-declared representative.

On November 12, 2015, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), with the support of a number of local Islamic groups in Boston, organized a lobbying day at the Massachusetts State House, ostensibly to advocate on behalf of local Muslims.

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“Somebody’s Lying. Who Is It?” by Mark Steyn

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

On December 29th Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the editorial board of The Conway Daily Sun. (I’m on the western border of New Hampshire, Conway is down the other end of the Kancamagus on the eastern border.) As you can see from the photograph at right, the occasion lacks the glamour of her sit-downs with court sycophants like George Stephanopoulos, but it did provide a glimpse of the kind of day Mrs Clinton would be having every single day if the US media were journalists rather than Hillary’s palace guards. Tom McLaughlin is a member of the Sun’s editorial board, and, unlike most of the bigshots at The New York Times, he knows the facts on Benghazi.

Just by way of background, three months ago, the latest crop of email releases from Hillary’s secret server reveals that she knew even as the Benghazi attack was unfolding that it was terrorism and not, as I put it back in September 2012, a spontaneous class-action movie review. As I said to Hugh Hewitt in October:

She chose to politicize it from the moment it was happening, even as it was underway. In other words, in the afternoon of September 11th, when it was 9:00 in the evening in Benghazi, she was already politicizing it. And I think it was damaging that on September 12th, she told not only the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt, but also her own family members that it was a terrorist attack. And yet, there she was on September 14th at Andrews Air Force Base over the coffins of the dead lying to Tyrone Woods’ family when she told them we’re going to get that guy who made the video, and we’re going to have him arrested and prosecuted… She tells the truth to the Government of Libya. She tells the truth to the Government of Egypt. But she lies to the people to whom she is meant to be a public servant, the American people…

At a critical moment on a critical date in American history, she opened her mouth and vomited forth a sewer of lies that everybody else is supposed to just try and swim their way through to find out the reality of what went on. And if you’re a foreign government leader, you know the truth. If you’re the American people, you get lied to.

Once you know the timeline of her communications with the Libyans, the Egyptians and with Chelsea Clinton, it becomes harder and harder to accept that the video distraction was anything other than a consciously constructed official lie.

Now listen to Tom McLaughlin at the Conway editorial meeting. He has the facts, and she has a lot of generalized evasions about the “fog of war”:

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The Ghosts of Charlie Hebdo by Mark Steyn

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

“What happened on January 7th 2015 was terrible. But our response to it made it more terrible, and emboldened civilization’s enemies. With respect to the late Charb, the choice is not between dying standing up or living on our knees – for those who choose to live on their knees will die there, too, cringing and craven. As I said a year ago:

The weepy passive candlelight vigils – the maudlin faux tears and the Smug Moral Preening overdose – aren’t enough. If you don’t want to put out the fire, it will burn your world to the ground.”

One year ago today – January 7th 2015 – two Muslim fanatics burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people, including the bulk of the senior editorial staff and some of France’s best known cartoonists. I heard about the attack shortly before I went on that morning’s John Oakley Show in Toronto. Throughout the very bad year for free speech that followed, I have thought often of Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo and a great cartoonist in the French style. Two years before his death, he said:

It may seem pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.

He did. He was an heroic figure, and he paid for it with his life. One reason for that is because, when everyone else is on their knees, the guy standing up kinda stands out. And Charb & Co had been standing out for almost ten years. As I said to Megyn Kelly at Fox News later that night:

STEYN: Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad — the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I’m proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons. And it’s because The New York Times didn’t and because Le Monde in Paris didn’t, and the London Times didn’t and all the other great newspapers of the world didn’t – only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed…

We will be retreating into a lot more self-censorship if the pansified Western media doesn’t man up and decide to disburse the risk so they can’t kill one small, little French satirical magazine. They’ve gotta kill all of us.