RUTHFULLY YOURS

Buffoonery is clownishness. The word comes from buffare, Italian for puffing out one’s cheeks, as comics have done since antiquity. Political buffoonery involves gross rhetoric and slapstick histrionics. Up until now, the American body politic has had reasonably effective antibodies to resist the swaggering demagoguery of political buffoons.

Other nations have been less fortunate. Plutarch describes the 5th-century b.c. Athenian politician Cleon as a buffoon who yelled, slapped his thigh, and pranced about while speaking. Plutarch disapproved. Cleon encouraged contempt for serious public discourse, the historian noted, and that harmed the state.

Mussolini’s strutting, chest-jutting, and self-identification with predatory-animal symbols of the Roman Empire — eagle, lion, and wolf — earned him special infamy as a fascist buffoon. His over-inflated pride led to Italy’s grim fall.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin — and Barack Obama.

Right now the world is focused on the Middle East: Russian jets and bombers, operating from an expanding air base in Syria, strike opponents of dictator and war criminal Bashar al-Assad. The Russians say they are going after Islamic State — but there’s no evidence they are doing so. Nor do they have reason to, considering the aim of Putin’s war is to preserve Assad’s rule and to expand, for the first time in decades, Russia’s sphere of influence into the Middle East.

Key to Putin’s strategy, write analysts Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, is the doctrine of “reflexive control”: establishing facts on the ground “in such a way that the enemy chooses Russia’s preferred course of action voluntarily, because it is easiest and all the others appear much more difficult and risky, if not impossible.”

Doesn’t have to be this way. Moscow’s propaganda notwithstanding, Russia is a weak state with a deteriorating military capability, whose claim to great power status is based on its nuclear arsenal. But, by acting decisively and provocatively, Putin has found the means by which to reassert Russian sovereignty and preeminence and ward off challenges to his authoritarian regime.

It’s ba-aack.

The Vacuum, that is. That’s the Beltway fairy tale about how Syria was teeming with secular-democratic Muslim moderates ready and willing not only to topple the barbarous Bashar al-Assad regime but simultaneously to rout al-Qaeda. They were not able to pull off these feats, we’re told, without the massive help that President Obama refused to give them. This default, combined with Obama’s unconscionable retreat from neighboring Iraq while jihadists were on the rise, created a leadership void — the Vacuum — into which the Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) poured in . . . or spontaneously generated . . . or . . . something.

It is a myth, but a useful one for people who do not know what to do, or know what to do but fear explaining it because they know there is no political appetite for it.

The Syrian mess has gotten messier because Vladimir Putin, with all the unpredictability of the morning sun, has invaded Syria on behalf of Assad and Putin’s more important ally Iran — Assad’s longtime string-puller. The Russian strongman’s claimed purpose is to fight the Islamic State — a pretext no more real than was the supposed need to protect indigenous Russian populations that Putin cited in invading Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.

Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

Dear Reader (including Kevin McCarthy, who may be too busy putting a cast on his Boehner, having stepped on it so badly),

I feel like Donald Trump when asked to list all the reasons why he’s terrific; I have no idea where to begin.

Lots of stuff has happened since my last “news”letter. Rather than approach this blank page with the sort of planning and care that you’ve come to expect from this well-crafted digital epistle, I’m going to throw care to the wind and, like Bill Clinton at a Saudi harem, I’m going to just jump right into it.

Don’t Move On

Speaking of Bill Clinton, by the end of his presidency, whenever critics said anything critical of him, the almost instantaneous response from his praetorians was to say (1) the critics were “obsessed” or “haters” and (2) that it was time to “move on.” People forget that MoveOn.org began as a kind of non-partisan, No Labels-y, bit of marketing claptrap designed to make the Lewinsky scandal seem like old news. It was a mass-marketing version of the liberal habit of saying “the time for debate is over” — something liberals never say when the debate is politically helpful to them.

Of course, once the country did in fact move on, MoveOn revealed what was always obvious to all of us “obsessed” “haters”: It was an entirely partisan, left-wing operation from soup to nuts.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Thursday to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, America’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, was not there. Neither was Secretary of State John Kerry. Though both Kerry and Power were in New York.

Representation of the U.S. was left to a lineup of lesser State Department eminences.

This petty behavior could only have come with the blessing and at the orders of America’s top boss, and it was a gross insult, from the president of the United States to the nation of Israel. That does not represent the broad view of the American public, nor does it represent the support for Israel in Congress — where Netanyahu’s speech earlier this year warning about the Iran nuclear deal was received by the majority of lawmakers as the important and dire warning it was, but dismissed by Obama as “nothing new.” It suggests what Elliot Abrams neatly sums up in an article on this latest destructive U.S. snub of a vital ally: “The Obama Vendetta Against Netanyahu. [1]”

Rep. Issa is right but he should first check out Open the Books, http://www.openthebooks.com/, where every dime these government agencies spend on gratuitous “benefits” is documented. rsk

“Every day countless individuals, companies, news organizations and law firms try to receive information under FOIA. The first thing that happens is it goes to a human being who begins a search process, who then begins looking through the data in order to redact information that’s not going to be given – literally a human nightmare to try to do,” he said at an event held by the Transparency Data Coalition.

“Under the DATA Act, we envision that metadata will be so easily searched, that when you are looking for it, you won’t even have to ask for a FOIA because the vast majority of information that today is being asked for in FOIA will already be available online with appropriate personally identifiable information. FOIA will be limited to, ‘I looked at the data, the data indicates something more, and I believe I have a right to some portion of what is redacted,’” he said.

President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 last May.

Recently, I was surprised to come across a chapter titled “My Dinner with David”— the David in question being me, and the dinner is one that continues to produce indigestion for the diner — in a just released book called “Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent [1].” In this self-published account, Ottawa author Fred Litwin sets out to tell the story of how he became a moderate gay conservative, a voice of reason and sanity in the heated rhetoric of gay liberation and anti-jihad activism. The chapter in which he distinguishes his own apparently sensible views on Islam from the apparently toxic views of various anti-jihadists uses me and some of my close friends as hateful foils to his enlightened position.

The book received several glowing endorsements from such heavy-hitters as Daniel Pipes, who praises its handling of the ongoing dispute between what Pipes calls “anti-Islamist sophisticates” and “anti-Islamic simpletons.” (More on this later.) Litwin’s mischaracterizations and temper tantrums, applauded by Pipes and several biggish names who give the book their imprimatur, got me thinking once again about the much-belabored subject of the hypothetical difference between Islam and Islamism.

Finally, we may be getting some cosmic justice for the gang of warmists who have spread hysteria over their shaky theory of global warming. Owing to an outrageous act of witch-hunting dissenters, a congressional investigation has begun, and who knows what it will uncover?

It was an outrage when a group of 20 scientists published a letter to President Obama and AG Lynch demanding RICO prosecution of those who question the theory of global warming, based as it is on models that have failed to accurately predict the Earth’s climate for the last 19 years. Not only is criminalizing scientific investigation a bad idea, but the underlying contention that skeptics are funded by greedy polluters is false, a myth deliberately spread by the gang that profits from hysteria, as Russell Cook demonstrated on these pages yesterday.

The letter was published on the website of the Institute for Global Environment and Society (IGES), a nonprofit funded almost exclusively by government grants. The first sign that something was amiss was when IGES disappeared the RICO letter from its website. A bit later, the “404 not found” page was replaced by this:

The letter that was inadvertently posted on this web site has been removed. It was decided more than two years ago that the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) would be dissolved when the projects then undertaken by IGES would be completed. All research projects by IGES were completed in July 2015, and the IGES web site is in the process of being decommissioned.

Inadvertently? Somebody is trying to cover his posterior, aware that misconduct has taken place. It is bad enough that the entire website is about to be taken down. Perhaps they got an inkling of what was headed their way. Lachlan Markay of the Free Beacon delivers the news:

A congressman is asking a taxpayer-funded environmental group to preserve records related to its president’s campaign to bring federal racketeering charges against climate change skeptics.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, revealed the committee will be investigating calls from George Mason University meteorologist Jagadish Shukla and nineteen other scientists to bring civil racketeering charges against companies and organizations that pay for scientific research that questions catastrophic human-induced climate change. (snip)

“IGES’s recent decision to remove documents from its website raises concerns that additional information vital to the Committee’s investigation may not be preserved,” Smith wrote in a Thursday letter to Shukla.

America is still waiting for President Obama to share his insights on Kate Steinle. Kate is the woman murdered by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal felon who, after being deported seven times, managed to find his way back to San Francisco where he shot the 32-year-old in the back with a stolen gun.

To date: “No comment.”

Conversely, much as he does whenever there is a mass shooting, Obama nearly tripped over his wingtips sprinting to the podium to blame Second Amendment advocates and the Republican-controlled Congress for the mass shooting on a community college campus in Roseburg, Oregon.

Yet every day, 4,000 babies expire in abortion clinics and dozens of people die at the hands of inner city thugs and illegal immigrant criminals, none of which the president responds to with grief or concern.

Unlike his indifference to the deaths of Americans killed by illegal aliens or the dismissive attitude he has toward the 60 million human beings who have been ferried from the abortion clinic to the incinerator, and much like the way he portrayed 9-year-old Tucson shooting victim Christina Taylor Green jumping in heaven’s rain puddles, while exploiting the Umpqua Community College victims for political expediency the president sounded like he was describing DREAMers:

Like the radical left-wing domestic terrorists befriended two decades ago by Barack Hussein Obama, the totalitarian mass murderers of the Islamic State are reportedly determined to kill millions of Americans.

Slaughtering Americans by the millions was a key objective of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), which was led during the Vietnam War era by Obama’s close Chicagoland friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers, among other individuals.

Ayers described the Weatherman philosophy as “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”

He was delighted in the 1980s when riot incitement and conspiracy charges against him were thrown out. “Guilty as sin, free as a bird,” Ayers gloated. “America is a great country,” he said for the first and only time in his life.

Obama infamously began his career in electoral politics at a fundraiser in 1995 in the home of the unrepentant small-c communist terrorist bomber Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, another former WUO leader.