RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest round of condemning the past on the moral criteria of the present started with banning the Confederate flag from public places. Now it is on to airbrushing away progressive old white guy Woodrow Wilson, in Trotskyized fashion, from public commemoration.

But do those on the Left realize that they are rapidly becoming captives to the consequences of their own ideology? Their current effort to rewrite the past is doomed to failure for a variety of reasons.

Left-Wing Hypocrisy

First, this damnation of memory is not a balanced enterprise, but predicated on today’s notions of politics, race, and gender. No one is insisting that the great work of Martin Luther King Jr. be dismissed from the pantheon of American heroism because he was a known plagiarist and often a callous womanizer who did not live up to our current notions of gender equality. The racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is still a saint.

No one is claiming that Franklin Roosevelt was a third-rate president because his State Department was full of racists and anti-Semites, who were not too bothered by reports reaching the United States about the Final Solution, and who green-lighted the illegal internment of Japanese-Americans.

And why is Mohandas K. Gandhi exempt from left-wing ethical erasure? Was not his creed of non-violence tainted by the fact that his opposition to apartheid did not include much sympathy for blacks, while his advice to Jews facing extermination in Europe was heartless and anti-Semitic?

Despite a tepid response from the president, the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris may be causing some U.S. officials to take stateside ISIS recruits more seriously. On November 17, the U.S. Department of Justice was to make an offer to Islamic State supporter Nicholas Teausant, seeking to resolve his case without trial “with the possibility of a guilty plea to an as-yet-undefined charge” as the Sacramento Bee reported. Reports of a settlement have yet to surface and Teausant, 22, remains in custody.

Teausant served in the National Guard’s 118th Maintenance Company in Stockton. He lacked extensive military training but gathered information on bomb making and jihad tactics from the English-language al-Qaida magazine Inspire. The Muslim convert talked about blowing up his daughter’s day care center, which was “Zionist.”

In March 2014 Teausant sought to join ISIS and said “I would love to join Allah’s army” and “I want to go fight in Syria.” He would only return to America after President Obama was dead, Congress gone, and chaos prevailing across the nation. Teausant offered to make a video for the ISIS and leave his face “wide open to the camera.” He wanted to be a “commander” and if he landed on the FBI’s 12 most wanted list “that means I’m doing something right.”

The Obama administration tried to defuse growing bipartisan discontent with the visa waiver program by announcing enhancements to the program that eases travel from Europe.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced days after the Paris terror attacks that she and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) would be introducing a bill after Thanksgiving to crack down on what she called “the soft underbelly of our national security policies.”

The visa waiver program allows 90 days of travel visa-free to the United States from 38 countries, including European terrorist hotspots such as Belgium. In its lobbying corner: business and tourism industries. Some 20 million travelers use the program to arrive visa-free in the U.S. each year.

Feinstein and Flake quickly got to work crafting a bill to make “several changes” to the program, including the requirement that anyone who has traveled to Iraq or Syria in the past five years must apply for a visa through the traditional process of an interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has taken up the task of chronicling government waste since notorious pork-fighter Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) retired, today revealed a nearly half-million-dollar video game produced for climate-change education.

The Climate Change Narrative Game Education (CHANGE) is being developed by researchers at the University of South Florida and piloted at Hillsborough County high schools. It received a nearly $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“CHANGE’s goal is to help high school students learn complex Global Climate Change science by making it personally relevant and understandable,” says the USF description of the game, which uses “scientifically realistic text narratives about future Florida residents” about 50-100 years into the future and “simulations & games based on scientific data to help students learn principles of GCC so students can experience and try to cope with potential long term effect of GCC via role-play and science-based simulation.”

In his Waste Report today, Paul slammed the project as “a video game aimed at indoctrinating kids into the climate change way of thinking.”