RUTHFULLY YOURS

— America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, American prison populations have boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has increased by only 50 percent. Why?

Liberals blame racism and the “War on Drugs,” in particular long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. This past July, in a speech to the NAACP, President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that “over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” The War on Drugs, he suggested, is just a continuation of America’s “long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system,” which has disproportionately harmed minorities.

Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a “primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon.” To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years’ imprisonment.

The president is echoing what liberal criminologists and lawyers have long charged. They blame our prison boom on punitive, ever-longer sentences tainted by racism, particularly for drug crimes. Criminologists coined the term “mass incarceration” or “mass imprisonment” a few decades ago, as if police were arresting and herding suspects en masse into cattle cars bound for prison. Many blame this phenomenon on structural racism, as manifested in the War on Drugs.

“I’m offering something different.”

Which Republican presidential candidate said these words? Was it Donald Trump, Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, one of the outsiders highlighting the fact that they have never held elective office? Or maybe John Kasich, Scott Walker or Chris Christie, one of the sitting GOP governors running against Washington?
Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. View Archive

No, it is Jeb Bush in his first campaign TV ad in the 2016 race.

Something different? Like what, a third Bush presidency?

The slogan, and the ad, epitomize everything that is wrong with his presidential campaign. In an election where outsiders are dominating, Bush’s ad screams “politician” — factory workers toiling in the background, while the candidate in his shirtsleeves talks about his experience and accomplishments in office. You could have seamlessly replaced Bush with almost any political candidate in America.

Newsflash: Hillary Clinton thinks you’re stupid. And if you still support her, then you must be stupid, too.

During a speech at Northern Iowa University on Monday, Clinton actually had the audacity to declare that sexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed.”

How noble! How feminist! Hey, Hillary, here’s an idea: If that’s really what you think, why don’t you start with believing Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and all the other women who have accused your husband of sexual assault?

I mean, is she serious? Did Hillary really think that everyone would have just forgotten about these women? Perhaps she forgot about them herself. After all, their troubles never really seemed to be all that important to this trailblazing “feminist icon.”

One thing’s for sure: Clinton’s campaign has been full of hypocrisy. She’s been quick to slam anyone who opposes gay marriage, despite having declared in 2004 that “marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.” She’s been calling for criminal-justice reform — arguing that imprisoning people “does little to reduce crime” — despite having called for more prisons and tougher sentences in 1994.

As I wrote in my new book A Time for Truth, “PolitiFact” represents a new species of yellow journalism, where liberal reporters dress up as “facts” their liberal opinions and accuse anyone who disagrees with them of “lying.”

An article published last week by the outlet is a perfect example. It purports to “fact check” my recent statement that President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal will “facilitate and accelerate the nation of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.” The reporter concludes that the statement is objectively “false.”

He does so based on three alleged “facts”:

1. In this deal, the Iranian regime has promised not to develop nuclear weapons;

2. Their promise is reliable because either (a) the mullahs are entirely truthful and honest or (b) we will somehow magically know if they are cheating and breaking the deal;

3. So therefore, since they’ve promised not to develop nuclear weapons and PolitiFact has decided to take them at their word, it is a “lie” to say that they will in fact develop nuclear weapons.

Refugees arrive in some of Europe’s poorest states, mainly Greece, Italy and Hungary, but insist that they have a right to head for more prosperous nations where welfare benefits are higher and healthcare freely available.

“Kuwait and the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries are too valuable to accept any refugees. … It’s too costly to relocate them here. Kuwait is too expensive for them anyway, as opposed to Lebanon and Turkey, which are cheap. They are better suited for the Syrian refugees. … it is not right for us to accept a people that are different from us. We don’t want people that suffer from internal stress and trauma in our country.” — Kuwaiti official, Fahad al-Shalami.

It may also be that the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere see the movement of Muslim refugees to Europe as a golden opportunity to increase their work in da’wa (Islamic proselytization).

This crisis has exposed the abject failure of the EU, the UN, the OIC or anybody else to criticize the bloated nations of the Gulf with even a tiny fraction of the abuse they pour daily on the only democratic state in the Middle East, Israel. It is a repetition of the ongoing Palestinian refugee crisis over again, with the Arab states refusing to give jobs and citizenship to Palestinian Arabs over decades, keeping them in refugee camps and laying the blame on Israel. Is it surprising that the Arab world is still on the steady downward course it embarked on in 1948?

Ben Carson has pulled into a statistical margin-of-error tie with Donald Trump in a new CBS News/New York Times poll out today.

The pediatric neurosurgeon has surged to 23 percent among likely Republican primary voters, up from just 6 percent in the same survey in July.

Trump has 27 percent, a slight uptick from 24 percent in July.

Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio all trail with 6 percent. Ted Cruz has 5 percent, Carly Fiorina has 4 percent, and John Kasich and Rand Paul have three percent each. Scott Walker only has 2 percent support, falling from 10 percent in July.

A lot of pundits are telling Hillary Clinton to fire her bloated campaign staff, but I have to believe that the problem lies between her ears. This woman has absolutely no realistic perspective on herself. I cannot believe that someone with her past of quelling bimbo eruptions and naming vast right-wing conspiracies would put out this short video ad: I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault.

Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have a right to be heard. You have a right to be believed. We’re with you.

Ahem. Does the name Kathleen Willey mean anything at all to you, Hillary? Kyle Olsen of The American Mirror is not suffering from amnesia, so he asked Ms. Willey to comment:

…that’s a very different message Kathleen Willey received in 1993 when she accused Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, of sexually assaulting her.

“She believed what happened for sure,” Willey tells The American Mirror. “She just chose to ignore the plight of all of his victims, thus enabling him to continue to abuse and rape women in the future.”

She adds, “She’s a money-hungry hypocritical witch who will do anything for money.

“She’s a lying pig. I CANNOT believe that she had the gall to make that commercial. How dare she? I hope she rots in hell.“

Wow. as they said in the Bronx :”That’ll learn them!!!!rsk

The White House gave vague warnings to behave to North Korea today after Pyongyang announced it had taken steps forward in expanding the “quality and quantity” of its nuclear weapons.

“All the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, including the uranium enrichment plant and five megawatt reactor were rearranged, changed or readjusted and they started normal operation,” reported the official Korean Central News Agency.

The director of the North’s Atomic Energy Institute was cited by KCNA as saying, “If the U.S. and other hostile forces persistently pursue their reckless hostile policy towards the DPRK, we are fully prepared to respond with nuclear weapons at any time.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today that the administration is “aware of the reporting that indicates the readjustment and operation of the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, including the fie megawatt plutonium reactor and the uranium enrichment facility at Pyongyang.”

After Abbott’s disappointments, a list that begins with his repudiation of the promise to erase Section 18C, Liberals have placed themselves at the disposal of a wind-vane sensitive to every self-righteous gust howling out of the inner city. Core principles and the courage to advance them are the antidote
The path forward for conservatives is clear, now that the coup executed by Malcolm Turnbull has eradicated any illusions that the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott could be an effective bulwark against the evermore intrusive power of the state as it seeks completely to colonize civil society and dominate every aspect of life.

Abbott had his chance right at the start of his prime ministership to make manifestly clear where he stood philosophically on the liberal-conservative continuum of political theory and principle. He had only to fulfil one election promise: repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to restore free speech and expression of opinion – and he chose quite deliberately to break that promise. Apparently he was seeking to curry favour with various lobby groups anxious to retain their state-endorsed shield from all criticism or negative opinion (and, of course, notoriously, he failed in this demeaning aspiration). It was a defining moment. If he couldn’t be relied upon to do that one iconic thing then what else was he good for?

Now he has been swept unceremoniously aside, as Liberal MPs had their minds focused by an impending election wipe-out and, clutching at straws, turned to Malcolm Turnbull, whose political philosophy is even more bankrupt than Abbott’s. Despite airy-fairy motherhood statements about exciting economic and technological challenges, etc., this consists of little more than a fierce desire to snatch the prime ministership by appealing to inner-city progressives and trendoids, who are themselves driven by an insatiable narcissistic lust to assert their moral purity and remake the world in their own effete image.

The Labour Party is a self-consciously progressive party dominated by highly educated people who believe they understand the world and its problems better than anyone else. Jeremy Corbyn is the distilled essence of that otherworldly arrogance
The 2015 British election was a turning point for the Labour Party from which it is hard to see it recovering in its present form. Moreover, there is no obvious centre-Left success story elsewhere in Europe which might provide a guide and inspiration for a Labour recovery. The temporary advance of harder-Left parties like Syriza and Podemos is unlikely to survive contact with economic realities and, in any case, is just further competition for the moderate Left.

In fact Labour’s defeat—in part at the hands of nationalists and populists of Left and Right—represents for the party an unwelcome Europeanisation of British politics. The old social democratic alliance between blue-collar workers and the non-business professional middle class—what one might call the Hampstead–Humberside alliance—has long since disappeared in continental Europe. The Tony Blair victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005 turn out to have been its last hurrah in Britain.

There is plenty of space for a rooted, well-led, social democratic party in Britain capable of speaking for two-thirds of the country or more, and able to appeal to both aspirational middle- and lower-income voters and those who feel left behind by rapid social change. It is just very hard to see how Labour with its current activists, MPs and leaders could ever be that party. For it is the party’s inability to understand the cultural anxieties of most British voters that lost it the election. Leaving aside the (admittedly large) issue of economic competence and Ed Miliband, it simply had no answer to nationalism in Scotland, UKIP English populism in the Midlands and the North (which gave UKIP nearly 17 per cent of the vote and 44 second places in those areas) and the free-market modernity of southern England.