RUTHFULLY YOURS

Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliché of “a legacy of slavery.” But anyone who is being serious, as distinguished from being political, would surely want to know if whatever he is talking about — whether fatherless children, crime, or whatever — is in fact a legacy of slavery or of some of the many other things that have been done in the century and a half since slavery ended.

Another cliché that has come into vogue is that slavery is “America‘s original sin.” The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for 50 years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking for even longer than that.

Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life.

Who knew that inherent rights are a political bombshell?

Justice Clarence Thomas set off a controversy in his dissent in the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision by reciting core American beliefs about the innate dignity and rights of all persons, whatever their circumstances or the injustices done to them. He wrote that even people held in slavery, even people interned during World War II, retained their dignity because it is impossible to erase what is woven into our very nature.

What one would think is a stirring statement about our irreducible human quality occasioned outrage among the justice’s critics. Slate considered the passage “brutal.” MSNBC found it “jaw dropping.” Salon called it “vile.” But none could top the gay actor and activist George Takei — famous as Sulu in “Star Trek” — who fumed that Thomas had forfeited his status as a black man.

Seriously. In a TV interview, Takei called Thomas “a clown in blackface.” Amid a backlash over this insult, he doubled down: “I feel Justice Thomas has abdicated and abandoned his African-American heritage by claiming slavery did not strip dignity from human beings.” Takei the would-be racial arbiter eventually apologized, although he still thinks Thomas is “deeply wrong.”

Obama has built a legacy, all right: appeasement, staggering debt, racial animosity . . .
President Obama last week spiked the ball on the Supreme Court’s decisions to legalize gay marriage and to ratify the Affordable Care Act.

Yet it is difficult to see quite how Obama had much to do with these decisions — or, to the degree he did, that they are earth-shattering. He twice ran for president expressing opposition to gay marriage while emphasizing the religious element of holy matrimony, which, he argued, precluded same-sex marriages. Is he delighted that the Court ignored his prior views?

On the Obamacare front, all the Supreme Court did was to clean up the Affordable Care Act, in a postmodern ruling that the administration’s poorly worded law actually meant something other than what the text as written actually said. The Court’s intervention was an act of partisan salvation, not disinterested legal reasoning.

Obama’s trade pact passed only with Republican votes. Apparently free-traders in Congress wanted the deal more than they worried about the president’s taking credit for their eleventh-hour rescue of what otherwise would have been a strong rebuke from his own party.

One of the assurances made by Team Clinton at the start of her latest presidential run was that her campaign would have a different look and feel than her failed attempt in 2008.

Hillary Clinton would be more accessible, her staff “footprint” would be smaller, relations with the press corps would be less chilly.

That promise is proving tough to keep.Over the weekend, Mrs. Clinton turned up for a Fourth of July parade with an entourage that deployed ropes to corral the reporters covering her march through the streets of Gorham, N.H.
Clinton aides said the maneuver was needed so that real voters got a chance to see the candidate. It also minimized any unscripted brushes Mrs. Clinton would have with the press.

A presidential campaign is a messy thing. People shout questions. Hecklers appear out of nowhere. It’s unavoidable. And, in some ways, testing candidates in a variety of unpredictable situations is valuable.

Where is the GOP candidate who will actually call for cutting the job destroying, anti free enterprise EPA down to size? rsk

The Supreme Court scolded the Environmental Protection Agency last week for bombing Dresden, albeit long after the bombs fell. In 2011, the year the EPA proposed the anticarbon mercury rule that the Court has now ruled illegal, some 1,500 fossil-fuel-fired electric units were in operation. Only about 100 have not already closed or complied at a cost of billions of dollars.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is hoping to prevent a replay on the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan, which will demand another 30% carbon reduction, on average, from the states. The rule was proposed by the EPA in June 2014 and is expected to be final by the end of this summer. The challenge Mr. Pruitt filed last week is a test of whether the snail’s pace of the judicial process in response to new rules lends de facto immunity to whatever the EPA wants to do, even if the conclusion is another legal defeat that arrives too late to make a practical difference.

On Sunday, Greece became only the second country in history—Argentina was the first—to make the transition from membership in the developed world to membership in the developing one. Now the question is: Who’s next?

The question is worth asking since so many very serious people— Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz among them—think Greeks did the right thing by voting down their creditors’ demands that they attempt to live within their means as a condition of further largess. Mr. Stiglitz, who doubles as a cheerleader for Argentina’s Kirchner government, says a “no” vote gives Greece the chance to “grasp its destiny in its own hands” even if it means a future “not as prosperous as the past.”

Destiny can seem so romantic—particularly to intellectuals wealthy enough to disparage the value of other people’s economic aspirations.

Destiny also has its uses for politically ambitious ideologues throughout Europe determined not to let the Greek crisis go to waste. France’s far-right National Front, Spain’s far-left Podemos Party, and Italy’s far-out Five-Star Movement all cheered Greece’s “no,” and they will emerge politically stronger should Athens now succeed in extorting better terms from its creditors. If nobody has the will to enforce the rules, nobody will have the desire to follow them.

Turkey boldly challenged its Western allies to join them in a fight against terror. But the target was not al-Qaeda or ISIS. Instead, Turkey wanted the West to fight the “terrorist state, Israel.”

One of Erdogan’s favorite statements is his famous line, “There is no Islamic terror.”

Why are these terrorists terrorizing? What is the ideology they are fighting for? Are they fighting to impose onto others by force the laws stipulated in Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Shintoist holy books? If their acts of terror are not related to Islam, what are they related to?

Turkey’s Islamist government, now squeezed in a political drama in which it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002, has in many recent years boldly challenged its Western allies by calling them to join an allied fight against terror. But the target was not al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or one of the dozens of different Islamist groups designated by the civilized world as terrorist.

Polls show most Americans understand the farcical P5 + 1 Iranian nuclear negotiations are on a disaster course. Nonetheless, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have announced a one week extension to their prior June 30 deadline. Quite favorably, Mr. Obama made clear during a press conference that he will “walk away from the negotiations if in fact it’s a bad deal.” While such declaration reeks of being just another Obama “red line” delivered as political wordsmithing with no intention of ever being followed, it does indicate the clear choice he now has to make: whether to be President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik or British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich. Walk away or appease and submit. Dignity or disgrace.

After 50 years, later this month an American flag will again fly over the old U.S. Embassy in Havana and the Cubans will open their diplomatic representation in Washington.
Pres. Obama has justified the move because it was time to change a policy that has not worked. That, not to put a fine point on it, is not true. Over five decades Washington was able – sometimes with direct intervention as with the Contras in Nicaragua – to prevent the spread of the Castros’ Communism in Latin America. And it wasn’t for lack of trying by Fidel Castro with Soviet inspiration and help. The list of by Cuban Communist attempts to subvert other governments in the Hemisphere, sometimes with actual military infiltration, is too long to list here.
That, of course, poses the next question coming up quickly.

There is universal agreement that China is increasingly the U.S.’ No. 1 policy concern.
But perhaps never in the history of modern Sinology has there been such difference of opinion about what is happening in China and what – if anything – the U.S. should and could do about it.
One reason is some Old China Hands have changed sides rather abruptly, no longer convinced that there is “a peaceful rising China” — which incidentally is a slogan Beijing itself has dropped.
True, there have been times when there was enormous difference among China scholars, not least during World War II and immediately afterward when in 1949 the Communists took over. There were a lot of “they ain’t Stalinists, just agrarian radicals” around; some with very long greybeards still in business not having yet offered a mea culpa.