RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the Polk Awards decided to honor the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, one obvious name came to mind. Gary Trudeau.

If there is one man who represents the opposite of what the Charlie cartoonists did, it’s Trudeau. They took risks, Trudeau takes none. They lived knowing that they could be killed at any moment. There is no person on earth who would bother killing Gary Trudeau even if it was Kill Gary Trudeau Day.

Trudeau is that paradoxical creature, the establishment cartoonist, the party satirist, the hack who dares to say exactly what he is expected to say. Imagine NPR in a few black and white sketches. That’s Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Republicans are bad. Liberals are good. And then insert a topical reference.

The Polk Awards were the best forum for Trudeau. George Polk invented [1] heroic wartime exploits that got him a job at CBS. Unlike Brian Williams, Polk did serve, but he was not a fighter pilot, he serviced aircraft. In Greece, his dubious reporting attacking Truman and the Greek government was defended by his lefty colleagues by inventing even more imaginary heroics that he had never claimed for himself.

By the time they were done, Polk had singlehandedly defeated the Japanese.

How the Clintons pioneered the methods by which Obama sold his Iran deal.

Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.

What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?

It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper—lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?

A President Who Lived and Died for Liberty
One hundred and fifty years ago, on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln went to the theater.
The day began as one of the happiest of his life. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 had elated him, and he had been more buoyant than at any other time during his presidency. Three-quarters of a million men had fallen in the Civil War over which he had presided, and the conflict had almost consumed him.
“This war is eating my life out,” he once said to abolitionist Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”

The universities were ranked using a traffic-light system: red for universities that ban and actively censor certain ideas on campus; amber for universities that chill free speech, and green for universities that have a hands-off approach to free speech.

The results of the Free Speech University Rankings were staggering. Forty-seven universities were marked red, including Oxford University and the London School of Economics; 45 were marked amber, including Cambridge University, and a mere 25 were marked green. Results indicate that 80% of British universities censor free speech.

You can never know what that wacky Hillary Clinton will do next. At the outset of her latest presidential campaign, she decided to drive from New York to Iowa for her first campaign stop. Or, to be more precise, she decided to be driven to Iowa by a Secret Service agent as part of a three-car caravan in keeping with her security needs. For a former first lady and global celebrity, this is traveling light and spontaneous — let’s load up the Secret Service detail and blow this joint.

Her campaign referred to her vehicle as “her Scooby van,” evoking the lovable madcap crew of the cartoon series. This could be considered a cute little affectation, until you realize that she campaigned in a van in her 2000 Senate race, and for the same reason: to appear more relatable (the Secret Service reportedly referred to that vehicle, too, as the Scooby-Doo van). Hillary Clinton has been reintroducing herself to the public for so long that even her manufactured stabs at authenticity aren’t entirely new. Of course, the image she is trying to live down is the Hillary of the “Saturday Night Live” sketches, whose calling card is her gratingly insincere laugh and her cringe-inducing blatant calculations. It is her curse as a politician of stamina and determination, but not of natural grace, that her maneuvers to reveal her “real” self always feel like obvious maneuvers. To say that she lacks the light touch is almost as much of an understatement as saying her husband is not a monk.

His foreign-policy errors result not from incompetence but from a conscious agenda. Lots of questions arise about the muddled foreign policy of the Obama administration. Critics suggest that America’s friends have now become enemies, and enemies friends. Others cite incompetence and naïveté rather than deliberate agendas as the cause of American decline, and of growing global chaos from Libya to Ukraine. But, in fact, there is a predictable pattern to Obama’s foreign policy.

The president has an adolescent, romantic view of professed revolutionary societies and anti-Western poseurs — and of his own ability uniquely to reach out and win them over. In the most superficial sense, Obama demonstrates his empathy for supposedly revolutionary figures of the non-Western world through gratuitous, often silly remarks about Christianity and Western colonial excesses, past and present. He apologizes with talk of our “own dark periods” and warns of past U.S. “dictating”; he contextualizes; he ankle-bites the very culture he grew up and thrived in, as if he can unapologetically and without guilt enjoy the West’s largesse only by deriding its history and values. In lieu of reading or speaking a foreign language, or knowing much about geography (Austrians speak Austrian, the death camps were Polish, the Indian Ocean Maldives are the politically correct name of the Falklands, cities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are Gulf ports, etc.), Obama adopts, in the manner of a with-it English professor, hokey accentuation to suggest an in-the-know fides anytime he refers to the Taliban, Pakistan, or Teheran.

Patients suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease shouldn’t have to plead with bureaucrats to try potentially lifesaving drugs.

In the next few days, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to decide whether to accelerate approval of a new drug that might save the lives of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease. The manufacturer, Genervon Biopharmaceuticals, requested the approval of GM6 in February after finding improvements in patients during preclinical, Phase 1 and Phase 2A trials — with no negative side effects. If the FDA grants the request, patients would gain immediate access to the drug.

Efforts to speed up approval were triggered, in part, by ALS patient Anthony Carbajal, who a little over a year ago launched a petition on Change.org urging the FDA to allow him, his mother, and others — approximately 30,000 Americans suffer from ALS — to use the new drug. To date, more than 500,000 people have signed the petition.

Not as famous as director Steven Spielberg is his sister Nancy, the filmmaker. Lesser known than the Israelis who fought for their country’s independence were the American pilots who secretly joined that fight. Ahead of Israel’s 67th Independence Day, the new documentary “Above and Beyond” is fusing those two unsung elements.

In 1948, just three years after the liberation of Nazi death camps, a group of American Jewish pilots answered a call for help. In secret and at great personal risk, they smuggled planes out of the U.S., trained behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, and flew for Israel in its War of Independence.

Russia announced Monday that it will sell Iran advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The decision, which ends an embargo dating back to 2010, shows that President Barack Obama is rapidly losing control of the international consensus on Iran.

It also sets Israel a deadline to attack Iran–since Israel has treated the S-300 system as a “red line,” and has attacked Syria several times recently to prevent advanced Russian air defense and anti-ship missile systems from becoming operational.

Some Israeli analysts have recently suggested that Israel will only attack Iran if the regime’s nuclear program poses a direct and imminent threat–if the “sword is at the throat.”

It looks like war is coming to Israel. With sanctions limited and the Obama administration signaling that it will not intercede, Iran is arming Israel’s enemies. The Islamic Republic has increased weapons shipments to Hezbollah, which have found their way to Lebanon and the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, and to Hamas in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. This looks like a coordinated attack from all sides in the making.Today, the Russians announced that they were supplying Iran with S-300 anti-missile defense systems which will provide protection for Iran’s nuclear sites. ..Janet Levy

On Monday, Israeli officials reported that Iran has upped its delivery of weapons to the Lebanese Shiite terror group Hezbollah in the past few weeks. Channel 2 stated that the shipments have been made to both Lebanon and the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

In addition, the report stated that Iran was sending weapons to Hamas chiefs in Gaza and arming Hamas members in Judea and Samaria.

Channel 2 asserted that the ease in sanctions on Iran from the present nuclear negotiations would allow it to spend “billions of dollars” shipping weapons to Israel’s enemies.

The increase in Iranian arms shipments coincides with Monday’s announcement that Russia will reverse an earlier ban and send S-300 missile defense systems to Iran. Israel is concerned Iran will transfer the systems to Lebanon and Syria, allowing Hezbollah to attack Israel with impunity and imperiling Israel’s ability to strike back.