RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert B. Young, M.D., is a psychiatrist who also writes for Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership at DRGO.us.
Being disagreeable has become a justification for censorship.

The current notion that we must avoid hurting anyone’s feelings is becoming oppressive. Particularly in academia, deviation from this standard can lead to educational or career consequences. Speaking up for gun rights, for instance, is virtually verboten; even a seven-year-old boy who chewed a Pop-Tart into the vague shape of a gun was punished by school authorities, who suspended him for brandishing the pastry in play.

Now a court has jumped on the bandwagon. On April 27, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decided Friedman v. City of Highland Park, Illinois, voting two to one to back the city’s banning of certain firearms and magazine capacities, partly based on feelings: “If it has no other effect, Highland Park’s ordinance may increase the public’s sense of safety.#…#If a ban on semiautomatic guns and large-capacity magazines reduces the perceived risk from a mass shooting, and makes the public feel safer as a result, that’s a substantial benefit.” Left unexamined is how anyone’s feelings are more important than actual risk, or how the court can override the Bill of Rights. As the dissenting judge correctly stated, “Both the ordinance and this court’s opinion upholding it are directly at odds with the central holdings of Heller and McDonald.”

Most Republican presidential contenders are trying to woo GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who in 2012 demonstrated his ability to bankroll a campaign almost singlehandedly when he kept former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s presidential prospects alive long after most expected him to bow out of the race. But in the Sheldon primary, according to multiple sources, one top candidate is already a dead man.

That’s former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose aides have, for the past several months, been making overtures to Adelson in an attempt to get him to open his wallet to a Bush super PAC that is expected to raise record sums. But at this point, it looks like none of that money will come from Adelson. “I think he’s lost the Sheldon primary,” says the leader of a top conservative group. The bad blood between Bush and Adelson is relatively recent, and it deepened with the news that former secretary of state James Baker, a member of Bush’s foreign-policy advisory team, was set to address J Street, a left-wing pro-Israel organization founded to serve as the antithesis to the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

I once had a boss who gave me some great advice, not just for managing people but for judging politicians: You forgive mistakes; you punish patterns. Everybody screws up. But if someone won’t learn from his mistakes and try to correct his behavior, then he either doesn’t think it was a mistake, he just doesn’t care, or he thinks you’re a fool. The one indisputable takeaway from Peter Schweizer’s new book, Clinton Cash, is that Bill and Hillary Clinton fit one or all of those descriptions.

Let us recall Marc Rich, a shady billionaire indicted for tax evasion and defying trade sanctions with Iran during the U.S. hostage crisis. Rich fled to Switzerland to escape prosecution. He hired Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel, to lobby the administration for a pardon. Quinn sought help from then–deputy attorney general Eric Holder, who advised Quinn to petition the White House directly — advice Holder later regretted. On the last day of his presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich.

Consider these facts about the creation of Israel and Pakistan. Whenever I have received a call from a listener to my radio show challenging Israel’s legitimacy, I have asked these people if they ever called a radio show to challenge any other country’s legitimacy. In particular, I ask, have they ever questioned the legitimacy of Pakistan?

The answer, of course, is always “no.”In fact, no caller ever understood why I even mentioned Pakistan. There are two reasons for this.

First, of all the 200-plus countries in the world, only Israel’s legitimacy is challenged. So mentioning any other country seems strange to a caller. Second, almost no one outside of India and Pakistan knows anything about the founding of Pakistan.Only months before the U.N. adopted a proposal to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state in 1947, India was partitioned into a Muslim and Hindu state. The Hindu state was, of course, India. And the Muslim state became known as Pakistan. It comprises 310,000 square miles, about 40,000 square miles larger than Texas.

In both cases, the declaration of an independent state resulted in violence. As soon as the newly established state of Israel was declared in May 1948, it was invaded by six Arab armies. And the partition of India led to terrible violence between Muslims and Hindus.

Same name, same tragic destiny

Baruch Mizrahi, killed on Seder Night in a West Bank terror attack, was named for an Israeli legend – an Arab who converted to Judaism and fought in the pre-state Irgun.

Israel Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi was killed in a terrorist shooting attack in the West Bank last year while driving to a Passover Seder with his family. Only after his death did his widow, Hadas, learn that her husband was named after an Irgun fighter who was killed in 1948, chillingly close to the same date.

“Baruch never told me about the origin of his name,” Hadas says of her husband, who served for more than 20 years in the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps before being drafted into the police’s Intelligence Department. “His mother decided to tell me only at the funeral that he was named after the Irgun fighter – and that they shared the same destiny.”

On the eve of the War of Independence, one of the pre-state Jewish underground’s most fascinating fighters – an Arab from Safed who converted to Judaism and chose the name Baruch Mizrahi – was murdered near Jenin. Some 19 years later, his former comrade-in-arms, Haim Mizrahi, decided to name his newborn son Baruch, in memory of the fallen Irgun fighter. Baruch Mizrahi the Irgun fighter was killed on ninth of the Hebrew month of Nissan; Chief Superintendent Baruch fell on the fourteenth day of Nissan.

The only reason an HRC candidacy is even plausible is the influence of the legacy media, which has simply declared, by fiat, her suitability and her inevitability.

Let us please stipulate that in a rational world, a woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton would have absolutely no chance of being nominated for, much less elected, president of the United States. She has achieved nothing, accomplished nothing (unless you count the four dead Americans at Benghazi, for which she will ultimately be held responsible); she is an exremely poor public speaker, full of annoying verbal and physical tics; she is legendarily dishonest; she is a hard-core Alinskyite; and in general a wretched human being. By rights, she should be laughed off the stage, the same way the smart set laughed at Lurleen Wallace, who succeeded her husband George Wallace, the racist Democrat, as governor of Alabama back in 1967. She has no natural political constituency, except the manufactured “women’s vote,” and no rationale for her candidacy except that it’s “time” for a woman president, just as it was “time” for a part-black African, part-Arab, half-white, paternally cultural Muslim to pass for a traditional African-American Christian and be elected president in 2008.

And yet, even after the comically disastrous and transparently phony launch of her new “campaign,” she’s considered the “inevitable” Democrat nominee for 2016 and, very likely, the next president of the United States. For the sake of democracy in America, she needs to be defeated and politically destroyed. Break Hillary and you have begun to break the power of the Mainstream Media, a fifth column masquerading as the Fourth Estate whose mission it has been for decades to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America.

After festering for half a century, we’re witnessing the endgame of LBJ’s Great Society.

Who wasn’t hugely depressed watching the non-stop coverage of the Baltimore riots Monday night? So sad. How has it come to this? We’re back in Watts [1], only it’s five decades later !

Well, it’s not exactly the same. It was white businesses that were trashed in Watts — this time they were black ones. And there was another, even more important, difference…

Commentators were repeatedly asking, where are the parents? Ben Carson — the neurosurgeon, potential Republican presidential candidate and onetime Baltimore resident — urged the city’s parents “Please, take care of your children.” [2]

Great idea, but here’s the problem. They don’t have ‘em. According to liberal CNN’s Don Lemon, 72 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. His stats were born out by the Centers for Disease Control [2]. One can only imagine what the stats would be broken down for those Baltimore neighborhoods that were rioting. The presence of a father in the home would be a rarity indeed. And a lot of the moms are probably holding their fatherless homes together for dear life, desperately trying to make a living when their kids are pouring out of school. No one was home.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-john-kerry-1430262734

“On that note, I want to emphasize our deep concerns regarding Russia’s clear violation of its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. We are urging Russia to return to compliance.”

From remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry at the 2015 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference at the United Nations in New York, April 27:

We have pledged not to pursue new nuclear warheads or support new military missions or military capabilities for the weapons that we do have, and we haven’t tested a nuclear weapon in 23 years. We have clearly demonstrated our commitment to abide by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We have reduced the role that nuclear weapons play in our national security strategy. And the primary purpose today is simply to deter nuclear threats from others. We have reduced the alert status of our nuclear arsenal, and we have taken every reasonable step to ensure its safety, security, and strict control.

But as someone who has spent three decades focused on these issues, I know as well as anyone that we have a long way to go. And I share President Obama’s belief that the same countries that ushered in the era of nuclear arms have a special responsibility to guide the world beyond it.

Despite significant reductions, the United States and Russia still possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty . . . will reduce our current stockpile of weapons significantly. But we know that we can cut back even further, and President Obama has made clear our willingness, readiness, now, to engage and negotiate further reductions of deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third below the level set by New START. Let me underscore: That offer remains on the table, and we urge the Russians to take us up on it.

On that note, I want to emphasize our deep concerns regarding Russia’s clear violation of its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. We are urging Russia to return to compliance.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been in the hostage-taking business since its earliest days, so nobody should be surprised by Tuesday’s news that Iranian warships seized a cargo ship and her crew of 34 in the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s a useful reminder of the kind of regime with which the West is now seeking to strike a nuclear bargain.

The M/V Maersk Tigris, a Marshall Islands-flagged container ship, was transiting the Strait along an internationally recognized maritime route when it was surrounded by gunships of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Iranians ordered the ship to divert into Iranian waters and fired warning shots when the skipper of the Tigris refused, sending out a distress call that was picked up by the destroyer USS Farragut. The Iranians then boarded the ship and steered her toward the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

“Yes, our democracy suffers from excessive secrecy. But given how parlous the world has become, and how many of our most precious secrets are now publicly available for our enemies to ponder and act upon, it is possible that excessive openness is an even greater problem.”….

The U.S. government is the most open in the history of the world—but it still keeps far too many things secret.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for a democratic society to find exactly the right equilibrium between protecting national security and fostering openness. There will be problems no matter how the balance is struck. In “Democracy in the Dark,” Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., chief counsel of the Brennan Center at NYU Law School, argues that we have arrived at a point of ominous disequilibrium—that America has a secrecy problem.

Mr. Schwarz has no difficulty showing that secrecy has long been abused by our government to cover up embarrassment and wrongdoing. He explores J. Edgar Hoover’s depredations at the FBI, Richard Nixon’s antics during Watergate and the many intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee (for which Mr. Schwarz served as chief counsel) in 1975 and 1976. Routine information, he notes, is too often classified as “secret” although it would convey little of value to our adversaries and yet a great deal of value to the American public.

Some government secrets are “worthy of protection,” Mr. Schwarz acknowledges, even if others are not. His project is to outline “possible guidelines with which we can distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate secrets.” He draws from various episodes across American history to make his argument.

One such episode is President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima even after officials learned how devastating the bomb’s effects would be. Secrecy in this instance, Mr. Schwarz maintains, was a bad thing: It allowed officials “to avoid outside pressure to revisit their decision, challenge their preconceptions, or take account of changing facts.” As a result, they went in the wrong direction and annihilated a densely populated city. The United States, Mr. Schwarz argues, “would have been on higher moral ground if it had started with a predominantly military target, coupled with a demand for prompt surrender, and only escalated if the demand were not accepted.” Thanks to secrecy, however, there was remarkably little “analysis, give and take, discussion or debate” about a step of enormous consequence.