RUTHFULLY YOURS

So the man who reckoned Obama would make a great president because of his “perfectly creased pant” thinks that Charlie Hebdo belonged at the “kiddie table”. One of the problems with public discourse in America is that David Brooks is considered what the French call an homme sérieux.

~I have complained in recent days about the horrible, self-flattering, evasiveness of all those pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword cartoons. So (via The Prussian) credit where it’s due to the Berliner Kurier for the front page at right, with the headline “NO! You cannot murder our freedom” and underneath, for once, a cartoon that lives up to it: the Prophet gleefully bathing in blood.

Unlike the Hamburger Morgenpost, they have not (yet) been firebombed.

~Speaking of des hommes sérieux, one other casualty of a bloody week in Paris appears to be the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq. M Houellebecq was, in fact, pictured on the cover of last week’s Charlie Hebdo – the issue that hit newsstands just before its editorial staff were murdered. His novel, Soumission (Submission) was published that very day:

Environmentalists have a host of arguments for not building the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would traverse the environmentally sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska and the Ogallala aquifer; it would increase global warming by encouraging more development of Canadian tar sands; it would transport oil to the Gulf only to have it trans-exported to other countries. Finally, it was the subject of an ongoing landowner lawsuit that would have to be resolved before construction began, so the project might be blocked by the courts anyway.

Each of these arguments has been refuted, so the left has come up with an even more fanciful objection. When oil prices were high, they argued that more supply had failed to reduce prices, so the pipeline would make no difference. Now that increased supply from fracking and other sources has cut prices by more than half, the same crowd argues that the Keystone XL is not needed because prices are already low. They now admit that increased oil supply from the pipeline would lower prices, but since prices at the moment are low, why build it?

When it comes to condemning Islam for inspiring terrorists to kill, the mainstream media is addicted to moral relativism and shilling for Mohammad.

My Dangerous New York Times Interview

In a startling and unexpected turn of events, I was granted the opportunity to interview over lunch the two top journalists of the New York Times, Steven Wackenhut and Jody Faelton, with Barbara Goodish and Rashid Owst of the Washington Post standing by for moral support of its sister publication and who will write their own accounts of the interview. A somewhat incestuous zeitgeist, I thought, but there it is. The subject was the terrorist attack on the French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and the murder of twelve of its staff, together with three other terrorist incidents in Paris, including the gratuitous murder of a French policewoman and two hostage-takings by Islamic terrorists.

What I focused on was the Times’ report of January 7th, “’Dangerous Moment’ For Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow,” which nattered on about the rising anti-Islam and anti-Muslim immigration feelings among non-Muslims in Europe. While Mr. Wackenhut and Miss Faelton did not write the story, they did not seem in the least uncomfortable with the idea of discussing another reporter’s story, after we had established our talking points over the phone.

I had wanted to interview the actual authors, Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold, but was told by Mr. Wackenhut that they were unavailable for an interview, having been sent to Buffalo to report on the lake effect on that snow-bound city. I had been told by Mr. Wackenhut over the phone that being assigned a story in Buffalo was tantamount to being sent to Beirut, Lebanon, or some other strife-ridden foreign capital. “They were very excited about the assignment,” remarked Wackenhut over the line.

We were seated around an indoor café table in Le Occupé Bagatelle, quiet, a tony, secluded bistro just a block away from the garishly anonymous headquarters of the New York Times on Times Square. The place was once a tawdry pornography and sex toy arcade, one of many such enterprises which once populated Times Square and 42nd Street before the Square was Disneyfied. Here a glass of Evian mineral water goes for $7.50, and a minuscule chunk of Angus prime, about the size of my palm, topped with a handful of off-color Brussels sprouts or some other hapless vegetable, will sock you at $35.00, not including side dishes (or tax, or gratuity). We loosened up with some pungent house wine (“from our deepest cellar,” the wine list read), at $11.00 a shot glass. I gather that meant the basement. God knows whatever else was still aging down there.

Mr. Wackenhut is head of the overseas desk, having been the Times’ deputy bureau chief in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for several years, and then senior correspondent in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Miss Faelton has written about political and social women’s issues her entire career, first for the Bismarck, North Dakota Bugle, then as foreign editor for the Arkansas Yahoo, before moving to the Times as women’s issues editor.

I did not enquire into the journalistic antecedents of the Post’s Goodish and Owst.

I let the Times and the Post engage in their tech talk and journalistic camaraderie before the waiter took our drink and lunch orders. I didn’t want to frighten them yet with my extraordinary and soul-scouring questions. They were a jolly group and I was reluctant to spoil the mood. I sipped my mineral water. I’d already finished the colored vinegar.

At one point, Mr. Wackenhut said with a chuckle and in an execrable French accent, “My nickname for Ulaanbaatar was ‘Oulan-Bator,’ or ‘Ooh-la-la! That’s better!’”

The Post pair giggled. I guess they thought it was a sexual innuendo. Or something equally lascivious. But it was lost on me.

Jody Faelton scowled and replied, “You told me once it was ‘Oh, my ulcerous bladder!’”

Mr. Wackenhut sighed and shook his head. “Oh, it was that, at times, Jo. That Mongolian rotgut they call a native port there really kept me jumping up to excuse myself. It was a lot like seasickness.”

A headline in London exclaims that what happened in Paris “has galvanized France.” Well, that’s good, so far as it goes. Galvanized can be a good thing only if the galvanizee stays galvanized. The record is not encouraging.

September 11 galvanized the world, a date that, like December 7, would live in infamy. In the wake of September 11 a leading newspaper in Paris proclaimed that “we are all Americans now.” President George W. Bush, standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center, with wisps of smoke and ash curling at his feet, promised to avenge the blood and bone of the 3,000 Americans who perished on a day with a harvest of dead to rival that at Antietam or Pearl Harbor.

We know how all that turned out, galvanized or not. Within a matter of weeks the naysayers were picking apart the resolve that united the nation, and the spirit of September 11 turned out to be not even a ghost of December 7. The infamy remained, the infamy of short memories, impatience and wilting resolve.

This is not your grandfather’s country, where resolve thrived, multiplied and prospered, as we’re reminded a hundred times a day. Resolve is like ice cream, delicious and satisfying in the moment, but it melts quickly. Some of the most heroic galvanized words fall from the tongue of the British and French prime ministers, and theirs are the countries most overrun with the waves of immigrants with no taste for the melting pot that once could transform an immigrant from Pakistan or Syria into an Englishman or a Frenchman, or at least a fairly reasonable facsimile thereof. No longer. Whole neighborhoods in London and Paris have become places where “outsiders,” including police, no longer dare go. Cities are soon divided by tribe and caste.

WHO IS ANDRE CARSON?
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will appoint the first Muslim member to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which deals with sensitive information on America’s war against terrorism.

International Business Times reports that Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., the second Muslim elected to the House, following the election of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., in 2006, will take a seat on the committee.

Politico reported that Carson’s nomination was announced by Pelosi in a closed-door weekly Democratic caucus meeting and would be announced publicly “in the coming days.”

Carson was first elected to the House in 2008 and converted to Islam 10 years before taking office, IBTimes reports.

In 2014, Carson came under fire for being scheduled to appear on a panel entitled, “Ferguson is Our Issue: We Can’t Breathe,” at a convention of the Muslim American Society/Islamic Circle of North America in Chicago, along with Mazen Mokhtar, a webmaster and fundraiser for al-Qaida, the Center for Security Policy reports.

However, after delivering a keynote speech, without explanation, Carson did not appear on the panel.

Why didn’t President Obama go to Paris?

Monday brought a lot of quickly discarded excuses. 1) The excuse that the United States was adequately represented, as suggested by Kerry’s claim that critics were “quibbling” because the U.S. ambassador attended. White House press secretary Josh Earnest eventually retreated on that one. 2) The claim that there were security concerns, which suggested the security measures taken to protect the French president, U.K. prime minister, and Israeli prime minister were somehow insufficient. Also note that the entire point of the march was to send a message to the world that leaders will not be intimidated by extremists who threaten to kill them. 3) Complete and total staff incompetence: “White House aides were so caught off guard by the march’s massive size and attention that they hadn’t even asked President Barack Obama if he wanted to go.”

— Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.) is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, a naval aviator, and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rep. Bridenstine is a veteran, a conservative stalwart, and his priorities as candidate (unopposed) were to repeal Obamacare, build the Keystone Pipeline, and oppose blanket amnesty in immigration….rsk

The Obama administration’s ramped-up efforts to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainees are yet another instance where the president refuses to acknowledge Gitmo’s value and compromises national security. Congress should move to thwart the president’s strategy and retain Guantanamo so American troops do not have to fight the same enemy twice.

In in an open letter in early December, Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica wrote to President Obama, offering to resettle six Gitmo detainees and actually accusing the United States of “kidnapping” detainees. On December 7, American military planes landed in Montevideo with their terrorist cargo. Mujica waited exactly one day to announce his true intentions, telling Uruguayan state TV, “The first day that [the detainees] want to leave, they can leave.”

Many of the Left’s favorite unratified treaties are aspirational fantasies.

Those nasty Republicans are at it again.

Dennis Jett, former U.S. ambassador to Mozambique and Peru, writes in The New Republic that GOP senators are blocking “even the most reasonable international treaties.” As opposed, apparently, to that mythical entity, the domestic treaty.

The ambassador proclaims the virtues of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which will somehow supposedly prevent nations controlled by dictators and terrorists from arming dictators and terrorists. If you want to read the case against it, you can start here. But for now, let’s talk process, not substance.

Jett is outraged that there are “36 treaties awaiting action by the Senate,” and implies that the ATT is one of them. He even helpfully links to a list of pending treaties. But the ATT’s not on it. That’s because the administration hasn’t sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Jett’s also angry that another treaty — the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — is supposedly stalled in the Senate. But it’s not. Though President Clinton signed the CRC in 1995, no administration — Democrat or Republican — has submitted it. That’s why the CRC wasn’t included on the Obama administration’s 2009 Treaty Priority List, at a time when Democrats were only seven votes away from the two-thirds majority needed to ratify it.

President Obama is officially at war with the Islamic State, yet he is not fighting to win. He is fighting to contain it and “degrade” it over a period of years. Practically speaking, this means: helping the Islamic State develop itself at home, and helping it inspire more terrorists worldwide — something the terrorists have brought home to country after country in recent weeks. Obama’s strategy is barely different from fighting to lose.

As long as the Islamic State is fighting America without losing — as long as it continues to control a large swath of territory — its roots deepen at home and its charisma grows among Muslims everywhere. Here finally is an Islamic entity that is able to fight “the Empire” and succeed in holding it off! It attracts adherents from a global base — a base of many thousand aspiring jihadists and many million supportive Islamists.

The U.S. has announced that it has killed a thousand Islamic State fighters — this, in all these months of containing and “degrading.” Meanwhile, by conservative counts, the Islamic State has recruited more than twice that number of additional fighters. Leftists argue that we are building up the IS by fighting it, so stop fighting. They would be right, if they put it this way: We are building it up by fighting pro forma without trying to win.

Unlike many conservatives, I was not outraged when President Obama directed the Justice Department to end the pretense of “defending” the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I feel the same way about the president’s decision not to join dozens of world leaders in Paris last Sunday to march in favor of free speech and against Islamic-supremacist terror. I’m glad he stayed home. I’m glad he didn’t send Vice President Biden (whose main job is to attend such exhibitions), Secretary of State Kerry (whose main job escapes me), or Attorney General Holder (who was in Paris but still didn’t go).

It’s not too often that the “most transparent administration in history” is, what’s the word? . . . transparent.

To be sure, in the immediate time frame of these decisions, Obama was moved more by frivolity than by principle. On DOMA, he needed to make a gesture to well-heeled donors on the left who, in their frustration over the president’s too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, were withholding campaign cash. As for Paris, I suspect Obama wanted to watch the pro-football playoffs (which is why — shades of Benghazi! — the White House refused to reveal what the Leader From Behind Of The Free World was doing in lieu of attending the free world’s march).