RUTHFULLY YOURS

I see Hillary Clinton has just been inducted into the “Irish America Hall of Fame”. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of that until today, but as an authentic son of Erin I strongly object to the Hall of Fame helping Hillary put the sham in shamrock. She has English, Welsh and Scottish blood coursing icily through her veins, but not a drop of Irish. Perhaps that’s why her blarney is so clunky and heavy-handed. At any rate, it’s 15 years since Mrs Clinton’s first political campaign – when a sitting First Lady decided to run for the Senate in a state she’d never lived in. In that time, she’s gone from presidential spouse to senator to president-presumptive to Obama roadkill to State Department airmiles queen to deleter extraordinaire and and president-presumptive 2.0. But, with hindsight, a lot of her subsequent presidential campaign style was visible in this St Patrick’s Day column from 2000:

As my favourite 1970s McDonald’s jingle put it:

Hey, come on down
The weather’s getting better
Have a big thick shamrock shake
We’ll welcome in the spring together…

As the head of the Department, Clinton should have been obligated to ensure proper records were kept. Did Hillary Clinton’s State Department exit follow the Department’s standard records-keeping protocol? Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Tuesday answered a pressing question I posed here about Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct official business. Responding to questions from AP reporter Matt Lee, she reported that the State Department had “no record” that Mrs. Clinton signed a “separation statement” (Form OF-109) certifying the completeness of the records that she left with the Department upon her resignation. When pressed on whether Mrs. Clinton actually signed the document, Ms. Psaki left herself some wiggle room, stating that she was “fairly certain” the former secretary of state had not. Ms. Psaki, acting more like an extension of Hillary 2016 than a State Department spokesperson, then went into full spin mode, disclosing that neither of Mrs. Clinton’s two Bush-administration predecessors signed a Separation Statement. She further stated that Mrs. Clinton broke no rules in failing to sign the statement.
But Ms. Psaki’s spin misstates applicable State Department rules and leaves many questions unanswered. First, the governing rules. The State Department Foreign Affairs Manual and Foreign Affairs Handbooks, which set forth the Department’s internal operating procedures and guidelines for the day-to-day operations of the Department, plainly require that all departing employees sign a separation statement. Department management is responsible under those procedures for “reminding all employees who are about to leave the Department . . . of the laws and regulations pertaining to the disposition of personal papers and official records” and for “ensuring that . . . [the] Separation Statement [is] executed for each departing employee.” Elsewhere, the same department rulebook, addressing termination of an employee, provides that a “separation statement will be completed whenever an employee is terminating employment.” Ms. Psaki’s suggestion that the rules were not broken therefore can’t bear scrutiny when actually reading those rules.

The key questions remain unanswered. The State Department’s explanation of why Hillary Clinton did not sign the Separation Statement that every other State Department employee is required to sign upon resignation is quickly approaching the farcical. In Wednesday’s daily press briefing, State Department spokesperson and Hillary Clinton spinmeister Jen Psaki offered a new take on why Mrs. Clinton was excused from signing the form:
“Secretaries of state often do not sign this form, as it is a step to revoking their own security clearance. There’s a long tradition of secretaries of state making themselves available to future secretaries and presidents, and secretaries are typically allowed to maintain their security clearance and access to their own records for use in writing their memoirs and the like. Hence, this is not a form that many would have signed.”

Before showing why this explanation is insufficient, let’s start with how it is correct. Psaki is undoubtedly correct that secretaries of state often retain their security clearances (although probably not their clearances into every program) after leaving office. That is probably true with Mrs. Clinton, who might be called upon from time to time to weigh in on an issue with which she has some experience or insight. And there is also some precedent for former secretaries of state being granted access to their official records after they leave office to write their memoirs or for some related purpose. Finally, at least according to Psaki’s prior statements, neither Secretary Condoleezza Rice nor Secretary Colin Powell signed such a statement upon leaving the Department

The Democrats are on the wrong side of a familiar issue. Last summer, I interviewed a slave. Her name is Ima Matul, and she is a native of Indonesia who was brought to southern California as a teenager with the promise of a job working as a household maid. She got the job. The rest will be familiar to those familiar with modern-day slavery in the United States: The family for whom she was to work took her passport and separated her from her cousin, with whom she had come to the U.S. The cousin was sent to work in another home. Ima Matul was, needless to say, never paid — the family said they were simply keeping the money safe for her until she returned home. She worked 18 hours a day or more. She was cut off from all communication, beaten, and abused. She was told that if she were to try to run away, she’d be arrested as an illegal immigrant and taken to prison, where she would be held indefinitely with no passport or other identification, and where she would certainly be raped.
She eventually escaped, with the help of a sympathetic nanny next door and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles. The humiliation, terror, and betrayal of her experience has never really left her, though she speaks about her experience with remarkable calm.

The promised money wasn’t very much: $150 a week. “It was more money than I could ever make at home,” she says. “And coming to the United States sounded like the best thing I could think of.” To a person in her situation — young, not having much in the way of resources or connections, experiencing family troubles (as a teenager, she’d been forced into a marriage with a considerably older man), and having little hope for happiness or advancement — working as a domestic servant abroad sounds like something bordering on deliverance. Many people in a similar plight make it to the United States. Many are cruelly disappointed by what awaits them.

You learn a lot by observing the way people choose to spend their money. Forget about what they say, and look at what they do. College officials endless proclaim their devotion to academic excellence, student achievement, blah, blah, blah. But instead of putting their resources into the faculty, more and more they prefer to spend money on administrators and bureaucrats who don’t teach at all. That’s the argument Mary Grabar makes in her new essay “Save Money With Adjuncts, Spend It On Bureaucrats.”

From her own experience teaching English at Georgia Perimeter College, Mary points to expensive but academically risible initiatives such as “civic learning.” A highly paid VP at the school called for courses with a “civic-engagement or service-learning component.” Among the results was having students serve as docents at the Margaret Mitchell House. Mary comments, “I failed to see how such activities, whether ‘global’ or ushering at a local historic site, would help students struggling with grammar.”

The absence of true leadership has created chaos at home and abroad. What has gone wrong with the U.S. government in the past month? Just about everything, from the fundamental to the ridiculous. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States to warn Congress about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. He spoke without the invitation of an irritated President Obama, who claimed that he did not even watch the address on television. Obama declined to even meet with the Israeli prime minister, announcing that it would have been improper for him to have such a meeting so close to Netanyahu’s re-election bid.
But if Obama was so concerned about not influencing the Israeli elections, why, according to some news accounts, is a Senate panel launching an investigation into whether Obama’s State Department gave grant money to a nonprofit organization, the OneVoice Movement, that sought to unseat Netanyahu with the help of several former Obama campaign operatives? Then, 47 Republican senators signed an unusual letter to the Iranian theocracy, reminding it that any agreement on Iran’s nuclear program negotiated with the Obama administration would have to first clear Congress. Obama shot back that the senators’ letter was undue interference that aided the Iranians.

Slow But Certain Integration in Israel.There’s more promise for improved Arab-Israeli relations than you think.

Weeks of devastating warfare and extremist rhetoric that began after the murders of Israeli and Palestinian boys have prompted many to ask if Israelis and Palestinians can ever get along. Skeptics aside, the answer is yes. Right in front of our eyes, we see how 1.7 million Israeli Arabs and more than 6 million Israeli Jews live in peace, because of how Israeli Arabs have been integrated into the economic, if not social, life of Israel.

Certainly, the decades after Israeli statehood were difficult and military rule over Arab communities lasted into the 1960s. But, over time, Israeli Arabs have come to believe that the Israeli government is serving their interests. They are increasingly seeing themselves as Israeli citizens, not as Palestinian outsiders. Affirmative action policies have significantly increased the number of Arabs employed in government agencies. The educational performance of Arab students has improved significantly as well, leading to a substantial increase in enrollment in Israeli universities. More Arab women are employed in professional careers, and Arabs with high-tech training have transformed Nazareth into a hub where numerous national and international companies run production development sites.

It would be a stretch to say that President Obama lost Israel’s election. But our president has made it pretty clear what he thinks of Benjamin Netanyahu, and last night, Israeli voters made it pretty clear what they think of him too. Netanyahu’s Likud party easily beat its closest rival, and now appears likely to head a conservative coalition or a centrist unity government. President Obama’s distaste for Israel’s reelected leader has two explanations. Netanyahu is the most articulate, most forceful global critic of Obama’s rabid desire for a deal with Iran. He is also the world leader who does the best job providing an alternative to the president’s Pollyannaish approach to Islamic terror. Of course, Israeli voters were considering many issues during this election, and much of the disagreement among Israeli parties is about domestic and social debates, not security policy. Because of the gravity of their situation, Israelis increasingly agree on questions of defense. But it is important that they reelected the loudest, most impassioned defender of their consensus. President Obama’s contempt for Netanyahu is disturbing because he is supposed to — and at times pretends to — have special solicitude for Israel’s security.
Doing so need not mean agreeing with its prime minister on every single question, but the president’s discomfort with the avatar of Israeli strength runs deeper than day-to-day debates. This is not confined to the president, either: It was obvious in the Western liberal hope and expectation that Israeli voters might share their contempt or boot a paranoid like Netanyahu because they care more about housing costs or income inequality. Many Americans are disturbed by the Netanyahu–Obama animosity, and for good reason. In part, it is because they worry what it portends for Israel, which needs allies. But it also reminds them that they lack a leader who has a clear-eyed view of evil and understands peace through strength. Israel reelected a man like that; we will have to wait a little longer to elect our own.

When Republicans complained that Obama refused to talk about Islamic terrorism, he accused them of playing into the hands of ISIS by demanding that he identify the enemy we’re fighting.

When they spoke out against his Iranian nuclear sellout, he accused them of “wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran”. Those hardliners would presumably toe a harder line than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who responded to Obama’s outreach in his first term by saying, “The Islamic peoples all over the world chant ‘Death to America!’” and who stated last year that “This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it.”

(The Supreme Leader of a country which stones teenage rape victims and rapes teenage girls so that they don’t die as virgins, also claimed that “The European races are barbaric.”)

If the moderate Supreme Leader that Obama is dealing with wants Death to America, what could the real hardliners want for America that’s even worse than death? A third term of Obama?

Meanwhile Joe Biden, Obama’s number two, accused Republicans of undermining Obama. This would be the same Biden who threatened to impeach President Bush if he bombed Iran’s nuclear program and who blasted Bush and the idea of an Axis of Evil at a fundraiser in the home of a pro-Iran figure.

In his 1964 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…” In that same speech Mr. Goldwater issued a warning more meaningful to today: “Those who seek absolute power [read: extremists], even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth…they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.” Seven years later Saul Alinsky, the “father of community organizing” and whose work influenced the young community organizer Barack Obama, published “Rules for Radicals.” Its opening sentence: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what is to what they believe it should be.” On October 30, 2008, candidate Barack Obama said: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.”

“Radicalism” is defined by Merriam-Webster: “The opinions and behavior of people who favor extreme change, especially in government.” There is no question that what Mr. Alinsky was advocating was extremism. However, during the 2008 campaign only a few “extremists” and “racists” brought attention to the radicals who had influenced Mr. Obama as a young man. Nevertheless, the names and the numbers are legion, and include among others Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Tom Hayden, Saul Mendelson, Dr. John Drew and Professor Charles Ogletree.