RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just prior to last night’s resounding GOP mid-term victories in the US Senate, the House and a host of gubernatorial contests, I had an opportunity to speak with Shoshana Bryen. She is the executive director of the Washington, DC – based Jewish Policy Center. We were preparing for last Sunday’s Lisa Benson Show, which had a midterm election theme of “Vote to Protect America and its Ally Israel”. We talked about a wide range of issues. In addition to Shoshana, we had as other guests on the show, Ken Timmerman, veteran Iran watcher and author of Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happend in Benghazi, and Navy Seal veteran, Ben Smith. Listen here to the discussion on the November 2, 2014 Lisa Benson Show.

When I asked Bryen about emerging figures in the mid-term elections, she pointed to Rep. Tom Cotton (R-4th CD AK) running a competitive campaign against incumbent two-term US Democrat Senator Mark Pryor. Pryor was the scion of a long serving Arkansas political dynasty. His father David before him had served as both Governor and US Senator.

Cotton, I knew from reading a profile of him by retired Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) had a career that resonated. He was a highly educated double Harvard graduate who voluntarily served as an Infantry officer in the US Army during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflict. Wisse’s WSJ op-ed was an unabashed endorsement, “Vote for Tom Cotton—and Redeem Harvard”. So, I asked Bryen on last Sunday’s broadcast to talk about Cotton and another Army veteran Lt. Col.Joni Ernst of Iowa both running for the US Senate in their respective states.

Cotton and Ernst won their respective Senate races last night. A colleague called last night from a cheering Iowa GOP celebration to give me the news about Ernst’s victory. Cotton trounced Pryor by running against “Obama’s failed policies”. He won by 16 percent. His campaign played up his Army service. Cotton, 37 years old, will enter the 314th Congress in January 2015 as its youngest member.

Cotton is a sixth generation Arkansan from a cattle raising ranching family in the small community of Dardanelle, Arkansas. A graduate of both Harvard College and Law School, motivated by the events of 9/11, he rejected a JAG Commission. Instead, he volunteered to go through OCS at Fort Benning and trained at both the Infantry and Ranger Schools. Cotton served from 2005 to 2009. He had two tours, one in Iraq and a second in Afghanistan with the famed Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne, rising to the rank of Captain and received a Bronze Star for his combat actions. At 6’5″, he was selected as Platoon Leader at the Old Guard that provides the honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery.

Watch this mini-documentary on Senator-elect Cotton:

It will be tempting to ride the red wave for a while. A startling Wall Street Journal report, however, reminds us that the urgent business of reining in President Obama’s recklessness — in this case, on Iran — cannot wait until the new Republican-controlled Congress takes over in January.

In a nutshell, Obama granted exemptions from congressional sanctions against Iran in order to promote the mullahs’ investment in Afghanistan – where American troops are still fighting jihadist terrorists, who, as even the Obama State Department acknowledges, have been armed and trained by the Iranian regime, the world’s chief state sponsor of jihadist terror, for nearly a decade.

You read that correctly.

As the Journal reports:

Twice in the last two years, [a Pentagon] task force [on “business and stability operations”] secured special permission from the U.S. government to seek help from Iran in setting up Afghanistan’s first pharmaceutical company and in developing four mines, according to government documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with people directly involved in the unusual outreach effort….

The unusual and quiet cooperation with Iran represents one small example of the Obama administration’s tentative efforts to allow for a closer relationship with America’s longtime adversary that would make it easier to work together in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. From last year’s ice-breaking phone call between Mr. Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani to ongoing nuclear talks, the two nations have been trying to repair their relationship—much to the dismay of American allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are wary of Iran’s intentions.

The biggest takeaway in this second historic midterm shellacking of President Obama’s tenure is how much executive lawlessness, recklessness, and incompetence upset voters, across party lines. As I argued in Faithless Execution, although there is insufficient political support for impeaching the president, executive maladministration is a very powerful political issue. We saw that last night.

Voters may want Obama out of office, but they do not want him removed from office. They want him reined in. They want normalcy: a relief from constant crisis that involves a restoration of strong American leadership in the world (which would have a sobering effect on enemies who are now emboldened), and a return to regular governance at home – not monarchical directives to fundamentally transform the country by, for example, unilaterally purporting to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens when over 90 million Americans are out of the workforce.

That being the case, the worst thing Republicans could do is cut a lame-duck deal with the very Democrats the voters have just ousted and the very president the voters have just rebuked to fund through the end of next year the very agenda the voters have just rejected. If they cut the deal, they surrender the constitutional authority to do what voters have entrusted them to do.

Impeachment is plainly not on the table. And Speaker Boehner’s lawsuit against the president, as I observed when it was floated, is such an absurdly ineffective gambit for reining in executive lawlessness that Republicans never even bothered to file it. The incoming Republican majority will have only one way to stop the president: Use the power of the purse to cut off the money Obama needs to do the lawless things the voters are up in arms about.

Republicans will be toast with the people who have empowered them if they now turn around and agree to fund Obamacare, the Homeland Security’s immigration agencies and the Justice Department that refuse to enforce the laws, the IRS that colludes with Democrats to intimidate the Left’s ideological opponents, and all the rest of it. The prattle from GOP leaders that they must show the country they can “govern” is ridiculous. It is not possible for them to “govern” when the chief executive does not faithfully execute the laws they enact. Besides, voters did not elect them to govern – they elected them to stop Obama.

“Yes we need to combat the Islamist threat, but this is not the way to do it…. You can’t protect democracy by undermining its very foundations…. Freedom of expression is an essential freedom for any democratic society.” — Colin Hart, Director, The Christian Institute.

“They made us feel threatened about our religion. They asked, ‘Do you have friends from other religions?’ They asked this many times until we answered what they wanted us to say.” — Eleventh grade student at a Jewish Orthodox school for girls.

Trinity Christian School, a small independent school in Reading, is being downgraded and may even be closed for not inviting a Muslim imam to lead a chapel service.

“Individuals who criticize the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain could be deemed to be racist and silenced…. Without precise legislative definitions, deciding what [is extremism] is subjective and therefore open to abuse now or by any future authoritarian government.” — Keith Porteous Wood, Director, National Secular Society.

The British government has unveiled a new proposal that would require Islamic extremists to have their social media posts pre-approved by the government.

The plan—which is aimed at curbing the spread of jihadist propaganda in Britain—is part of a wide-ranging effort to strengthen the government’s counter-terrorism strategy ahead of general elections set for May 2015.

The new policy is so broad in scope, however, and the definition of “extremist” is so all-encompassing, that the government could ultimately silence anyone whose views are deemed to be politically incorrect, according to free speech activists.

The so-called Extremism Disruption Orders (EDOs) would prohibit any individual the government considers to be an “extremist” from appearing on radio and television, protesting in public or even posting messages on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, without permission.

It was vintage Erdogan: There is no Islamic terror. ISIS is not an Islamic organization and its name is not even ISIS.

Slightly more than a year ago, the world was shocked at the dramatic death tolls in Kenya and Pakistan when jihadists, in separate attacks over one weekend, killed more than 150 innocent people — with the Kenya attack claiming victims aged between two and 78. In a public speech after the “black weekend,” Turkey’s then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now President) looked very sad. Indeed, he was sad.

But not for the victims of terror attacks the previous weekend. He was mourning Asmaa al-Beltagi, a poor, 17-year-old Egyptian girl who had been shot dead by security forces in Cairo as she was protesting the ouster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, in a July coup d’état. Asmaa’s father was a senior Brotherhood figure and after her death, Erdogan once even shed tears during a televised speech. He then commemorated the girl at almost every election rally.

Earlier in 2013, Erdogan’s Egyptian comrades, the Muslim Brotherhood, had perpetrated the worst attacks against the Coptic Church of Egypt since the 14th century. In one particular week, 40 churches were looted and torched while 23 others were attacked and heavily damaged. In one town, after burning a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three of its nuns on the streets, as if the nuns were prisoners of war.

Two security guards working on a tour boat owned by Christians were burned alive; and an orphanage was burned down. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood’s Facebook page claimed that, “the Church has declared war against Islam and Muslims.”

Congressman elect Mia Love celebrated her surprise victory in Utah as the first black Republican woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.

But during an interview with CNN this morning, Love was quick to explain that she was not elected because of her race or gender.

“I wasn’t elected because of the color of my skin. I wasn’t elected because of my gender,” she said during the interview. “I was elected because of the solutions that I put at the table because I promised I would run a positive issues-oriented campaign and that’s what resonated.”

According to the Associated Press, Love earned 50 percent of the vote against her Democratic opponent Doug Owens who earned nearly 47 percent.

Love said it was clear that Utah citizens were “not interested in dividing Americans based on race or gender,” but electing people who had integrity.

“Washington has gotten too big and people have gotten too small so we’ve got to start rolling up our sleeves and making sure that we bring balance back to government,” she said.

1. Barack Obama is now a toxic brand. Arrogance and incompetence are a fatal brew. If once his problem was his failed policies, now it is also his persona, especially the blame-gaming and sense of boredom on the job that borders on public petulance, as if he came into the presidency to save us, and we did not appreciate his godhead. “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” have become something like Sominex for most Americans. Let us hope that our enemies abroad in the next two years are confused by his erratic governance and at least find him as exasperating as we do.

2. Race/class/and gender baiting lost out to the dismal recovery, a foreign policy in shambles, a ruined health-care system, an alphabet soup of government corruption, and an Islamic State/Ebola/open border miasma of incompetence. The bankrupt idea that an amoral Al Sharpton was to be consulted on matters of race, while someone like a Senator Tim Scott would not be was always surreal. And the idea that a Wendy Davis or a Sandra Fluke was a model of feminist achievement in a way Joni Ernst was not was equally absurd. Character and achievement still matter. The problem with trying to get out the base with mythographies like Ferguson and winking and nodding at a blanket amnesty to come is not just the proverbial turned-off white male voter, but that minorities too either were not energized over these shrill appeals or themselves were not sure 160,000 children streaming across the border was a good thing, or that Ferguson was a clear-cut case of police brutality. All the demagoguing in the world could not change that.

3. Some polls seem to have transmogrified into pre-election partisan tools, given that a few Senate races and lots of governorships weren’t even close to supposedly scientific predictions. For example, what happened to the Rasmussen Poll? It seems not just unreliable, but predictably so in one direction, especially in terms of presidential popularity. A president supposedly always down only 5 to 8 percent in the polls would not have the cataclysmic ripple effect that we saw last night.

I vote at P.S. 6 on the upper east side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood with no bodega in sight between 5th and 2nd avenues yet the posters outside the school and all along the block said Vote Here and underneath, Vote Aqui. Below that, in fainter type was the same information in Chinese. In other words, we no longer expect Hispanic voters who use the same alphabet as English to understand the four letter word “here” even when used in context on Election Day at a polling station. This is even worse than translating SALIDA when EXIT is universally printed in bold red above a door frame. Mayor De Blasio has just designated a $150 million appropriation to improve some of New York’s ineffective schools but Vote Aqui is a prime example of one of the causes of failing in school – the patronizing soft bigotry of lowered expectations for minorities.

Long ago, before we knew about political correctness, foreign students were sent to school, immersed in a new language and left to fend for themselves until they caught on and started understanding and speaking it. This system had a 100% success rate with previous waves of immigration to the United States. As a first generation American, I can attest that ALL of my family members who came here under the age of 50, as well as all their friends and associates spoke English, albeit with heavy accents. Every one of them would have understood the phrase Vote Here and they all would have followed that instruction with great pride in their citizenship. All of them spoke their native languages at home yet this never prevented my siblings, cousins or friends from speaking English with a New Yawk accent perhaps, but not the same accent as our parents.

Yet the explanations for why Hispanic students don’t speak English well or speak it with Spanish accents always come back to what they hear at home and in their neighborhoods. What about what they hear in school, on television, in movies – and what they see all around them in our advertising, our billboards and everyday signage? Under the guise of being sensitive to their heritage, we have condescendingly decided that Hispanics aren’t smart enough to figure out the words EXIT and HERE and that it’s not fair of us to demand that comprehension, an assumption that has shortchanged them of incentive, the magic ingredient in any kind of learning.

The Israeli company Waterways brings Israeli solutions to Africa with cultural sensitivity and an emphasis on people, planet and profit.
Economists predict that in the next 15 years Africa’s economy will be growing at a frenzied pace, similar to India and China. Early birds have started racing into Africa to get businesses off the ground.
But what works in Europe or America –– or even in Israel — doesn’t necessarily work in Africa, especially when you are talking about Africa’s poorest people.
That is why the new Israeli company Waterways has sprung to life. The basic idea is to take the enormous innovations in water coming out of Israel and adapt them to rural areas in Africa.
There is a triple bottom line to fulfill here: people, planet and profit, according to Waterways managing director and founder Ornit Avidar, a startup success story in her own right, and a former diplomat. She has made it her new life mission to help water technologies enter African villages and stick.
Through her research she’s found that about 50 percent of all water projects in Africa’s rural regions cease within a year of implementation.
Cultural reasons, lack of upkeep funding or conflict –– there are endless reasons why “abroad” solutions don’t work in Africa.
That’s too much money going down the drain, says a pragmatic Avidar, who has developed another way.
Soft solutions, for a change?
Rather than propose the sort of large water projects found in municipalities and cities in the West, Avidar has her water compass set on providing Africa’s villagers with soft solutions — scalable, powered by little or off-grid energy, and requiring no advanced technical knowhow to maintain. Her business approach also includes economic models to help villagers make money.
A growing number of Israeli companies fit the Waterways approach, such as SunDWater, which helps people tap into brackish water sources. The off-grid solution pumps up water and purifies it using thermal solar radiation. People from all over Africa are already asking for this.

Whenever criticism is leveled at federal funding for area studies in universities—especially those bias-laden, error-prone Middle East centers—someone jumps up to claim that this funding is crucial to the national interest. Now it’s the turn of Nathan Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University and current president of the Middle East Studies Associations (MESA).

Brown claims that federally-funded area studies centers are “essential” for U.S. policy, a “vital national asset,” and “often the only sources of knowledge when crises erupt in unfamiliar places.” They’ve done an “outstanding job of training” Middle East experts, and “political” criticism of them “threatens the ability of the United States to understand the world and act effectively in it.” If you don’t like it that “an individual faculty member offends a supporter of a particular political position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, should students of Swahili and teachers of Tagalog be caught in the crossfire?” Should “programming that is critical of Israel on some campuses endanger all funding for international education?”

Those are valid questions, but they’re posed disingenuously. Here are Brown’s two main elisions:

1. The only people who think that these centers are a “vital national asset” are the professors who collect the money. Over the years, there have been a series of government-sponsored reviews of these Title VI programs (reference is to the authorizing title of the Higher Education Act), and not one review has concluded that the programs do anything resembling an “outstanding job,” especially on languages. (The last major review, by the National Academies, concluded there was “insufficient information to judge program performance.”)