RUTHFULLY YOURS

I know it’s early and the roster of potential Republican nominees for the 2016 presidential race is hardly set. But I’m already fed up with pundits and party operatives telling me what I think of the candidates, as if they had performed a Vulcan mind meld with the conservative grassroots and GOP base (which I will use interchangeably to include local GOP boots on the ground, social conservatives, and Tea Partiers).

The punditocracy might occasionally glance at a few e-mails their assistants have sorted through, but mostly, they converse among themselves and read one another’s articles, and, rather than listening intently to the input from this varied and complex group of conservatives, they often project their perceptions onto the base. They might chat briefly with some folks at book signings or speeches, and their prognostications might occasionally square with the base, but not this time.

To dig into the current thinking of the base regarding the Republican nominee, I sent an e-mail to members of the Bay Area Patriots/San Francisco Tea Party (both of which I have coordinated since 2009). The group is quite diverse, with dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, disgruntled Democrats, Ron Paul Libertarians, and independents.

This was not a survey with simple yes-or-no questions. Prompted by Laura Ingraham’s assertion that negative commentary about Mitt only serves to help Jeb, I asked what they thought about both men getting into the race; if they would vote for them against Hillary even if they did not support them in the primaries; who their preferred candidates were; and if there was anyone they would refuse to support. I was quite startled by several consistent revelations.

Approximately 350-400 opened the e-mail, and about 90 responded – a 23-26% sample. Respondents overwhelmingly (and vehemently) oppose Jeb Bush – only three consider him their preferred candidate. While 30 respondents would “hold their nose” and vote for him if he were the nominee against Hillary, roughly 36 said “no way” to Bush, and too many indicated they would stay home or vote for a third-party candidate. If all stayed home on Election Day – 40% – that would be an electoral apocalypse when translated onto the national stage. I doubt that that would occur, but even if 5% of 50 million voters rebelled, that would be a damaging 2.5 million lost votes. Jeb’s condescending and dismissive attitude toward the grassroots, concerns about a Bush dynasty, and Jeb’s views on Common Core and immigration factored heavily into the anti-Bush sentiment.

Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was recently the scene of a forum on misogyny titled “Transforming our campus and strengthening our community.” The discussion, hosted in part by the Canadian university’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program, and featuring a panel of professors and local “gender justice” activists, gave rise to solutions that are as sexist and racist as the problems they claim to be addressing.

What seems to have sparked the forum’s focus on misogyny is a scandal involving the Dalhousie dentistry school, whose Class of DDS 2015 Facebook page (which seems to have been taken down) reportedly featured sexually explicit posts from some male students, such as voting on which woman they’d like to have “hate sex” with and jokes about using chloroform on women. While this was highly inappropriate to say the least, the forum participants seemed oblivious to how inappropriate it would be to respond by punishing all male students at Dalhousie by essentially sending them to the back of the bus.

There is a jewel of a museum in the Marais district of Paris. It is the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. It is housed in a beautiful mansion built in 1650, which was later turned into a hotel once inhabited by Jewish immigrants from Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine. For years, Marais has for years been the epicenter of Jewish life in France. It was largely depopulated during the Nazi occupation but has been rejuvenated in recent years by Jews who were escaping from persecution in the former French North Africa and returnees from Southern France who miraculously survived the Nazi collaborating Vichy government.

Inside the museum are documents, paintings, decorative arts, and other precious items related to the Jewish presence in France. Established in 1986, it was designed to educate and remind people of the Jewish communities’ extraordinary contribution to the cultural life of France, despite the fact that their numbers were decimated during World War II.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obama-and-the-koran-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie came on the show to discuss Obama and the Koran, unveiling the curious relationship between the president and Islam’s “holy book.”

There are many moments from the past 6 years that demonstrate the criminal incompetence of this president and his administration. But for me, Obama’s interview with GloZell––whose claim to YouTube fame comes from eating Cheerios in a bathtub filled with milk––represents best the essential emptiness, triviality, and sheer dumbness of this president. Imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 being interviewed by a carnival geek, and you can gauge just how low the most consequential political office in the world has sunk.

This interview, remember, took place the same time as problems requiring urgent presidential attention were escalating. Libya imploding, Iran inching toward a nuclear bomb, ISIS expanding in Syria and holding ground in northern Iraq, Iranian military assets active in Iraq, Yemen falling to an Iranian proxy terrorist group, another Iranian client, Bashar al Assad, strengthening his hold over Syria––and that’s just the Middle East. And don’t forget, the GloZell farce followed hard on Obama’s State of the Union address, a congeries of wishful thinking, narcissistic braggadocio, and outright-lies, a preposterous catalogue in which generous sprinklings of first-person-pronoun fairy dust transmuted every failure into an achievement

The theme of Obama’s last campaign was “Forward.” Having thoroughly alienated Republicans in Congress, he is boldly moving forward on his final mission of also alienating the Democrats.

It’s no secret that Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, now loathes Obama. But the conflict between Senate Democrats and Obama is approaching explosive temperatures. Senator Menendez accused Obama of parroting talking points out of Tehran as the Senate approaches a sanctions vote.

Obama has threatened to veto bills on Iran and Keystone, along with others, leading to a showdown in which Democrats will have to choose between Obama and electability. The last time Democrats chose wrongly they lost the Senate. Many of the survivors aren’t looking forward to another round of getting stomped on by an angry middle class tired of a thoughtless celebrity administration and its abuses.

How America’s first swim commandos got their start

Today, the Navy SEALs are the stuff of Hollywood legend: The last two years alone have seen them featured in both Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper. But few people know the history of America’s first swim commando teams.

It all began with a kick in the ass. On the night of December 19, 1941, a 709-ton Auda-class Italian submarine surfaced in Alexandria Harbor, and six Italian frogmen mounted three miniature submersibles that contained massive warheads. Clad in wetsuits and wearing breathing devices, they each received a ceremonial kick in the backside from their commanding officer, Prince Junio Valerio Scipione Borghese, as they exited the submarine. Later called “The Black Prince,” Borghese was the leader of Decima MAS, an Italian special-operations unit that included these underwater swim commandos.

House conservatives are tired of losing fights with leadership. Now, they’re doing something about it.

About 30 House Republicans will meet Monday evening to establish the bylaws of a new caucus animated by two principles: First, rank-and-file Republicans must pressure leadership to enact a more conservative agenda. And second, this pressure should never involve frantic scurrying on the House floor.

The House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group, will work in concert in order to guide the House Republican Conference at key junctures, starting with the debate over a border-security bill that has conservatives alarmed.

“We’re going to focus on what we believe middle-class voters sent us here to do,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the de facto chairman of the organization pending leadership elections, tells National Review Online.

Every criminal printing money can now argue in court that he should be given a medal for “stimulating the economy.”

The refusal of some European countries, such as France, to tackle their high debt level and lack of competitiveness, is now also affecting the non-eurozone.

Europe now wants the rest of the world to foot the bill for its own economic mismanagement.

Suppose a family can no longer pay its debts and dad decides to solve the problem by going down to the cellar and printing extra money. Society would not approve. Printing money is a form a robbery, stealing from everyone else by diluting the value of their financial assets.

The political violence of the Koran is eternal and universal. The political violence of the Bible was for that particular historical time and place. This is the vast difference between Islam and other ideologies.” — Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study of Political Islam.

The word has turned into a place where free speech is confused with hate speech, and people in positions of responsibility, who take that responsibility seriously, such as the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, are bullied, marginalized and brought to trial.

So, to a degree are we all mentally ill, but not all mental illnesses are socially acceptable and not every mentally ill person channels his mental illness through a prism of religion that glorifies homicide.

Every time Islamic terrorism is discussed, those who bring up the “Christian terrorism” of the Ku Klux Klan or anti-abortion violence simply block free speech, as if deliberately trying to scramble the main topic. They seem to be saying, “Whether the Islamic State is Islamic or not is irrelevant; there are Christian terrorists as well, so do not talk about Islamic terrorists.”