RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every parent should be happy for the Bergdahl family, whose son was returned to them after five years of captivity among the Taliban. But every parent is not the president of the United States, whose primary responsibility is to protect the security and interests of all Americans, both now and in the long-term. The release of 5 “high-risk”––a phrase meaning they’re eager to kill Americans–– Taliban jihadists held in Guantanamo Bay is nothing more than ransom paid to kidnappers, and an invitation to the enemy to take more Americans captive and to hold them as bargaining chips for more concessions. And the release of hardened, high-ranking Taliban terrorists means there will be more dead Americans after theses soldiers of Allah return to the battlefield.

We shouldn’t give credence, however, to the criticism that Obama’s action uniquely violates the principle that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.” Obama’s administration has already been negotiating with the Taliban in order to craft some chimeric “peace agreement” with the Afghan government after we leave. And talking with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, is de facto “negotiating with terrorists.” But before Obama we have negotiated with terrorists on numerous occasions, and each time we have confirmed the moral hazard that attends trying to talk with fanatic ideologues that, like Auric Goldfinger, don’t expect us to talk, but to die.

How else did we secure the release of the 52 Americans held for 444 days by the Iranians starting in 1979, other than by negotiating ransom with hostage-takers? The hostages came home after Jimmy Carter issued a series of Executive Orders that released billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets in American banks, and that indemnified the Iranians from any lawsuits suing the regime for the destruction of American property and the abuse of the diplomats. So much for Carter’s bluster that “we will not yield to blackmail.” During the negotiations the Iranians serially humiliated the Americans. For example, Carter aide Hamilton Jordan donned a fake moustache and wig to meet with the Iranian negotiator in Paris. After weeks of negotiations, with a deal seemingly close, Ayatollah Khomeini killed it with a public speech in which he called the embassy kidnappings “a crushing blow to the world-devouring USA” and left the decision to the new Iranian parliament, which was months from being seated. Negotiations continued with a series of concessions offered by Carter, all of which were contemptuously slapped down by the Iranians. As a result, the prestige of Iran as the foremost jihadist foe of the infidel West expanded across the globe, providing inspiration and material support to other jihadist groups convinced by America’s weakness that we were a civilization with “foundations of straw,” as bin Laden put it, and ripe for destruction.

“It was an extraordinary day for America,” said National Security Advisor Susan Rice on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, referring to the announcement of a deal that would free Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Afghan captivity after five years. Indeed it was an extraordinary day: it was a day when we signaled to the world that America officially caves in to terrorists for hostages.

Well, not America herself, but President Barack Obama specifically. Obama, who has openly expressed frustration with the Constitutional constraints of checks-and-balances on his dictatorial impulses, circumvented Congress’ collective back to clinch a deal that would free five of the most dangerous guests at Club Med Guantanamo in exchange for Bergdahl. Even the Afghan government condemned it as a breach of international law.

His administration denies, of course, that it broke any laws or this country’s longstanding policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. Bergdahl wasn’t a “hostage,” claimed our anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-military, anti-American exceptionalism Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel: “We didn’t negotiate with terrorists. Sergeant Bergdahl is a prisoner of war. That’s a natural process.” What does that even mean? Is he saying we didn’t negotiate, or that the enemy aren’t terrorists? A prisoner of war can’t be a hostage? Sorry, but a prisoner of war becomes a hostage the moment the enemy makes demands for his safe return. A “natural process”? That phrase is meaningless.

I should concede that Hagel is technically correct: we didn’t negotiate, because giving the enemy exactly what they ask for isn’t negotiation – it is capitulation. Though America should not abandon her dead, wounded, or captured warriors, trading five Taliban leaders for one soldier who deserted after expressing his disgust for our own military is surrender, not a successful trade that benefits American interests. Bergdahl reportedly emailed his parents that “the US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at,” that he was “ashamed to even be an American,” and that “the horror that is America is disgusting.” Some report that he converted to Islam during his captivity and, outrageously if true, trained his captors in bomb-making and ambush skills.

And let’s get this clear about Bergdahl – he didn’t “wander” off base that June day in 2009, as the media so often put it, like a lost toddler; if reports from the ground are to be believed (and they are), he intentionally and premeditatedly deserted. In the wake of that, at least six good American soldiers died or were wounded in search attempts. Their names: Staff Sgt. Clayton Bowen, Pfc. Morris Walker, Staff Sgt. Kurt Curtiss, 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews, Pfc. Matthew Michael Martinek, and Staff Sgt. Michael Murphrey. Their families and friends have suffered a far greater loss than the Bergdahl parents.

‘The Law Requires . . .’

What a quaint phrase! Not quaint for you and me, of course. For us plebs, what the law requires is, well, what the law requires. To the letter, Kemo Sabe. But how about for our masters in Washington, especially for the master-in-chief, Barack Obama? What, exactly, does the law require of him? That he follow and (see Article II of the U.S. Constitution [1]) “faithfully execute” the laws? Not hardly. Andrew McCarthy’s new book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment [2](not officially published until Tuesday but available now on Amazon) provides a sort of catalogue or cornucopia of Obama’s lawlessness. I won’t rehearse that litany here except to mention these key words:

Benghazi [3]
Obamacare (“If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan [3], period.”)
IRS [4]
Immigration [5]
et very much cetera (think Fast & Furious [6], Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, making recess appointments when Congress not in recess, Solyndra — really, read Faithless Execution [2])

When it comes to lawlessness, Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. If Congress passes a law that is Constitutional but that he happens not to like: no problem. He just won’t enforce it (ask the folks in Arizona about immigration laws). Perhaps Congress fails to pass a law about something that he does want done: that’s no problem, either, because he has learned that there is no cost to governing by decree. The latest instance of presidential lawlessness concerns the Taliban’s release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for five high-level Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Naturally, one rejoices at the release of an American solider after nearly five years of captivity in the savage hell-hole of Afghanistan. But as Rep. Howard McKeon and Sen. James Inhofe observed yesterday [7], “America has maintained a prohibition on negotiating with terrorists for good reason. Trading five senior Taliban leaders from detention in Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl’s release may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans.” Prediction: you’ll see many more Americans captured and held for ransom now that the Taliban knows our policy of not negotiating with terrorists implies that, if you push a little, we will happily negotiate with terrorists.

There’s also the little matter of how the transfer was arranged. As the Washington Post reports [8], “Lawmakers were not notified of the Guantanamo detainees’ transfer until after it occurred.” But, the report continues, “the law requires the defense secretary to notify relevant congressional committees at least 30 days before making any transfers of prisoners, to explain the reason and to provide assurances that those released would not be in a position to reengage in activities that could threaten the United States or its interests.” “The law requires.” Ha, ha, ha. This is King Obama we’re talking about, not you or me. Apparently, he can do whatever he pleases, from calling on the IRS to harass his political opponents to selectively enforcing to law to imprisoning video makers who are convenient scapegoats. But wait, there’s more. Why do you suppose Obama was so eager to release Sgt. Bergdahl? Did you see the Rose Garden ceremony yesterday [9] at which Bergdahl’s father, Robert Bergdahl, stood beside the president as he made the announcement about the son’s release? Note that he began by addressing his son in Arabic and then added a bit for the Afghanis in what news reports said was Pashtu. Has he become “pro-jihad in his heart [10]”? Well, we do know that in a recent Tweet he announced that he is “still working to free all Guantanamo prsioners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen! [11][sic].” That tweet was just deleted, but you can, as of this writing, see it here [12].

There is an overstatement here. I have read the book very carefully. McCarthy does not, repeat, does not advocate for impeachment- stating quite clearly that the American population and legislators have no real appetite for impeachment. Rather, like the skilled prosecutor he is, he carefully lays out the case of how this President and his administration are flouting the law and Constitution….in serial impeachable acts. He calls on legislators and concerned public to insist that Obama abide by the laws of this nation…..rsk

Though I had read and hugely admired former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy’s previous work, when I opened the galleys of his latest book — Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment [1] — I assumed I was just embarking on what was more or less an intellectual exercise from one of America’s great legal minds.

After all, we were rounding the bend into the last quarter of the eight-year Obama presidency and such a national distraction seemed scarcely worth the effort. As McCarthy’s own subtitle indicated, building a political case for impeachment with the public, a literal groundswell, would be necessary and that seemed, well, a bridge too far or a mountain too high (pick your cliché).

When I finished the book — which I devoured in one breathless gulp, a rarity for me in these days of multiple distractions — it was a wholly other matter. If it weren’t eleven o’clock at night, I would have run out to buy a pitchfork and headed for the barricades, or at least the Washington Mall, myself.

With measured, almost inexorable clarity, this book is an extraordinary call to legal — or, more precisely, Constitutional — arms.

McCarthy begins with a basic history of impeachment, showing the provenance of the deliberately general “high crimes and misdemeanors” from English law via Edmund Burke and how our Framers saw this as a way to preserve the separation of powers we all (I hope) learned about in school and prevent the emergence of a despotic presidency.

The UCSB Solipsists

A sociopath runs amok—and kills more men than women—and feminists ride their hobbyhorse.

Over 77 percent of all U.S. murder victims in 2012 were male; targets of non-lethal shootings are even more disproportionately male. Four of the six homicide victims of Elliot Rodger, the lunatic narcissist who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara in revenge for female rejection, were male. And yet the feminist industry immediately turned this heartbreaking bloodbath into a symbol of America’s war on women. The mainstream media and the Internet quickly generated a portrait of America where women walk in fear simply “in order to survive,” as a Washington Post blogger put it, adding that the shootings were merely an extreme example of the “abuse and anti-woman violence” that American women face every day. “If we don’t talk misogyny now, when are we going to talk about it?” a global-studies major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asked the New York Times. The episode has provoked “a call to end misogyny, inequality, and violence against women,” reports the Huffington Post. Females allegedly have to walk a daily gauntlet of leers, gropings, catcalls, and condescension, simply in order to go about their business, according to the New York Times and posts on #YesAllWomen (as in: Yes, all women experience sexual hatred and violence).

These females are apparently living in a different world than mine. Leave aside the fact that the Santa Barbara killings were clearly the actions of a madman. Rodger’s every gesture and word bespoke monomaniacal, self-pitying delusion, amplified in the hermetic echo chamber of his own deranged narcissism. There is no pattern of gender-based rampages in this country; there is an emerging pattern of rampages by the untreated mentally ill. But the fundamental premise of the feminist analysis of Rodger’s massacre — that the U.S. is “misogynist” — is patently absurd. To the contrary, ours is a culture obsessed with promoting and celebrating female success. There is not a science faculty or lab in the country that is not under relentless pressure from university administrators and the federal government to hire female professors and researchers, regardless of the lack of competitive candidates and the cost to meritocratic standards. Wealthy foundations and individual philanthropists churn out one girls’ self-esteem and academic-success initiative after another; boys are a distant runner-up for philanthropic ministrations, even though it is boys, not girls, who are falling further and further behind academically and socially. (The Obama administration’s flawed initiative to help young minority males succeed has drawn predictable criticism for leaving out girls. No one complained, of course, about the White House Council on Women and Girls or the endless female-empowerment projects that roll forth from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.) Girls hear a constant message that “strong women can do it all,” including raise children on their own. Any female even remotely in the public realm who is not deeply conscious that she has been the “beneficiary” of the pressure to stock conference panels, media slots, and op-ed pages with females is fooling herself. Corporate boards and management seek women with hungry desperation. And even were this preferential treatment to end tomorrow, females, especially the privileged, highly educated ones who make up the feminist ranks, would still face a world of unprecedented, boundless opportunity.

Women “face harassment every day,” a double global-studies and feminist-studies major told the New York Times. (“Global studies” appears to be a previously overlooked arena of left-wing academic propaganda, joining postcolonial studies and other concocted fields.) This portrait of a public realm filled with leering, grasping men may have described 1950s Italy and perhaps some Latin American countries today, but it bears no resemblance to contemporary America. Construction workers have largely been tamed. Groping on subways is thankfully rare — and it is committed by perverts. No one condones such behavior. It is on the very margins of our social lives, not at the center.

Will Congress stop Obama’s lawless material support to Hamas?
The problem with writing a book about President Obama’s lawlessness, as I have just done in Faithless Execution (which will officially be published Tuesday), is that eventually the author has to stop writing so the book can be printed. The administration’s illegal conduct, by contrast, rolls right along — so by the time the book comes out, I find myself several impeachable offenses behind.

At the moment, we are still processing the latest executive malfeasance: the president’s release this weekend of five senior Taliban jihadists in exchange for a U.S. soldier who is alleged to have abandoned his post in 2009 after complaining that “the horror that is America is disgusting” (and whose father is on a campaign to free all anti-American terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay).

Some lawmakers have pointed out that the release, which flouts American policy against negotiating with terrorists (Obama is a recidivist offender on that score), also violates federal law. Specifically, the president must give Congress 30 days’ notice before transferring detainees out of Gitmo, in addition to explaining how the threat to the United States has been mitigated so that the release is justified. Obviously, the president disregarded the law because complying would have made it clear that the transfer exacerbates the threat to the United States, sparking public and congressional protests that would have scotched the deal. It is a swap that the administration, which is delusionally courting the Taliban in hopes of an Afghan peace settlement, has been trying to make for years. So Obama did what Obama does when the law is against him: He ignored it, claiming not to be bound by it if he concludes the circumstances are “unique and exigent,” as a White House spokesman put it.

The swap, it should be noted, also violates federal laws prohibiting material support to terrorism. The Obama administration may think it can sidestep this inconvenience by its longstanding refusal to designate the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization. Federal law, however, bars giving support — including providing personnel, as Obama has done here — not only to formally designated terrorist organizations but to groups known to engage in terrorist activity, whether the State Department gets around to designating them or not. (See Sections 2339A and 2339B of Title 18, U.S. Code.) There is no doubt that the U.S. government knows the Taliban and its confederates engage in terrorist activity — it has been telling us for 13 years that this is why we must have thousands of American troops in Afghanistan.

Pelosi and Dems are pushing a bill that could kill a bipartisan effort to help the seriously mentally ill.
As a result of politics in Washington, we are likely to see more events like the killing of seven in Santa Barbara, Calif., by Elliot Rodger, a young man who had serious mental illness.

Before the killings, Rep. Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) proposed the transformative “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act” (HR 3717). It ends wasteful mental-health spending and focuses the savings on getting treatment to the most seriously mentally ill — those most likely to become a headline. Murphy, who is a practicing psychologist, crafted a bill that earned 56 Republican and 31 Democratic co-sponsors, an amazing accomplishment in Washington’s toxic political environment.

Unfortunately, while well-intended, Representative Ron Barber (D., Pa.) was misled by the mental-health industry into introducing a competing bill, the “Improving Mental Health in Our Communities Act” (HR 4574). It gives the mental-health industry more money without requiring them to serve the seriously mentally ill. It languished with hardly any support until May 2, when Nancy Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill told The Hill that Pelosi wants a bill “that actually has the support of the mental-health community.” On May 24, Elliot Rodger killed four men, two women, and himself — causing 35 Democrats to sign on as co-sponsors to this industry-sponsored bill so they can be thought of as “doing something.” But unbeknownst to them, what they’re doing is feeding the industry, not helping the ill.

The Barber bill encourages mental health among the citizenry at large, perhaps all of whom would like their mental health improved, and it may help some of the 20 percent of adults over 18 who have a diagnosable mental-health issue. But it does little for the 4 percent who have a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder. This is part of a trend. Until the early 1960s, virtually all mental-health expenditures were spent on the most seriously ill in psychiatric hospitals. Today — at the request of the mental-health industry — dollars are instead spent improving the mental health of all citizens including people without any mental illness. As a result, 164,000 mentally ill are homeless and more than 300,000 incarcerated.

Reagan regretted breaking the law to rescue prisoners — Obama is now in the same dangerous waters.
If there is one constant about U.S. policy in the Middle East, it is the law of nasty unintended consequences. That’s something the Obama administration disregarded when it recently chose to ignore the law that requires the president to consult with Congress before releasing or transferring any prisoners from Guantanamo. Flouting the law, Obama swapped five hard-core terrorists for Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The Taliban terrorists are now in Qatar, whose government claims it will restrict their movements to inside Qatar for one year. And then what?

“These are the hardest of the hard core,” Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam POW, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “These are the highest high-risk people, and others that we have released have gone back into the fight.”

Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, appeared on the Sunday-morning talk shows in full-spin mode that was reminiscent of her Benghazi appearances. “This was an urgent and acute situation,” she insisted, citing Bergdahl’s health as a reason for evading the legal requirement. Other Obama officials claim that the law wasn’t violated because U.S. diplomats went through a third party — Qatar — in arranging the release. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News summarized the administration’s justifications as follows:

This was moving so fast, they couldn’t talk to the Congress. But they also say the president, when he signed this law, said he had the constitutional authority not to live by it, that he had the constitutional authority to go around Congress and simply do what he needed to do to get the detainees back to their home countries.

The humanitarian aspects of Bergdahl’s release aren’t in dispute. Everyone is very glad he is back home. But there is real question as to whether he is a hero or a deserter. Significantly, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pointedly declines to say whether he believes that Bergdahl was attempting to desert the Army or go AWOL when he suddenly left his unit in Afghanistan in 2009 and disappeared. E-mails he sent prior to his capture surfaced in 2012 in Rolling Stone and indicated that he had been considering desertion.

So you’ve written a best-selling book that has cast an event that everyone in America thought they knew into an entirely new light, but you’d still like to get it in the hands of more readers. What do you do? If you’re Amity Shlaes, the author of the 2007 New York Times bestseller The Forgotten Man, you turn it into a graphic novel. Why not? Lefties have been doing it for years; Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire is also available in graphic novel format.

Shlaes turned to veteran Batman writer Chuck Dixon to consult on the script, and then brought in artist Paul Rivoch to craft the illustrations. The result is The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression, now available from Amazon.com and your local bookstore.

During our nearly half-hour long interview, Amity and Paul will discuss:

● Who was the “Forgotten Man” of the 1930s?

● How was new graphic novel’s visual look created?

● How did Paul research the visual details of the 1920s and 1930s?

● Every comic needs a hero and a villain. Who plays those roles in The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition?

● What is the real story behind Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” photo from 1936?

And much more.

The London Center for Policy Research (www.londoncenter.org) has just released a short book on America’s allies in the Sunni Arab world, titled, The Sunni Vanguard: Can Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia survive the New Middle East? Former Hudson Institute President Herbert London and former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin wrote the essays on Turkey and Saudi Arabia, respectively; I contributed a section on Egypt. The introduction to my section is below.

The United States faces a unique challenge in Egypt: state failure in Egypt would unleash problems orders of magnitude greater than the collapse of Libya. Yet avoiding state failure is especially difficult because Egypt’s economy is in utter ruin after sixty years of “Arab socialist” mismanagement. It is a banana republic without the bananas, a mainly rural country that imports half its food, the host to a vast jobless proletariat living off a state bread subsidy.

With the U.S. increasingly withdrawn from Egypt, we have seen three countries involved in Egypt. The first is Saudi Arabia, which is lending the country enough money to keep the bread subsidy intact, and preventing actual starvation. The second is Russia, which has stepped in to sell Egypt arms after the United States foolishly withdrew. The third is China. Chinese companies are constructing a north-south rail line and have undertaken to build a national broadband network.

U.S. policy should seek to minimize Russian influence, which can only grow at America’s expense. We should maintain our strong ties to Egypt’s military, the only source of stability in a situation bordering on state failure. Despite our vigorous (and well-founded) objections to Chinese foreign policy elsewhere, we should cooperate with China in investment in Egypt: here China’s influence is economic rather than strategic, and its investments represent no threat to American interests. We have a uniquely difficult challenge in salvaging Egypt’s economy, and China’s willingness to invest in the country is a net positive.

The first paragraphs of my esssay from the London Center book and its conclusion are on the next page.

The so-called Arab Spring in Egypt began in January 2011 with the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, an American ally of thirty years’ standing, and ended in November with the restoration of the country’s cold-war alliance with Russia. America’s determination to depose Mubarak’s military-backed regime and to lead the most populous Arab country towards democracy had nearly unanimous bi-partisan support, with the Obama administration vying with the Republican mainstream in its zeal to sweep out the old regime erred and foster a Western-style democracy. The drive for a new democratic Egypt was buoyed by a wave of popular sentiment, and serenaded by rapturous media accounts of young, hip revolutionaries toppling a sclerotic dictatorship.