RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Nixonian terms, Robert Gates’s memoir Duty would already be labeled “Gatesgate” if the revelations in it were half as good as the reports of them are. Add to that the dissolution of Iraq, Ed Gillespie’s imminent Senate candidacy and a tinge of GW Bridge envy and you have a lot of SGO for a month that’s only half-over.

(For those just joining us, “SGO” is the comprehensively useful acronym invented by my friend and former SEAL Al Clark. It means “s*** goin’ on” which is as good a shorthand for politics as anyone can devise.)

The Economist seems to have captured the moment in its editorial cartoon this week. In the foreground, de facto Secretary of State Dennis Rodman is handing a “Happy Birthday” balloon to Kim Jong-un. In the background stands Barack Obama asking angrily how he can respond to amateurs messing around in foreign affairs. Next to him stands Bob Gates, saying “You could write a book.”

We need to be a bit cautious about Gates’s book before reading it and being able to judge its importance. (The book isn’t being released until tomorrow, so I haven’t read it yet.) But a few initial comments are appropriate because so many quotes have been published.

The most significant revelation I’ve seen is Gates’s statement about a 2011 meeting with Obama and Gen. Petraeus, then overall commander in Afghanistan. Gates writes, “As I sat there I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

For those of you who did not watch BBC TV’s News last night it is easy to paraphrase the entire programme as follows:

“Former Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has died. While a small number of Israelis respected him, to the rest of the world he was deservedly known as a murdering bastard and war criminal who spent his entire life killing innocent Arab women and children. So let’s hear from a whole bunch of Palestinians, none of whose testimonies we will challenge, how truly evil this man was and how he symbolises how terrible Israel is. And who better to lead the narration of all this than Israel-hater Jeremy Bowen.”

The programme was a perfect textbook implementation of the Rules and Guildeines for Reporting about Israel. The program stated as ‘facts’ a catalogue of blood libels that have long been comprehensively debunked (see Honest Reporting’s coverage for example). What was ignored was the fact that, in total contrast to the narrative presented, Sharon was ultimately so desperate to achieve peace at any price that he uprooted the entire Jewish population from Gaza and that these 10,000 Jews were therefore his most unfortunate ‘victims’. What has also been ignored in all the main stream media reporting is that it was Sharon who, in 2004, secured from the US President George Bush a binding commitment from the US that in any future agreement with the Palestinians Israel would keep the major settlement blocks, and there would be no ‘right of return’ to Israel of Palestinian ‘refugees’. This was a written agreement that Obama has now decided to tear up.

These “leaders” are pushing to eradicate the difference between lawful immigrants and illegal aliens and refuse to accept the fundamental concept that America’s first line of defense and her last line of her defense are the borders and immigration laws of the United States.
The most recent example of this inability to connect the dots would be humorous if it was not so disturbing.
New York City is a “Sanctuary City” where the NYPD is inhibited from notifying immigration authorities about illegal aliens who are encountered by law enforcement. Our immigration laws were enacted to prevent the entry and presence of aliens who pose a threat to national security, public safety and the jobs of American workers. These laws are utterly blind as to race, religion and ethnicity. The only distinction the immigration laws make is between citizens and non-citizens. The term alien, which has been so vilified is defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act as simply being “Any person, not a citizen or national of the United States.” There is no insult to be found in that definition- only clarity. Clarity is something that the open-borders crowd whom I have come to designate as the “Immigration Anarchists,” know that they must avoid at all costs if they are to succeed.
This is the case for politicians of both major political parties. Any politician who calls for providing unknown millions of illegal aliens is either foolish beyond comprehension or does not care about the well-being of America and Americans. It is as simple as that.
It is not that the aliens are hiding in the shadows as they often claim, but the truth is being concealed in the “Fog of war” being waged against America and Americans by those who seek to erase America’s borders and obliterate the immigration laws. In point of fact, a country without secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement cannot stand any more than could a house without walls!

One of the sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182 which enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded. Among these classes are aliens who suffer from dangerous communicable diseases or extreme mental illness. Additionally convicted felons, human rights violators, war criminals, terrorists and spies are excluded as well as aliens who would seek unlawful employment or become public charges.

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=d164b49f-4e8e-4193-8801-1d5c3fe5a40b&c=7d69eda0-3629-11e3-9528-d4ae528ed502&ch=7e894050-3629-11e3-9577-d4ae528ed502 The speed at which the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia are advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions is mind-boggling. Even before the ink dried on the P5+1’s six-month Geneva accord with Iran — aptly described as  “just an appetizer” by former chief UN nuclear inspectorHerman Nackaerts — we hear that talks on the final agreement will […]

In a perverse way it does because scientists are part of the junk science cult even though the whole thing is shown to have no basis in real research…and that’s academic prostitution….rsk

You probably haven’t heard of House Resolution 36, but it takes the global warming/climate argument to a bizarre new level. Brought to the floor by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the resolution outlines the impact that climate change has on women. In fact, the impact is so dire, it may force women into prostitution as a means for survival.

For video click link above:

“Well, the Democratic Party has found a new consequence of climate change: Prostitution,” Pat explained on radio this morning. “Barbara Lee issued a resolution staying a climate change can cause food and water shortages, which can lead impoverished women to prostitution as a means of income. Clearly, climate change leads to prostitution.”

According to the resolution, “food-insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs [sexually transmitted infections], unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.”

“We all knew this was true, and it’s finally confirmed,” Stu concluded. “If Barbara Lee says it, it’s true.”

“[H]aving a nuclear bomb is necessary to put down Israel.” — Muhammad Nabavian, Iranian lawmaker and cleric. Meanwhile, according to U.S. officials, Hezbollah members are smuggling advanced anti-ship missiles from Syria to Lebanon, ostensibly to “upgrade Hezbollah’s arsenal to deter future Israeli airstrikes — either on Lebanon or on Iran’s nuclear program.” Israel, which risks […]

During his long career, Ariel Sharon built a lot of roads. As housing minister in the early 1990s and as national infrastructures minister in the late 1990s, Sharon played a key role in building everything from the Trans-Israel Highway to access roads to isolated communities.

Since he passed away on Saturday, his role in building Israel’s national infrastructures has been widely noted. But no mention has been made of the final and most important road that he paved.

That is the road to Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

Sharon’s most controversial – and damaging – act was his decision in late 2003 to surrender the Gaza Strip to Palestinian terrorist organizations. The action, which involved not only withdrawing Israeli military personnel and transferring control over the international border with Egypt to the Palestinian Authority, but also forcibly removing 8,000 law-abiding, patriotic Israelis from their homes and farms and the bulldozing of their flourishing communities, was carried out in August 2005.

Just before Sharon was felled by a stroke in January 2006, he was running for reelection on a platform calling for reenacting the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in large swathes of Judea and Samaria.

Sharon decided to surrender the Gaza Strip due to massive pressure from abroad and at home. The Bush administration, which launched the so-called Middle East Quartet’s road map for peace, was quickly losing patience with Sharon, who rightly noted that the PLO had no intention of making peace with the Jewish state.

At home, the leftist-dominated media and legal system were applying heavy pressure on Sharon, intimating that due to bribery allegations, Sharon would likely end his career behind bars – and that his two sons would share his cell.

There are only three options for dealing with the dispute over Palestinian-majority territory now administered by Israel. The first option is to negotiate a settlement with the PLO . Israel adopted that policy in 1993. Sharon owed his rise to power to the abject failure of the negotiated settlement policy at Camp David in July 2000.

The PLO ’s refusal to accept statehood and peaceful coexistence, and its subsequent turn to terrorist warfare in September 2000, demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to the vast majority of Israelis that the negotiated settlement policy was a dead end.

“Arik” Sharon was elected by a landslide in 2001. He promised a tough response to Palestinian Arab uprisings and terrorism. His tough stance and his frequent and defiant visits to East Jerusalem won him opprobrium from the leftist media but he was reelected by a large majority two years later. He encouraged settlement of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and funneled money and supplies to aid and encourage the settlers.

Then……in 2005 he stunned his supporters as well as his detractors by declaring a withdrawal from Gaza-the forcible removal of 85,000 settlers and the abandonment of all the homes and state of the art farms, which American philanthropists purchased and gave to the local Arabs of Gaza.

After the completion of the withdrawal, the Arabs plundered, vandalized, looted and destroyed all the crops, seeds, homes, greenhouses, and equipment, and commenced their terrorizing of Israeli citizens in Sderot with daily rocket barrages. Then Hamas established its permanent foothold in Gaza.

If, one could speak to him now, how would the great and courageous general respond to the tragic outcome of his “painful concessions?”

During the recent foreign policy crises over Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, the Munich analogy was heard from both sides of the political spectrum. Arguing for airstrikes against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the nation faced a “Munich moment.” A few months later, numerous critics of Barack Obama’s diplomatic discussions with Iran evoked Neville Chamberlain’s naïve negotiations with Adolph Hitler. “This wretched deal,” Middle East historian Daniel Pipes said, “offers one of those rare occasions when comparison with Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 is valid.” The widespread resort to the Munich analogy raises the question: When, if ever, are historical analogies useful for understanding present circumstances?

Since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, one important purpose of describing historical events was to provide models for posterity. Around 395 B.C., Thucydides wrote that his history was for “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” Thus he proclaimed his history to be “a possession for all time.” Nearly four centuries later, the Roman historian Livy wrote his history of the Roman Republic from its foundations to Augustus in order to show “what to imitate,” and to “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”

Both historians believed the past could inform and instruct the present because they assumed that human nature would remain constant in its passions, weaknesses, and interests despite changes in the political, social, or technological environment. As Thucydides writes of the horrors of revolution and civil war, “The sufferings . . . were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.” Good history must take into account that “variety of the particular cases,” but an unchanging human nature will over time and space work similar effects. The past, then, can provide analogies for the present, provided they are based on “exact knowledge,” and the “variety of particular cases” is respected.

The headline of his New York Times obituary described him as a “Polarizing Poet and Playwright,” and the obit itself began by describing him as a figure “of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others.” The Associated Press called him a “militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture.” The Washington Post celebrated “his protean place in American culture.” His legacy, according to NPR’s headline, was “Both Offensive And Achingly Beautiful.” The people at Poetry Magazine, the legendary journal founded in 1912, pronounced themselves “deeply saddened to report” his death; the Academy of American Poetry was “sad” over his loss. Over the years, the death notices informed us, he had taught at such places as Yale and Columbia and received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from PEN, and from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Warren Beatty respected him enough to give him a small symbolic role in his movie Bulworth.

Who was this literary master? His name was Amiri Baraka, and he died last Thursday at age 79. When I was a graduate student in the English Department at Stony Brook University, Baraka (who had been born Le Roi Jones) was the star of the Africana Studies Department, directly across the quad. (At his death, he was an emeritus professor there.) I never met him, but when I took an undergraduate course in modern American poetry, his work was on the syllabus. It was without question the worst stuff we read that term; in fact it was the worst stuff in that whole edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern American Poetry. I was so astonished at the sheer awfulness of his poems, in fact, that I typed one of them up, banged out three others of the same ilk off the top of my head, and passed them around to a few of my dorm friends, asking if they could tell which three I’d made up and which one I’d copied out of the Norton. None of them could. But the joke, it turned out, was on me. What I later learned was that Baraka wasn’t going for literary excellence: as he explained in a 1980 interview, his poems weren’t intended mainly to be read by other people in books; he created them so he’d have texts to declaim at public readings. (Even then, appparently, he was making a good deal of money giving public readings – much of that money, one presumes, drawn from university treasuries.)