RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am feeling a bit scandal whipped by the many revelations about the Obama administration which were airbrushed during the campaign of 2012. And, I am full of remorse now, more than ever, for the loss of Mitt Romney, and at a loss about what can save our nation and the Republicans in 2016.

A good primer and a great read is Gabriel Schoenfeld’s book. This is not one of the myriad “sore loser” brickbats that were hurled at Mitt Romney after the devastating loss. This is a serious accounting of what went wrong and how it determined the outcome.

Gabriel Schoenfeld was intimately involved in the campaign as a senior adviser. His essays on national security and modern history have appeared in leading publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, New Republic, Atlantic, National Interest, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Commentary, where from 1994 to 2008 he was senior editor. His books include: A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account; Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law; and The Return of Anti-Semitism.

Those of us who cheered at Romney’s knock out of Obama in the first debate when it was about the economy, were buoyed and confident that in succeeding debates, particularly on foreign policy Romney would triumph. Instead, we cringed when he flubbed the debate on what should have been his strong suit. But now what?

I posed the following question to Gabriel Schoenfeld:
“In the book you site the awkward handling of the anniversary of 9/11 in the Romney campaign…..particularly in light of the evolving protests in Cairo and Benghazi as being critical.I am persuaded that Romney got some awful advice but what we know now …leaves me perplexed and wondering what moves one can make in preparing for 2016.
Given that now we know the lies and obfuscations and negligence of those events which were kept from us…and candidate Romney, do you think the outcome could have been different?

Much of this is out since your book was completed….Have you any second thoughts?”
His answer:
“The revelations about Benghazi that have appeared since my book was locked into type four weeks ago only serve to confirm its thesis. The Obama administration made multiple mistakes before, during, and after the Benghazi episode and it took monumental misjudgment for the Romney campaign to turn an Obama vulnerability into a Romney vulnerability. But that is what happened on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.
I am certainly not arguing that the campaign’s mishandling of this episode cost Romney the election. But politics is a dynamic thing. And if Romney had managed to raise the issue effectively, it would have provided at least an opening, a way for him to change the momentum of a race that was turning against him. The things we have learned over the last few weeks only confirm that this was a missed opportunity. The administration, for a variety of reasons, intra-bureaucratic and political, was misrepresenting what happened in Benghazi. If Romney had handled this deftly, he would have been able to score somewhat more in the second and third debate. As it was, he was unable to talk effectively about the fiasco. The campaign also told the RNC to stand down with a highly effective ad that explained Benghazi to the public in readily digestible sound bites coupled with vivid images. The big lesson for 2016: it is folly to ignore foreign policy–which is what the Romney strategists deliberately attempted to do. When a crisis occurred, they were woefully ill-equipped to deal with it. ”
READ THE BOOK….74 PAGES THAT PACK A POLITICAL PUNCH FOR THOSE WHO CARE DEEPLY ABOUT THE NEXT ELECTION.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/11/dangers-of-legitimizing-islamic.html

There is no surer path to Muslim violence than through the legitimization of Muslim grievance. And once you accept the legitimacy of the grievance, then you are also bound to accept the legitimacy of the violence that follows.
Violence begins with grievance. Grievance is the pretext for violence and the narrative for the violence. Liberals make a fetish of separating the grievance from the violence, emphasizing constructive means of resolving the grievance. But what do you do when the grievance and the violence are inseparable?

Grievance is the stories that Muslims tell themselves to justify their violence. To explain why they kill children and why they murder the innocent. The list of grievances is an endless as the violence. Every act of violence carries its own narrative. The endless Muslim conflicts throughout the world all carry their burden of history. But it isn’t a history that can be resolved with a tolerance session.

Muslim grievances are the frustration of conquerors, the broken teeth of predators who weren’t allowed to feed on the world until their stomachs burst. All the lands they couldn’t conqueror, the peoples who rebelled against their rule, the inferior civilizations that pushed them back and drove them off. The swine who build skyscrapers and enjoy the fine things in life.

The civil rights model of social conflict resolution accepts grievances as legitimate and then tries to ‘heal’ through them through social justice. And when that model is applied to Muslims, it turns into empty appeasement because the conflicts at the heart of Muslim violence cannot be resolved through integration or representation. Applying the word “justice” in any form to a conflict involving Muslims is wasted ink.

The problem begins with a clash of definitions. To a citizen of a secular Western state, “injustice” means a lack of representation. To a Muslim, “injustice” means a lack of Islamic jurisprudence. A Non-Muslim state is always unjust simply because it is not ruled by Islamic law.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ New York Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem are expected to set new standards for malicious bias and during his time there, Ethan Bronner was no exception. A bureau chief anywhere else in the world may be expected to explore the life and color of the city. But in Jerusalem, a New York Times scribe […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/05/27/contrary-to-obama-the-terror-war-has-barely-begun/?print=1 The collapse of Middle Eastern states from Libya to Afghanistan vastly increases the terrorist recruitment pool, while severely restricting the ability of American intelligence services to monitor and interdict the terrorists. In addition, it intensifies the despair that motivates Muslims like the Tsarnaev brothers or Michael Adebolajo to perpetrate acts of terrorism. That makes President […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/be-afraid-be-very-afraid#ixzz2UaGClb2j From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/hamas-in-gaza-sending-out-tentacles-to-the-west-bank In March, a Palestinian resident of the West Bank appeared before an Israeli military court and was charged with attempting to set up a Hamas terrorism cell, after being recruited for the mission by Hamas in Gaza. Ahmed Fahida, a 26-year-old attorney from a village near Ramallah, allegedly worked under the instruction of Hamas’s […]

http://www.jidaily.com/eeff9

In 1942, a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea torpedoed and sank the Struma, a ship filled with almost 800 Jewish refugees headed from Romania to the Holy Land. David Stoliar, the lone survivor, agreed to share his story with SPIEGEL ONLINE.

David Stoliar’s neat house sits atop a hill on the edge of Bend, a small city in central Oregon. A few steps lead up to the front door. Stoliar’s wife, Marda, opens, followed by a happy beagle. “Come in,” she says cheerfully. “Come in.”

Her husband is waiting in the living room, surrounded by souvenirs and family photos. Stoliar, his light-blue eyes twinkling, appears much younger than 90. He laughs, chats about the weather, mentions the road conditions up on nearby Mount Hood. He’s making small talk, obviously, to avoid the actual topic of this visit.

David Stoliar needs time to bring his thoughts — and himself — all the way back to that night. He’s actually never discussed it before with a German reporter. “Nobody has asked me,” he says with a shrug, adding emphatically that, after this meeting, he won’t ever speak of it again — with no one, no matter what or where they’re from.

“Not a good memory,” Stoliar states matter-of-factly. “I just want to finish my life in peace.”

But memories, of course, can’t be dismissed so easily. Especially these memories. The explosion, catapulting him into the water. The screams of the others, fading slowly. The wait for his own certain death on that icy night at sea.

Stoliar’s story has always been a taboo of sorts. His ordeal illuminates a forgotten, inconvenient chapter of the Holocaust, which the then-Allies would rather not be reminded of. For, if anything, they chose to look the other way — before, during and after.

“Everybody had an excuse,” Marda says.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349409/securing-israel-today Jerusalem, Israel — After meeting with a representative from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), we drove through the West Bank on our way to a Syrian border crossing on the Golan Heights. The day before we had visited a village just outside the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and the next night we stayed on the […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349381/while-you-labor

Welcome back to work.

With a rare three-day weekend behind you, you may be reading these words on your office computer or perhaps on a mobile device en route to your workplace. After barbecuing, relaxing with loved ones, and remembering America’s fallen GIs, it may be tough to focus today on meetings, deadlines, and distracting colleagues who drop by to chat.

Too bad you are not Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS’s exempt-organizations office in Washington, D.C. She now has America’s easiest job. Having pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee last Wednesday, Lerner was placed on administrative leave. Meanwhile, Congress will sort out her role in the burgeoning scandal over the IRS’s ideological profiling and political discrimination against at least 471 conservative groups and Tea Party organizations.
Since Lerner is on administrative leave, she will avoid her office. This means that she — unlike you — can sleep in until the crack of noon, savor breakfast in bed, visit the gym around 3 p.m., head home for a refreshing nap at 4:30 p.m., and then enjoy a long, boozy dinner. She can awaken on Wednesday morning with a throbbing hangover, roll over, and return to sleep. So, tonight: Waiter, make that one more bottle of Malbec!

And on Thursday: Rise, rinse, repeat.

REP. TOM COTTON IS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING CANDIDATES….THIS IS FROM TODAY’S WES PRUDEN COLUMN

The man most likely to run against Mark Pryor is a freshman congressman, Tom Cotton, who really, really does like guns. He’s rarely photographed without one. He looks too good to be true. He grew up in small-town Arkansas, went to Harvard, gave up the law after 9/11 to join the Army, disdaining a posting as an Army lawyer to lead an infantry company in Iraq and then Afghanistan, where he received a Bronze Star for heroism in combat. He has run in 11 marathons and earlier this year was named “the fastest man in Congress” after he won a three-mile congressional minimarathon in under 18 minutes. At 36 and 6 foot 5 inches tall, he looks like a candidate consultants dream of.
Rep. Tom Cotton

He’s a nightmare for Mark Pryor, the son of a senator and trying to survive as a Democrat in a newly Republican state. He has a long slog to re-election, but a genius from New York City just made it a little easier.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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