RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352706/coolidges-birthday-too-julia-shaw

America’s birthday is also Calvin Coolidge’s. It’s a fitting coincidence, as the 30th president was one of the most eloquent defenders of America’s principles.

Few words, let alone eloquent ones, are associated with Coolidge, who was, after all, nicknamed “Silent Cal.” Coolidge was that rare politician who valued silence as much as speech — and “no” as much as “yes.”

Coolidge came to national prominence in 1919 by saying “no” to a Boston police-union strike. The officers went on strike to protest the suspension of union leadership by the police commissioner. Public unrest ensued. Massachusetts governor Coolidge responded by calling up the National Guard and declaring that there was “no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” His bold actions earned him national attention. Soon after, Coolidge joined Warren G. Harding on the 1920 Republican presidential ticket as vice president. Coolidge took the presidential oath of office in August 1923 after President Harding’s death.
As president, Coolidge said “no” even more: no to tax increases, emergency spending, farm legislation, subsidies, entitlement programs, and expanded government. Reasoning that to stop bad laws was more important than to pass good ones, he wielded the veto power unabashedly. He was especially fond of the pocket veto, which allowed him to express “disapproval by inaction,” as the New York Times called it. Pocket vetoes do not require the president to explain his reasons for rejecting the legislation in question. Because Congress is not in session to override the veto, the pocket veto kills the bill until the next session.

Coolidge’s courage to say “no” serves as an important example for today’s spendthrift politicians. When he left office in 1929, the federal budget was smaller than when he was sworn in as president in 1923.

But after recounting what Coolidge was against, we should remember what he was for.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352778/elections-are-not-democracy-andrew-c-mccarthy The democracy fetish would be worth having if it were about promoting real democracy. Instead, as illustrated by media coverage of the military coup that ousted Egypt’s popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood president, we’re still confusing democratic legitimacy with legitimate democracy. The latter is real — a culture of liberty that safeguards minority rights. Attaining […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352784/princess-and-brotherhood-mark-steyn

“This week, the Brotherhood was checked — but not by anything recognizable as the forces of freedom. Is it only a temporary respite? Certainly, in the age of what Caroline Glick calls “America’s self-induced smallness,” Western ideas of real liberty have little purchase in Cairo. Egypt will get worse, and, self-induced or not, America is getting smaller.”

After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom, most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity. The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in nothing flat.

And so the “Arab Spring” ricochets from one half-witted plot twist to another. Morsi was supposedly “the first democratically elected leader” in Egypt’s history, but he was a one-man-one-vote-one-time guy. Across the Mediterranean in Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan could have advised him “softly softly catchee monkey” — you neuter the army slowly, and Islamize incrementally, as Erdogan has done remorselessly over a decade. But Morsi the “democrat” prosecuted journalists who disrespected him, and now he sits in a military jail cell (next to Mubarak’s?). And so the first army coup in Egypt since King Farouk’s ejection in 1952 is hailed as a restoration of the idealistic goals of the “Facebook revolution,” although General Sisi apparently has plans to charge Morsi with “insulting the presidency.” That’s not a crime any self-respecting society would have on its books — and anyway the Egyptian presidency itself is an insult to presidencies. Morsi’s is the shortest reign of any of the five presidents, shorter even than the first, Mohamed Naguib, who was booted out by Nasser and whose obscurity is nicely caught by the title of his memoir, I Was an Egyptian President.

In the 2011 parliamentary elections, three-quarters of the vote went to either the Muslim Brotherhood or their principal rivals, the Even More Muslim Brotherhood. So, statistically speaking, a fair few of the “broad-based coalition” joining the Coptic Christians and urban secularists out on the streets are former Morsi guys. Are they suddenly Swedish-style social democrats? Human Rights Watch reports that almost 100 women were subjected to violent sexual assault over four days in Tahrir Square, which suggests not. The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick argues that the coalition that’s supplanted the Muslim Brothers will wind up controlled by neo-Nasserite fascists.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/political_correctness_is_cultural_marxism.html The excellent AT article “Conservatives Pushing Back” by Bruce Walker explored what we conservative thinkers (We are, after all, American Thinkers) have known for quite some time: political correctness (PC) is to culture what Marxism is to economics.  To recognize that fact arms us with what we need in order to push back.  As […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/bowing_to_moscow.html In March of 2011 Vice President Joe Biden made a two-day visit to Moscow. His purpose was, among other things, to assist Russia’s government in gaining admission to the World Trade Organization. Not only didn’t Russia pay the U.S. a consulting fee for Biden’s valuable assistance, it wouldn’t even put him up during his […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/07/dangerous_times_obamas_arab_spring_logic.html Wanna have an authentic people’s revolution?  Wanna have an Arab Spring?   Well, Egypt is having a people’s revolution of sorts, as the Egyptian military have cobbled together a political coalition ranging from the Coptic pope to the hyper-reactionary Salafists.  They all support the overthrow of Brother Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.   Obama […]

Another Tack: Where crazies thrive To contextualize the provocations of the so-called hilltop youth, and the possibly linked price-tag inanities, we need to visit unloved and forsaken southern Tel Aviv – From Neveh Sha’anan all the way to the Hatikva and Shapira Quarters. Their sordid streets offer an improbable but pertinent perspective for the barren rocky […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2573/Is-Paula-Deen-the-Worst-American-Ever.aspx This week’s syndicated column As practically everyone knows by now, multimillionaire TV chef Paula Deen was yanked from the pinnacle of free-market success after admitting to a lawyer taking a deposition in a racial and sexual harassment lawsuit (already Orwellian) that she had used what is referred to as “the N-word” some 25 years […]

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ MOST EVIL: Gang-Raping Boys, an Islamic Staple – 4 Articles MOST EVIL: Gang-Raping Boys, an Islamic Staple – 4 Articles: Boy Kidnapped and Raped by Two Men Two men in Fujeirah kidnapped and raped a local boy before threatening to kill him in case he reported the incident, a newspaper said. The boy, whose […]

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/07/israels-reviled-strategic-wisd.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel%27s+reviled+strategic+wisdom&utm_campaign=20130705_m116540940_Israel%27s+reviled+strategic+wisdom&utm_term=Continue+reading__ On Wednesday, Egypt had its second revolution in as many years. And there is no telling how many more revolutions it will have in the coming months, or years. This is the case not only in Egypt, but throughout the Islamic world. The American foreign policy establishment’s rush to romanticize as the Arab Spring […]