RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2545/Truth-Snowden-and-the-Surveillance-State.aspx

On November 14, 2002, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire wrote a column called “You Are a Suspect.” It is posted below, an early signpost to our current state of dislocation and upset.

It is dislocating and upsetting to be confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks: the leaked court order, the leaked logistical scope of what is being aptly labeled the Surveillance State. This what Safire predicted would be foisted on Us, the People. We are told it is The Only Means Possible to prevent “another 9/11.”

The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the totalitarian structure of the hyper-state it supports.

Yesterday, I focused on the failures of former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden to comprehend the quite simple patterns of Islamic conquest that history is replete with, that our own era is undergoing, that Western civlization is being transformed by. Why would an intel chief draw such blanks? One reason might be hostile Islamic penetration of the policy-making chain, which appears to have influenced key actors inside our government. Congress blindly, resolutely refuses to examine any evidence of this. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s political career seems to have cratered after and because she quite logically and patriotically asked for Inspectors General outside Congress to examine the evidence and was demonized as a second coming of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Another wrong on its face, as my new book, American Betrayal, argues.

Hayden, of course, is not alone. Indeed, he exemplifies the hollowness at the very top of our security bureacracies: FBI Director Mueller, DNI Clapper, JCC Dempsey, DHS Secretary Napolitano. CIA Director John Brennan, overtly sympathetic and even protective of Islam, is another bird entirely. He may well be a Muslim himself.

Under the fundamentally flawed guidance of such hollow people, a terrifying super-state has arisen to defend their beliefs, their ideology, not the Constitution.

It doesn’t protect the public, either, although this is the rationale that is supposed to excuse the “overreach.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/u-s-sovereignty-under-siege-on-the-chandler-gang/

On this week’s Glazov Gang, Michael Chandler filled in as host for Jamie and produced a stellar episode with guests Larry Greenfield, a Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance, Hollywood actor Dwight Schultz (dwightschultzfansite.nl) and Lloyd Romeo, an Electronics Engineer and Patriot.

The Glazov Gangsters gathered to discuss Why Wasn’t There a Military Response To Benghazi? The episode also featured the themes: The Obama Doctrine, U.S. Sovereignty Under Siege, and much, much more.

To watch both parts of this riveting episode, see below:

Part I:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/denial-about-stockholm/

Why are leading conservative magazines buying into the lie that the Swedish riots have nothing to do with Islam?

The June 4 issue of National Review contained a piece entitled “Torching Utopia” and subtitled “Sweden’s problem is not Islam, it’s multiculturalism.” Its author, Tino Sanandaji, an Iranian Kurd who has lived in Sweden for many years and who studied economics in the U.S., had one principal point to make: that there does exist a “fierce hostility toward Swedish culture” in Sweden, but that it originates not with Muslim immigrants but with Swedish elites. To support this claim, he cited one Swedish politician’s declaration, some years ago, that “Swedes are jealous of immigrants” because the latter “have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you together,” while Swedes have only “Midsummer’s Eve and other lame things.” What Sanandaji chose not to point out was that the politician who made that statement, Mona Sahlin, made it while addressing an audience of Muslims in a mosque; and she didn’t say that Swedes were jealous of immigrants generally – she said that they were jealous of Muslims, because Islamic culture is wonderful and manifestly superior to Swedish culture.

Yes, Swedish elites hold Swedish culture in contempt. But so do Muslim immigrants – in the same way that they hold the local culture in contempt in every non-Muslim country in which they reside. Yes, the Swedish elites’ contempt for their own culture has made it easier for Muslims to express their contempt – but the Muslims would feel that contempt anyway. And it’s the palpable contempt of Muslims in Sweden for Swedish culture that has motivated the Swedish elite – in a perverse, pathetic, and increasingly desperate attempt to please and pacify the Muslims among them – to express their own contempt for Swedish society so openly.

Many of Sanandaji’s points were splendid, as far as they went. “Cultural self-confidence is essential for integration,” he wrote. He complained that there’s no established “social contract wherein Swedes accept immigrants as one of their own once certain obligations are fulfilled”; that Sweden isn’t an easy country to integrate into, because “Swedes tend to be reticent, solitary, and reserved,” with “a complex culture, full of subtle rules and opaque codes of conduct”; and that “Swedes are conformist and quite intolerant of deviation from group norms….Icy Scandinavia was never a particularly well-chosen testing ground for the multiculturalist experiment.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-dumb-police-state/ Investigative work is built on selective mistrust. The difference between a state in which there are police and a police state is the scope of that mistrust. A state in which there are police will pursue criminals by using investigative techniques to profile suspects while a police state criminalizes everyone by treating the entire […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The dominant struggle of the 20th Century was the attempt to reconcile the growth of industrial economies with the social welfare demands of the left. The various attempts to “Steal the Thunder” of the left by adopting its social programs led to horrors such as Nazism on the one hand and the growth of the welfare state on the other.

Communism was finally defeated by adopting its program. The national battle against a Russian
Communist empire was won while the domestic struggle against the left was lost.

The welfare state created a fifth column of bureaucrats and recipients to act as the left’s electorate. Instead of stealing the left’s thunder, they subsidized the triumphant long march of the left.

The liberal Republican prescription is still to Outleft the left, adopting some of its more popular ideas and social policies in a more sensible fashion. And they have never understood that the strategy, even when it succeeds in the short term, is doomed. You don’t win by making your enemy stronger. The left understands that. That is why it’s strategies once in power involve deepening and expanding its institutional power while destroying those of the right.

The temptation to Outleft the left is always there and always doomed because adopting the ideas and positions of the left means that you have already lost.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350806/our-idols-and-ourselves-kathryn-jean-lopez

In “those rare moments when we find ourselves alone and the gadgetry silent, we feel we are at a loss,” Elizabeth Scalia writes in Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life. “With nothing to distract us, we come face to face with a keening emptiness.” Scalia, known on the Internet as “The Anchoress,” says that “silence” can be “terrifying” then. ”But only because it lays bare our loneliness, our self-recriminations, and our doubts. Possessing nothing that is equal to those depths, we sense the need to distract ourselves and the cycle begins to churn again.”

Sound familiar? Read on. Scalia talks with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about her new book.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s so “strange” about the idols of modern American life?

ELIZABETH SCALIA: Perhaps primarily what is strange about our idols — beyond the fact that they are strange gods we were never meant to place before the Creator — is that they are so interior to us. When you mention an idol, the first image most people will conjure up is the golden calf the Hebrews created while Moses was on the mountain. It was an external thing, something outside of the people themselves — and they understood the God of Abraham to be outside of themselves, too. We are more sophisticated in our understanding, now — so comfortable with the notion of “God within” that we barely think what it means.

We may still have idols residing outside of ourselves — if we allow our things, our possessions and creations to stand between us and God, and to essentially own us — but we are very adept at burnishing the godlings of the mind, the ideas and opinions and beliefs formed interiorly. These are petted and loved and fed, and they grow directly in proportion to how much we indulge them, until they become the object of our enthrallment and the entity we serve. If our ideology, for instance, has become an idol, then we nourish it by reading only what suits our point of view; we speak and gather with only those who think as we think; we visit websites that echo our thoughts back to us, until we lose sight of anything beyond it — even the humanity of the one who does not conform to our beliefs. We begin to serve the idol of the idea, alone.

LOPEZ: Do you come close to sacrilege when you write, “As a Catholic priest stands ‘in persona Christi,’ Obama stood, ‘in persona meum’” in 2008? Was it so in 2012, too? Now?

SCALIA: Wow, that’s a big question. Sacrilege? No, I don’t think so. It is a rather apt comparison. As a Catholic, I believe that a priest truly does stand “in persona Christi,” and as a living, breathing observer of the world, I do believe that for some people, in 2008, Obama was a personification of the wonderfulness of themselves, made manifest. And I think Obama would agree. In The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He completely got the idol thing; he knew he was an idol, and in 2008 he brilliantly exploited it. The grandiose speech in Germany, the Greek columns behind him at the Democratic National Convention — Obama, I believe, understood that these events and props were as much meant to flatter his admirers as to shape world opinion. People who thought themselves smart, urbane, sophisticated globalists saw themselves shining in Obama, just as the Hebrews saw their reflections coming back to them with the golden calf. There is a line from the musical Evita: “I came from the people/ they need to adore me/ so Christian Dior me/from my head to my toes.” The idol flatters the idolator. The idolator wants to be flattered.

And by the way, in 2008, the idol-as-candidate model was also true on the right, but it was the veep candidate, Sarah Palin, and not John McCain, who was the adorable reflector: People looked at Palin, with her despised non-Ivy degree and her “you betcha” ways and her blue-collar background, and they saw themselves, their values. When she was savaged by the media, they saw themselves being savaged, and they got to the point where they — like the Obama lovers — would not tolerate a negative word said about her. Palin, quite unlike Obama, didn’t realize she was an idol until after the election, when her patina quickly rubbed away.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/american-subversion/

Diana West’s American Betrayal [1] — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. Cassandra, during her scene from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon [2], is possessed with the unique ability to visualize past and present, and even to augur future events, all as if they were happening in the present. There is a terrifying quality to Cassandra’s intensity, her peculiarly broad, profound, and temporally extended knowledge, and the directness with which it is conveyed. But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.

American Betrayal [3] chronicles the nation’s original subversion by Communist totalitarianism — the ugly, watershed “Big Lie” event being U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union in November 1933 despite knowing the Ukrainian terror-famine (see Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow [4]) orchestrated by Stalin’s Communist regime had already killed four to six million souls. Having long since crossed that ignominious threshold, West argues, it is easy to fathom how we are currently being subverted by the contemporary “Big Islamic Lie,” which romanticizes totalitarian Islam [5].

FDR, in a blatant lie designed to justify massive Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets, praised the USSR (in 1941) for its “freedom of conscience, freedom of religion,” which he further claimed was comparable to “what the rule is in this country [i.e., the U.S.].” Six decades later, George W. Bush mendaciously bowdlerized the timeless, global aspirations of Islam to impose its universal totalitarian system, Sharia (Islamic law), via jihad [6] when sanctioning the American response to the mass-murdering jihadist terror attacks of 9/11. Addressing the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2001, Bush opined [7]:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

By 2003, President Bush had fully embraced the delusive [8] (and self-contradictory [9]) Bernard Lewis Doctrine [10], which, squandering precious U.S. blood and enormous U.S. treasure, empowered the forces of Sharia to foster Islamic “democracy.” Similarly, FDR’s massive material and propagandistic support of Stalin’s Soviet transnational state abetted the metastasis of Communist “democracy” during the World War II era.

Despite its momentum, the grotesque transition to the acceptance (and at times blatant agitprop hagiography; see the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, aka “Submission to Moscow”) of Soviet Communism, which Diana West painstakingly details, was not seamless or uninterrupted. She also brings forth the countervailing efforts of a pantheon of brave, albeit isolated (and at times understandably shrill) truth tellers about Communism, Communist subversion, and Communist depredations: journalists and writers/educators (including ex-Communist apostates, or ex-fellow-travelers) such as Eugene Lyons, Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge, Fred Beal, William Wirt, J.B. Matthews, Victor Kravchenko, Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Max Eastman, Hanson Baldwin, Edward Kennedy [the AP and Atlantic Magazine journalist], Vladimir Petrov, Albert Konrad Herling, David J. Dallin, Boris Nikolaevsky, Elinor Lipper, Julius Epstein, Robert Conquest, Claire Stirling, Joseph D. Douglass, Tim Tzouliadis, M. Stanon Evans, Herbert Romerstein, Yuri Besmenov, Vasili Mitrokhin, Vladimir Bukovsky, and of course Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; military leaders, and intelligence officers and analysts including George Racey Jordan, Albert C. Wedemeyer, John Van Vliet, and Mark W. Clark; jurists Robert H. Jackson and Irving R. Kaufman; and politicians/staff lawyers, ambassadors, federal law enforcement, and even State Department officials, such as Martin Dies, Robert Stripling, Pat McCarran, Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, William Bullitt, George Earle, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kelley, Roy Atherton, Raymond Murphy, and Loy Henderson.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/model-muslim-state-turkey-accelerates-towards-tyranny/?print=1 It first begins with a peculiar, bitter smell. As you inhale, it starts to burn your throat, your eyes get red and you start to cry. Then it becomes difficult to breathe. You feel suffocated. Get sufficiently exposed, and you may faint or even die. These are the effects of pepper spray, the chemical […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324063304578525850909628878.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
A ruling against the NYPD’s successful ‘stop, question and frisk’ policy would be sure to inspire lawsuits in other cities.

A racial-profiling lawsuit over the New York Police Department’s “stop, question and frisk” policies is now in the hands of a judge whose decision is expected within weeks. Many New Yorkers watched the two-and-a-half-month trial nervously, concerned that a ruling against the NYPD by U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin could spell an end to a police practice that helped the city achieve an astonishing drop in violent crime.

But non-New Yorkers would do well to worry about the case too. A decision against the NYPD would almost certainly inspire similar suits by social-justice organizations against police departments elsewhere. The national trend of declining crime could hang in the balance. And the primary victims of such a reversal would be the inner-city minorities whose safety seems not to figure into attempts to undermine successful police tactics.

New York-style policing—including the practice of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—ought be the city’s most valued export. Since the early 1990s, New York has experienced the longest and steepest crime drop in the modern history of policing. Murders have gone down by nearly 80%, and combined major felonies by nearly 75%. No other American metropolis comes close to New York’s achievement. Bostonians are twice as likely to be murdered as New Yorkers, and residents of Washington, D.C., three times as likely.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578535823045836956.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

With the Senate beginning debate this week on the immigration reform bill, border security will be one of the most contentious issues. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) argues at every opportunity that “immigration reform hinges on border security,” and he isn’t wrong. But physical control of the border can go only so far in preventing illegal immigration. At least as important is finding a way for immigrants to work here legally. That’s where a guest-worker program is crucial.

The U.S. workforce is changing. Americans are having smaller families, and birthrates are well below replacement level. Baby boomers are retiring: 10,000 leave the workforce every day. Younger workers coming up behind them are much more educated than earlier generations. In 1950, according to the Census Bureau, 56% of U.S. workers were high-school dropouts. Today, the figure is less than 5%.

The result is that the pool of people available to fill low-skilled jobs has shrunk dramatically. It is not so much that the native born don’t want to work as busboys, farmhands or nurse’s aides. But the overwhelming majority of Americans are now overqualified for these jobs and have other options. Meanwhile, less-skilled immigrants with no family in the U.S. have no way—no access to a visa program—to enter the country legally and work in year-round jobs. This is why so many immigrants have flowed into the country illegally in recent decades and remain here, underground.

The challenge facing Congress is to create a better system—one that works for willing immigrant workers and willing employers, replaces the current illegal influx with a legal labor force, and protects the rights of Americans who are looking for low-skilled jobs.