RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Ambassador John Bolton expressed hope today that President Obama would not apologize to the Russians following their dangerous military provocation on the Baltic Sea earlier this week. Russian attack planes buzzed dangerously close to a U.S. Navy destroyer on Monday and Tuesday in what the U.S. described as a “simulated attack.”

During an appearance on Fox News Friday morning, Bolton also predicted “there’s more” Russian aggression to come. “If that airplane had caught a gust of wind, it could have been right up against that destroyer,” he said.

“Russia’s latest stint in the Baltic Sea signals to our NATO allies that the U.S. can’t take care of itself,” he continued.

“I just hope Obama doesn’t apologize for [our] destroyer getting in the way of that airplane.”

It’s not an unfair barb given the Obama administration’s culture of weakness, apology, and moral equivalence on the world stage.

Via Cortney O’Brien at Townhall:

Before the Russian airplane flew near our destroyer, Iran captured 10 of our American sailors and celebrated it. Secretary of State John Kerry actually thanked Iran for their compassion during the ordeal. President Obama, meanwhile, continues to defend his nuclear deal with the nation, which has basically given Iran a pass for its bad behavior. A Middle East expert who is very critical of that agreement argues it has severely damaged America’s image as a superpower.

You think Kerry is a dunce?….rsk
Albright: ‘War on Terror’ Bad Term for ‘Just Murderers’ By Nicholas Ballasy

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she dislikes the use of the phrase “war on terror,” arguing that it makes terrorists look like warriors.

“For me, I’ve had a very hard time with the vocabulary of all of this and I have not liked the words ‘war on terror’ because it makes those that are fighting us warriors when they are actually just murderers and they get a greater kind of reverence in their societies if we make warriors out of them. They are murderers, plain and simple,” Albright said during a discussion about religion, peace and world affairs at Georgetown University.

While she did not mention any presidential candidates by name, Albright criticized Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as a way to combat Islamic extremism.

“The challenge for us is to harness the unifying potential of faith while containing its capacity to divide. Now this is not easy to do, particularly in a political season where candidates are vilifying Muslims and exploiting the fear factor. The irony with all of this is that Daesh [ISIS] is the one that wants to divide the world along religious lines,” she said.

“We should not play into their game by provoking a clash of civilizations or leading Muslims to believe they are under attack by the West, but that is what happens when we suggest that our country should shut our borders to Muslims or patrol the streets of Muslim-American neighborhoods,” she added.

Albright said Americans must remember that the first rule in public life is to “frame the choice.”

“We will win if people believe the great divide in the world is between those who believe it is OK to murder innocent people and those who think it is wrong – between terrorists and those who are not terrorists,” Albright said.

“We will be in for a very long struggle if people believe the choice is between the supporters and defenders of Islam. This is precisely the fight that Daesh wants to have, but the truth is when Muslims commit terrorist attacks they are not practicing their faith – they are betraying it,” she added.

Albright repeated a message she conveyed in the past at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on engaging Muslims.

“In the end, both the Bible and the Quran include enough rhetorical ammunition to start a war and enough moral uplift to engender permanent peace,” she said.

In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86-35 B.C.), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on “The Roman Revolution.” Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for “The Roman Revolution,” which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life; consider alone Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. CONTINUE AT SITE