RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the whole 2,000-mile border with Mexico has gotten a lot of immigration hawks excited. I understand the emotional appeal of his proposal, but it addresses what is actually the least serious vulnerability in our immigration system.

Border infiltrators were indeed the main type of illegal immigrants for a long time. Estimates dating from the 1990s were that about 60 percent of the illegal population had jumped the border.

But since then our effort at the border really has improved. While the number of border agents and the miles and type of fencing are all still inadequate, not all the money we’ve spent there over the past two decades has been wasted. Border crossings really are way down. We’re much more able than we were before to patrol the border effectively, though we have an administration in Washington that often chooses not to do so, as we’ve seen with the ongoing surge of Central American teenagers and families into South Texas.

But even if we were to build a wall, and elect a president interested in using it to protect America’s sovereignty, we’d be missing most of the problem — because the majority of new illegal aliens are actually visa overstayers.

We all have our own American Dreams. Some of us aspire to be chief executive officers or the owners of our own small businesses. Others aspire to be talented teachers or skilled engineers. No matter the dream, we all want success, and we all want to be able to provide for ourselves and our families. We work hard so we can live comfortably, safely, and securely. In the 20th century, having a college degree usually guaranteed this outcome. If you graduated from a traditional four-year university, you could attain a well-paying job and eventually start a family.

Today, we have this same dream, but the global economy has vastly changed. Thanks to innovative ideas and new advancements in technology, 21st-century jobs require more technical skills and training than ever before. Having a college degree no longer guarantees that you will be competitive in the job market. Too often, students struggle to find employment after graduation and face massive student-loan debt. In America today, college graduates have more than $1 trillion in combined student loans, and that number only continues to climb.

The goal of public policy must be to ensure not only that an abundance of jobs are available for our people, but also that our people are equipped with the skills needed to attain those jobs. We can start by supporting the many innovative education approaches that have sprung up in recent decades, including technical schools, online colleges, and other alternative institutions. They help people get the advanced training and skills they need with more flexibility, lower costs, and less debt than most traditional colleges and universities.

As any month ends, I am always amazed as to how much news gets packed into a mere thirty or thirty-one days. September was no exception. Flash floods in Utah killed nineteen and fires in California destroyed 1000 homes. The refugee crisis in Europe worsened.and Russia sent troops and equipment to Syria. The Pope came to the Americas, first to Cuba and then to the United States. John Boehner announced his intent to resign his seat in Congress and as Speaker of the House. The month saw both Rick Perry and Scott Walker drop out of the Republican race for President, and the e-mail hole Hillary Clinton has dug became deeper.

September 11th marked the fourteenth anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attack on the United States. In our politically correct world, fear of triggering unhappy feelings in others, including our avowed enemies, drives out common sense. It is forgotten that more people were killed that day than sailors at Pearl Harbor or American soldiers on D-Day. The war against Islamic terrorism persists, as we know from ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian-fueled Quds Force, to name only a few. Yet Mr. Obama refuses to put the modifier “Islamic” before the noun “terrorism.” Perhaps for that reason, the world has become more dangerous since he became President. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, fatalities resulting from armed conflict increased by a factor of four since 2010, with the vast majority of the deaths being caused by Islamic groups.

“Anti-Immigrant bigotry” and lack of jobs are causing the rise of ISIS?

President Barack Obama continued his feckless foreign policy charade at the United Nations on September 29th before returning to Washington. He chaired what was billed as “The Leaders’ Summit on Countering ISIL and Violent Extremism,” and he met with Cuban President Raul Castro.

At the summit, Obama claimed major progress in rolling back the Islamic State (or ISIL, as he refers to the jihadist caliphate occupying large portions of Syria and Iraq). By now, the president is certainly aware of the reported complaint, backed by 52 defense analysts, to the Pentagon’s inspector general, which alleged that intelligence reports on the war against the Islamic State were doctored in order to support the Obama administration’s claims that the fighting was going well. Some of these doctored reports were reportedly used to brief the president and other high government officials, telling them what they wanted to hear. The defense analysts, who are career professionals, have painted a far more pessimistic picture of the fight so far than the Obama administration wants the public to believe. Nevertheless, while Obama acknowledged at the summit that the Islamic State fighters are “resilient” and that there will be some setbacks along with successes, he continued the false narrative that the Islamic State is in retreat. The fact is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of Obama’s lack of leadership in the fight against ISIL. Putin is taking the lead himself, providing direct military support to the Syrian regime and building his own coalition including Iraq and Iran.

A case study on how the media and duplicitous politicians hide the truth from the public.

As ISIS, the Nusra Front (an al Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria) and other terror organizations continue spreading death and violence in Syria, increasing numbers of Syrians are literally running for their lives.

Europe has witnessed a tsunami of refugees and Secretary of State John Kerry has promised to increase the number of refugees that the United States will admit.

Communities that have already been accepting refugees, and not just from Syria, are questioning the wisdom of this effort and the way that refugees are being vetted. One such community is to be found in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

It is important to note that the member of the House of Representatives who represents Spartanburg in Congress is none other than Representative Trey Gowdy who also chairs the House Subcommittee on Immigration. He has also voiced serious concerns about the way that the refugee program is being administered and has been unhappy with the lack of information being provided — even to him as the chairman of the subcommittee that is constitutionally mandated to provide oversight over our entire immigration system. He has been quoted as describing responses to his questions about the resettlement of refugees in Spartanburg as being “sorely inadequate.”

On June 4, 2015 the local newspaper, Spartanburg Herald Tribune (GoUpstate.com) published a report, “First refugees arrive in Spartanburg despite questions raised by Gowdy.”

As questions continued to go unanswered, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a public forum in Spartanburg, South Carolina on the issue of the vetting process being used to screen refugees on September 20, 2015.

Among those in attendance at the town hall meeting were newspaper reporters, including one from the New York Times, Richard Fausset.

A day after the Taliban had overrun the city of Kunduz, Obama told the UN that, “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they’re defeated by better ideas.”

The better idea that the Taliban had was fighting a war with guns, while Obama was still searching through his hashtags for a better idea than a bullet. Instead of convening a summit on “countering violent extremism”, the Taliban retook the last of their cities to fall to the United States.

In a single day in September, the Taliban had captured a city of a few hundred thousand people.

Tajikistan saw the fall of Kunduz coming months ago, but Obama’s vaunted intel operation was too busy cooking the books to make it seem as if he was winning in Iraq to waste time lying about another war.

In March, Obama was crediting himself with having shifted the momentum against the Taliban. Now the Taliban have shown him which way the momentum had really shifted.

Last year, he declared the war was over. But Obama and reality have never been on speaking terms. The war had not reached a “responsible conclusion”. The fighting wasn’t over until the Taliban said so.

In his first significant leadership role — as president of the Screen Actors Guild — Ronald Reagan fought communist influence in Hollywood and prevailed in a tough contract negotiation.

In his first command — as a captain during the Black Hawk War — Abraham Lincoln overruled his men to prevent the execution of a suspected Potawotami spy.

To win his first congressional race, Richard Nixon disingenuously linked his opponent to communist sympathizers, the start of a pattern that would earn Nixon the nickname “Tricky Dick.”

With presidents, the past is often prologue. So what do Ted Cruz’s early leadership roles tell us about his presidential proclivities?

Now that Cruz regularly polls toward the top of an ever-shrinking field, his early tenure bears closer scrutiny. Cruz has gained fame as a social conservative and an unwavering opponent of Obamacare. In his first major leadership role, however, he developed economic policy as the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning.

At the FTC, Cruz’s agenda could have been written by Milton Friedman.

Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers. Based on his early support of disruptive online companies, Cruz has some grounds to call himself the “Uber of American politics.” [1]

In New York, the United Nations is still lumbering through its Sept. 28th – Oct. 3 general debate. But even with today’s declaration by aging potentate Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority will no longer respect the Oslo Accords (did they ever?) the headlines are elsewhere. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin not only stole the UN show, but in Syria — and beyond — is stealing a march on President Obama that makes the current world scene look ever more like the disastrous penultimate year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. That 1979 run of debacles opened with Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and rolled on to the Soviet Union’s December invasion of Afghanistan — lighting the fuel under the cauldron whence sprang, in due course, a great many horrors, including the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

Obama’s presidency still has more than a year to run (477 days, to be precise), and after more than six years of U.S. global retreat, as we toil through this fourth quarter of “interesting stuff,” trouble is spreading even faster than it did in the Carter era. The threats now rising like a tsunami on the horizon are, arguably, worse.

But let’s focus here on Russia. This week, President Putin has delivered not only a blitz in Syria, but a grand slam on the world stage. Call it a play in three acts.

Act I: Monday, Sept. 28th, at the UN General Assembly in New York. Obama delivers his annual speech, repeating the message of his first presidential address to the UN in 2009 — in which he effectively served notice that under his command, America was abdicating, to the international collective, its longtime leadership of the Free World. This year, arriving with the feckless UN-approved Iran nuclear deal in his pocket, and lamenting both the ills of dictatorship and the frustrations of democracy, Obama tells the assembled eminences at the UN that he believes in his core “that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion.” He adds, “We cannot look backwards.” (“Oh, yes we can,” editorializes The Wall Street Journal, noting that “even as he concedes the growing world disorder, Mr. Obama still won’t admit that his policy of American retreat has created a vacuum for rogues to fill.”)

From the Baltic to the Middle East the threats are rising, yet across the Anglosphere defence budgets are slashed and a blind eye turned to perils that range from Russian adventurism to Islamic aggression. Never have so many been protected by so few.
Many in the British defence establishment and private think-tanks were dismayed when David Cameron’s coalition government, despite international turbulence, cut Britain’s army from 100,000 to 82,000 men, its smallest size since before the Napoleonic wars. More recently, in the face of obvious international instability, Cameron has announced defence spending will be increased to the agreed Nato minimum of 2 per cent of GDP over the next few years. It appears to be a U-turn away from a policy of steady and increasingly dangerous defence cuts.

This will be welcome news, as far as it goes, to the many senior figures in the defence establishment and the many retired senior officers of all three services who have been warning with increasing urgency over the last few years about the parlous state of Britain’s armed forces. Further, a new Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) has been promised for this year.

However, the conservative Bow Group, a think-tank with some highly qualified members, has recently made the point that simply budgeting towards an arbitrary figure does not necessarily mean that the spending priorities will be right. It calls for an extended and less hasty review that takes full consideration of the range of inputs needed. It argues that the SDSR should be sufficiently resourced to give due consideration to the UK’s national objectives, operational sovereignty, and the views of industry and major allies. This could enhance the UK’s international standing and security. Otherwise the promised increase may not be as good as it looks.

This is a story that has the feel of a slightly implausible spy thriller. Unfortunately, it is all too real, and it suggests that hidden forces have indeed been at work shaping the narrative on the Benghazi attack that was so deftly manipulated in the lead-up to the 2012 re-election of Barack Obama. The complicated story (as much of it as we know at present) is laid out by Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard:

In March, an investigation by ProPublica and Gawker revealed that a “secret spy network” that was not on the State Department payroll, run by longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, was “funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack.” Now the WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes.

According to WEEKLY STANDARD sources, Drumheller was active in shaping the network’s Benghazi coverage. His role at the network raises questions about what went wrong with the retracted 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that aired in October 2013. Despite his former life as a high ranking CIA official, Drumheller was laden with political baggage, making him a curious choice to be consulting with a major news operation—especially so given that he was working directly with Sidney Blumenthal, whose primary occupation appears to be manipulating media coverage on behalf of the Clintons.