RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, America marked two significant milestones in its history. Friday was the 80th anniversary of Social Security, a program that has helped millions of seniors, including my parents, retire with dignity. Saturday is the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, when the most violent conflict in human history ended as an American victory.

We refer to the Americans responsible for these accomplishments as the “Greatest Generation.” In less than two decades, they survived economic catastrophe, triumphed in a global conflict, and laid the foundation for unparalleled prosperity for their children in what would become an American century. When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, they took our nation to new heights. Because of their sacrifices, we have been able to enjoy what we call the American dream, promising that our children’s future will always be brighter than our own.

There was a lot going on today that affected the American people.

Capitulation to the Castro brothers was completed when Secretary of State John Kerry raised the American flag over the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

ISIS, which is using chemical weapons, was confirmed to have raped American hostage Kayla Mueller, keeping her as a sex slave for the caliph in two years of captivity before her death.

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban renewed their commitment vows.

Opposition to the Iran nuclear deal continues to mount, though the administration would rather bury its head in the sand for that development.

But President Obama’s playlist leads the White House website.

Yes, the White House announced, the commander in chief, who’s spent the week golfing along Cape Cod, joined Spotify this week! “And our inaugural playlist was hand-picked by none other than President Obama.”

“Your summer just got a little groovier,” the administration declared. “When asked to pick a few of his favorite songs for the summer, the President got serious. He grabbed a pen and paper and drafted up not one, but two separate summer playlists: One for the daytime, and one for the evening.”

And the White House provided official photographic evidence of POTUS picking his playlist:

Anyone living in Rhode Island who wants to get a free voter ID can get one

Although Rhode Island residents can easily get a photo voter ID, requiring one at a polling place suppresses “minority, low-income, disabled, and elderly voters,” according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

So, of course, the ACLU has demanded an end to the state’s photo voter ID law enacted by a Democratic legislature in 2011.

Anyone living in Rhode Island who wants to get a free voter ID can get one. All you have to do is provide an employee ID card; an ID card provided by a commercial establishment; a credit or debit card; a military ID card; a student ID card; a health club ID card; an insurance plan ID card; or a public housing ID card.

Don’t have one of those forms of identification? No problem!

Years before Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, German scholars were advocating the killing of “worthless” people under the protection of the state. On April 7, 1933 the Nazis eliminated “long established ethical and administrative public supervisory bodies” when they introduced the “law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” Euthanasia and experimentation on human subjects became the Nazi norm. The purveyors of Nazism saw their system as “applied biology.”

Can one draw a parallel with the Nazi “applied biology” ideology and the recent revelations of Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby parts? Is it “erroneous thinking” to show sympathy for “lives [deemed] devoid of value” but from which parts of those lives medical benefit can be derived? And are any such “errors of judgment, diagnosis, and execution to be of concern when compared to the social benefits that might eventually accrue?”

In a New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson titled “Nazi Scientists and Ethics of Today” scientists discuss the ethical questions concerning the use of Nazi data. Dr. Benno Muller-Hill, a molecular biologist and director of the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne in West Germany maintains that people “should remember those who died. We should not try to squeeze profit out of it.” Others have “suggested that the use of the data would serve as a lesson to the world, that the victims did not die futilely, and that a post mortem use of the data would retroactively give ‘purpose’ to their otherwise meaningless deaths.” Yet, “Doctor Howard Spiro, of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University, insists that no one honors the memory of the dead victims by learning from experiments carried out on them. Instead, we make the Nazis… retroactive partners in the victims’ torture and death.”

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won’t be uncorking the champagne when Secretary of State John Kerry officially opens an American embassy in Cuba today for the first time in 54 years.

Instead, the Republican White House hopeful marked the historic occasion by delivering a stinging rebuke of President Barack Obama’s two signature diplomatic breakthroughs this year, vowing to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran and threatening to sever diplomatic ties with the Castro regime in Cuba.

Mr. Rubio outlined those positions in a Friday speech in New York hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, further casting himself as the candidate most eager to reignite tensions with two longtime adversaries.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat to become secretary of state in the Obama administration, making her the public face to the world for the man who dashed her own hopes for the presidency,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 22, 2008.

Well, that was a mistake.

Maybe even the mistake of a lifetime. You’ve probably heard that Mrs. Clinton is seeking the presidency again. As in 2008, she is the inevitable Democratic nominee but her prospects are looking shaky. This time virtually all of her problems, except those having to do with her character and political talent (or lack thereof), can be traced to her decision to leave the Senate and join the Obama administration.

Start with the one that is most obvious, and most severe: the metastasizing scandal over her improper use of a private email server. As the Associated Press reported in March, when the scandal first became public:

Members of Congress who are demanding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails are largely exempt from such scrutiny themselves.

Congress makes its own rules, and has never subjected itself to open records laws that force agencies such as the State Department to maintain records and turn them over to the public when asked.

There’s also no requirement for members of Congress to use official email accounts, or to retain, archive or store their emails, while in office or after. That’s in contrast to the White House and the rest of the executive branch.

The AP piece suggests that makes hypocrites of the Republicans who currently hold majorities in Congress, but then goes on to note that “open government advocates are largely unconcerned. They agree it makes sense for Congress to be treated differently from the executive branch.”

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign “is taking on the stale air of the bunker,” writes Peggy Noonan. “When you mention to Democrats that Nixon never burned the tapes but Hillary surely burned that server, they nod, smile or half-wince. No one grows defensive for her. It does not seem possible that more candidates, big ones, won’t get in.”

A Journal editorial today adds that the “admission that her aides were also using her server demolishes Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that she used this server for personal ‘convenience.’ She was really running a parallel mini-State email operation.”

And our columnist Kimberley Strassel notes that this week Mrs. Clinton’s “use of private emails while serving as secretary of state turned from a political problem into a potentially legal problem.”
It’s not the only problem. “Democrats also see new weakness in their favorite themes. Here is Mrs. Clinton trying out an inequality argument, as she builds up her personal bank account. Here she is floating the ‘war on women’ theme, as her foundation takes donations from countries that whip rape victims. Here she calls for lower college costs while charging these institutions $250,000 for a speech. Here is a candidate who was in the past for Keystone, and for trade, and for more intervention overseas. And who maybe now is not. Though they don’t really know.

A cheer and a half for the Obama Administration for finally recognizing something the U.S. government has been denying since the 1970s: that the market for oil is global.

The acknowledgment takes the form of a Commerce Department decision disclosed Friday to let U.S. companies export domestically produced crude oil to Mexico. Technically it’s a swap, meaning that we give Mexicans crude oil in the grade they need in exchange for Mexican oil that fits our needs. The swap will help to ease a refining mismatch on the Gulf Coast that has caused America’s light crude to pile up in storage areas that are almost full because they have no place to go.

While this is a good step, it leaves the real problem untouched: the ban itself. The ban dates to the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which Congress passed in response to that era’s oil crisis. The idea was that if we could keep oil produced within our borders for the domestic market, it would insulate Americans from price spikes.

‘Cuba’s future is for Cubans to shape,” declared Secretary of State John Kerry in Havana on Friday as he reopened the U.S. Embassy after 54 years. If only this were true. The reality is that Cuba’s future is still reserved for the Castro brothers and their political comrades to shape, and that hasn’t changed a whit since President Obama decided to recognize the Cuban regime in December.

“Having normal relations makes it easier for us to talk—and talk can deepen understanding even when we know full well that we will not always see eye-to-eye on everything,” Mr. Kerry said. This sums up the Obama vision of foreign policy, in which talk typically turns out to be its own reward.

Certainly there isn’t much to show so far for the U.S. outreach to Cuba. The U.S. has supplied the government run by Fidel and Raúl Castro and the military with much-wanted new global legitimacy. The U.S. has also eased travel restrictions to the island, and American business interests and the Obama Administration are lobbying Congress to end the U.S. trade embargo.

Edward Said leaves us with the impression that all prejudice is only on the part of the West.

To the traditionally minded, news of such things as man-made laws based on objective evidence, free speech, equal justice under law, democracy, elections, freedom for women, freedom of religion and respect for the “other,” and so on, may have come as a sort of horror. Despots recoiled from the very thought of democracy. Religious leaders fumed at secular education, the freedom to question and say what one liked, even about religion.

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” — Hasan al-Banna’, Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, 1928.

The vast amount of what is called “Islamophobia,” however, is not that at all. Fair criticism is not phobic, responses to Islamic terrorism are reasonable reactions to violence.

Based on news reports of Muslims murdering other Muslims and killing Christians, there is, ironically, probably more Islamophobia among Muslims for each other than there is from Westerners toward Muslims. There is also probably more “Infidelophobia” by Muslims toward non-Muslims than by non-Muslims toward Muslims.