RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393713/liberalism-ruins-victor-davis-hanson

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Obama’s immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don’t think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

My last post (“May the Farce Be With You“) drew 280 comments, most of them infuriated, and most of them ill-informed. By way of remedy, I repost below an April 4, 2007 review-essay on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Children of Hurin. My literary friends point out that Tolkien’s style is turgid and his literary muse is lame. I don’t care. No writer in the English language did more to uplift popular culture. Star Wars, I observe, derives from Richard Wagner’s noxious Ring cycle by way of the odious Joseph Campbell, and had a corrupting effect on the culture. The contrast with Tolkien is instructive. Rather than remasticate the pagan idea of the hero, Tolkien created a pagan anti-hero (specifically, an anti-Beowulf and anti-Siegfried) in the tragic figure of Turin. Reconstructed from manuscripts by Tolkien’s son Christopher, the Turin story sheds light on the broader purpose of The Lord of the Rings, and illuminates the fraught relationship between the pagan and Christian worlds.

Many readers objected to the way I threw Harry Potter into the same kettle as Luke Skywalker. A qualification is in order: J.K. Rowling stole from Star Wars as well as from Tolkien (and of course from Thomas Hughes), so that one can read a variety of different standpoints into her work. They all are there, in unhappy cohabitation.
Tolkien’s Christianity and the pagan tragedy

The Children of Hurin, by J R R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Reviewed by Spengler

J R R Tolkien was the most Christian of 20th-century writers, not because he produced Christian allegory and apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of his son Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume from several manuscripts, we have before us a treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose of his The Lord of the Rings.

In The Children of Hurin, a tragedy set some 6,000 years before the tales recounted in The Lord of the Rings, we see clearly why it was that Tolkien sought to give the English-speaking peoples a new pre-Christian mythology. It is a commonplace of Tolkien scholarship that the writer, the leading Anglo-Saxon scholar of his generation, sought to restore to the English their lost mythology. In this respect the standard critical sources (for example Edmund Wainwright) mistake Tolkien’s profoundly Christian motive. In place of the heroes Siegfried and Beowulf, the exemplars of German and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the forces of evil.

In Marked for Death [1], Geert Wilders argues that Islam has marked not only him but ultimately every freedom-loving individual and so-called “Islamophobe” for death because of the supremacist nature of its doctrines. What outrages Wilders, in addition to the Islamic threat and the demographic inroads the religion of war is carving into the European urban landscape, is the scandalous complicity of Europe’s governing elites, leading to the eventual subversion of the continent. Although Wilders does not address American vulnerability in any detailed way, what must surely strike a disinterested observer is the equal complicity with which the commander in chief of the United States is pursuing a program of American decline. On the domestic, economic, military, and foreign policy fronts, Obama is energetically and probably irretrievably weakening the country he has sworn to defend, with surprisingly little concerted opposition, or even awareness, from many politicians or from the still-infatuated members of his constituency.

To start with Islam, it is mind-boggling to observe an American president vigorously facilitating the Islamic imperial agenda in a number of different but equally effective ways. He could not do better — or worse — if he were a transplanted Qatari sheikh. One notes the infamous Cairo address [2] with its bloat of lies and factoids. The UN speeches [3], such as “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” The elevation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives [4] into sensitive posts in his administration. Islamic outreach through official institutions such as NASA, once designed for space exploration, now, apparently, for Muslim apologetics. Iftar dinners at the White House. Congratulatory letters to mosques [5] and his designation of terror attacks as “workplace violence,” “man-caused disasters” and “traffic incidents.” His concessionary engaging in a secret correspondence [6] with Iran’s anti-American and anti-Semitic Ayatollah Khamenei. The withdrawing of troops from Iraq, thus opening the way for the establishment of the Islamic State [7]. The purging of FBI training manuals of all reference to jihad. And the interviews [8] in which Obama claims that the U.S. is “one of the biggest Muslim nations.” (In actuality, professing Muslims count for 1.5% of the American people, in comparison, for example, to Muslims amounting to 13% of India’s census.) [9]

But it doesn’t stop there. Obama is not only manifestly pro-Islam; he is demonstrably anti-American. His policies across the board are all of a piece. Domestically, his economic projects have been calamitous. Obama has pied-pipered the nation to the brink of fiscal ruin, “increasing the national debt,” as Conrad Black writes [10], “from the $10-trillion accumulated in 233 years of American independence prior to 2009 to $18-trillion in six years.” His racial interventions have set race relations back a generation or more — most recently his urging the Ferguson rioters to “stay on course [11].” His attack on the Constitution is systematically undermining the republican nature of the U.S. Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey cites [12] the president for violating the Constitution 24 times with regard to Obamacare alone.

Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell—a fact developing countries keenly realize.

Which would be worse: a hostile foreign regime using a sinister magnetic pulse to take down the entire electrical grid—or the chief executives of the world’s major oil companies having a collective personal crisis about carbon emissions, shutting down their operations, and sending their employees to live the rest of their days off the grid in rural Vermont? Either way, the country goes dark. Transportation stops. Schools, hospitals and businesses close down. We are left to grow our own scrawny vegetables and slaughter our own animals for meat. We cannot even text.

If you drive a car, or use modern medicine, or believe in man’s right to economic progress, then according to Alex Epstein you should be grateful—more than grateful. In “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” the author, an energy advocate and founder of a for-profit think tank called the Center for Industrial Progress, suggests that if all you had to rely on were the good intentions of environmentalists, you would be soon plunged back into a pre-industrial hell. Life expectancy would plummet, climate-related deaths would soar, and the only way that Timberland and Whole Foods could ship their environmentally friendly clothing and food would be by mule. “Being forced to rely on solar, wind, and biofuels would be a horror beyond anything we can imagine,” writes Mr. Epstein, “as a civilization that runs on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy would see its machines dead, its productivity destroyed, its resources disappearing.”

When you consider that most of us live what we would consider decent, moral lives, it seems extraordinary that anyone feels it necessary to write a book called “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” We use fossil fuels and their by-products in everything we do and rarely consider it a vice. A pang of conscience may strike us when we read of oil spills or melting icebergs. But not when we are sitting on a plastic chair, visiting a power-guzzling hospital or turning on our computers. To call fossil fuels “immoral” is to tarnish our entire civilization and should plunge us all into a permanent state of guilt, which seems a bit strong.

Narratives and allegations are not facts, despite what the media would have us believe.

In March 2007 the New York Times Magazine ran a stunning 12,000-word cover story on the subject of “The Women’s War.” It told the story of several female veterans of the war in Iraq, of the sexual assault some had endured in the military, and of their subsequent struggles with alcoholism, depression, PTSD and other effects of combat.

Among the most compelling characters in the piece was a woman named Amorita Randall, who claimed she had barely survived an IED attack on her Humvee and that she had been raped twice in her six years of Navy service. She claimed to have reported the second incident to her commanders only to be told “not to make such a big deal about it.”

The details are gruesome: “I remember there were other guys in the room too,” Ms. Randall told the Times. “Somebody told me they took pictures and put them on the Internet.” Ms. Randall, added reporter Sara Corbett, “says she has blocked out most of the details of the second rape—something else experts say is a common self-protective measure taken by the brain in response to violent trauma—and that she left Iraq ‘in a daze.’ ”

Only one problem: “Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did,” as the Times later acknowledged in an Editors’ Note. Instead, her overseas service was spent in Guam, 6,200 miles away from the combat zone. The Navy, the Times added, “had no record of a sexual-assault report involving Ms. Randall.”

The president’s unilateral approach ensures that a new global carbon pact will be a campaign issue in two years.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, this week and next will lay the groundwork for a more significant gathering in Paris a year from now: the 21st conference of the 1992 United Nations Convention on Climate Change. The third such conference, in 1997, produced the Kyoto Protocol, the much-heralded but ineffective plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions without applying to developing nations. The 15th conference, held in Copenhagen five years ago to draw up a successor treaty, collapsed spectacularly under determined opposition from China and India.

The Paris conference, also intended to bring about an agreement covering all the world’s emitters, promises to be different—if only in the way it influences the next U.S. presidential election.

The Obama administration drew two lessons from Copenhagen. First, that the key to getting a global climate deal in Paris would be to secure first a bilateral one with China. Second, that seeking a binding treaty is overambitious and unnecessary. An accord that doesn’t require Senate approval would suffice. America’s international commitments could be implemented by executive actions.

From President Obama’s viewpoint, developments are moving in the right direction. At Copenhagen, China’s posture was that its carbon-intensity target was its own affair. But on Nov. 12 Mr. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China had agreed not to exceed its carbon emissions at 2030 levels, while the U.S. would double the pace of America’s greenhouse-gas reductions.

The consequence is that the fate of the current attempt to agree on a global climate pact won’t be decided around the negotiating tables in Paris a year from now, but by American voters in November 2016. President Obama has all but guaranteed that where candidates stand on implementing a Paris climate accord will be a campaign issue.

Maj. Avichay Adraee, an Israeli army spokesman, was taken aback when he received a message from a mysterious man writing from the heart of Syria’s bloody civil war.

The man, a Sunni Muslim who created a Facebook page called “Jobar Synagogue,” said he was on a mission to preserve his town’s crown jewel, a centuries-old religious site venerated by the three major religions. Merely contacting the Israelis was an act that could have put his life in danger.
“If we do not move fast to protect this historical heritage, it will be lost forever,” he wrote to the Israeli major, via Facebook.

The exchange last year was part of a frantic mission to rescue the synagogue, located in the battle-worn Damascus suburb of Jobar. The man behind the Facebook page, who uses the nom de guerre Abbas Abu Suleiman, got the attention of rabbis in Israel and New York, Syrian exiles in Washington and a Manhattan diamond-district salesman who visited the synagogue as a boy.

Mr. Suleiman hoped the Jewish community would intervene with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not only to save the site, but to halt the bombardment of his hometown. Safeguarding a part of Syria’s multicultural religious heritage, he hoped, might help the country rebuild whenever the war was over.

Maj. Adraee gets as many as 18,000 Facebook messages each day, many berating him for Israel’s policies toward its neighbors. After receiving Mr. Suleiman’s plea, he didn’t know what to think. Was this man an ally? An opportunist? He replied to the Facebook message with a question mark.

Others contacted by Mr. Suleiman had a similar reaction. Jewish leaders on two continents worried about, among other things, whether intervening would endanger the tiny community of aging Jews remaining in Syria.

Obama isn’t at war with ISIS, the Taliban or the Muslim Brotherhood. He’s at war with the Constitution, the middle class, and, ultimately, with America.

For our president, the 2014 election was liberating. There’s no longer a need to pretend, for the sake of his party, that he feels anything but contempt for the nation he was elected to govern.

Last week was typical. On Monday, after a grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson for acting in self-defense, a mob once again rampaged in Ferguson, Missouri. After mouthing a regulation-issue call for calm, the president used the mayhem to push his racist/redistributionist agenda.

While there’s no excuse for violence, “we have to understand” the rage of the lynch mob, the leader of the free world told us. “We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson (black businesses burned to the ground) speaks to the broader problems that we still face as a nation” – like having a president who condones anarchy?

Obama insisted, “There are good people on both sides of the debate” (who are the good people who wanted to crucify a cop for doing his duty?) who want to work with his administration in “much-needed criminal justice reform” – including eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and racial quotas for traffic stops. Attorney General Eric Holder, who never met a quota he didn’t like, said Ferguson shows the need for affirmative action in police hiring.

The nation’s felon-in-chief is in sync with the petty criminals who loot liquor stores and shoot at police cars. On November 5, he held a private meeting at the White House with the most prominent outside agitators, including Al Sharpton, who disclosed: “Mr. Obama was concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was he knew we were advocating.”

The day before Ferguson again exploded, the president gave a speech in Chicago attempting to justify his latest lawlessness. It isn’t enough for him to amnesty five million illegal aliens in violation of the Constitution, he has to rub our noses in it.

The assumptions that Israel’s economic growth depends on the conclusion of peace accords, and that Israel’s economy cannot withstand BDS pressure (boycott, divestment and sanctions) are inconsistent with reality.

In fact, Israel’s unique economic growth – from $1.5bn GDP in 1949 to $300bn in 2014, from $50mn annual exports in 1949 to $97bn in 2014, and from no foreign exchange reserves in 1949 to $92bn in 2014 – has been driven by Aliyah (Jewish immigration), fiscal responsibility, brain power, cutting-edge commercial and defense technologies, exports, military posture of deterrence and (most recently) natural gas; not by the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, or the Oslo Accord with the PLO.

For example, Israel’s GDP surged by 8%-14% annually following Israel’s victory in the Six Day War (1967-1972), and by 9% upon the launching of the Aliyah wave of one million Olim from the USSR in 1990. On the other hand, the post Oslo (1993-1996) economic growth of 4%-7% was triggered, mostly, by the Aliyah ripple effect, but was marred by rapidly worsening budget and trade deficits.

In addition, Israel’s 42.5% annual inflation in 1977 – when the Begin-Sadat peace initiative was launched – galloped to 111.4% in 1979 and 445% in 1984. Inflation was reduced to 19.7% in 1986, and to the current low single digit levels through an unprecedented policy of fiscal responsibility; not through the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

The BDS impact on Israel’s economy is minor as demonstrated by the improved trade balance between Israel and Turkey and Britain, independent of the Turkish government and British Parliament support of BDS. Moreover, Israel’s vulnerability to BDS is highly constrained since 90% of Israel’s exports are business-to-business, enhancing the cost-effectiveness and the level of health, medicine, irrigation, science, education and national security of Israel’s trade partners. Furthermore, Israel’s trade is trending away from Europe – the epicenter of BDS – towards India, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the former Soviet Republics.

While the Rev Al Sharpton was in Ferguson last Sunday, whipping up continued frenzy over the refusal of the grand jury to indict white Officer Darren Wilson for killing a black man who had just committed a robbery and when apprehended, tried to grab the officer’s gun, 8 black people were shot – 3 fatally – in Newark and 4 more at a baby shower in Brooklyn. These were all young adults whose lives were snuffed out or brutally impacted by other blacks, though no arrests have been made so far. A month ago, a black man used his car to plow into a crowd of black people who had also attended a baby shower, killing one and injuring two. The racial violence of black on black is a nightmare for law-abiding urban black citizens, most of whom understand that the police are there to protect them, not act as executioners. But for the Reverend Al, playing the race card has always been and continues to be his only modus operandi. It’s the ticket to his overwhelming acceptance by American political leaders, too intimidated to excoriate a lying tax cheat who profits from his motor-mouthed characterization of black people as continually oppressed and victims of white racism.

Numbers tell a different story than the narrative that’s been super-imposed on Ferguson. According to the FBI data for 2011: out of 2,695 black murder victims – 2,447 were killed by blacks. Though only 13% of our national population, blacks account for more than 50% of homicide victims, 94% of whom are killed by other blacks. When we look for reasons for poverty and criminality, there are two overriding statistics that govern their predictability – education and being raised in a single parent family. According to the Schott Foundation, only 52% of black males graduate from high school within 4 years (compared with 58% Latinos and 78% whites) and perhaps most significantly, 73% of black children are being raised by a single mother (Fed Center for Disease Control). What we see is that black children are most victimized by the disintegration of black family life and the resultant difficulty they face in completing their education and becoming gainfully employed. Without those two pre-requisites, there is a tsunami of possibilities for drug and alcohol addiction, mental problems, poverty, criminality, homelessness, disease and death by violence.