RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is fine to discuss a philosophy of freedom. But discussing it also requires a good, hard look at the political realities that negate any chance of freedom in the near future.

Frightened Turtles

I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state.

This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles.

This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans, Democrats, environmentalists, welfare statists, special interests or lobbyists, and so on. President Barack Obama is the apex and end heir of every statist law and notion ever proposed or legislated, ever since ratification of the Constitution, even as the ink on it was barely dry – and Obama is the logical end of all those unopposed laws and policies. He loots without care or thought of whatever might replace the looted wealth and nullified rights – except for stage-managed anarchy and beating into submission the American spirit.

Obama practices Islamic taqiyya, which is saying one thing in his woozy, folksy style English, but meaning something else. Most readers here, instead of conceding that Obama is a nihilist, buy the official line that he is merely a rudderless, arrogantly insouciant pragmatist. Actually, his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a card-carrying pragmatist, formulating his policies on the premise that he could preserve that status quo – whatever that might have been – by denying the deadly peril of Islam. However, Obama, who administration has been top-heavy with Muslims from his first term, is a rotten-to-the-bone nihilist steeped in “community organizing” and a subscriber to the agenda of the “socialist transformation” of the country into a super-size European Union. Some intellectuals of my acquaintance deny that he is a nihilist, and instead call him a rudderless pragmatist or assign him some other non-condemnatory appellation.

This is not observing his behavior and actions with any kind of objectivity. It is an evasion of the evidence of one’s senses. Waiting for Obamacare to collapse? Waiting for Obama to okay the Keystone Pipeline? Waiting for him to put together a “Coalition of the Reluctant” to combat ISIS? Waiting for him to rein in our lawless Attorney General, Eric Holder, or to order any number of federal agencies to stop spying and threatening private citizens and organizations that question federal power? Take a number.

In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

“I write with serious concerns stemming from a telephone call my staff received late on Friday afternoon from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) about the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants,” Issa states.

A senior OPA official—under the apparent mistaken belief he had called the staff of Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings—asked if the Committee would release Committee documents to the media so that the Department could publicly comment on the material. I am extremely troubled by this attempt to improperly coordinate the release of Committee documents with the Minority staff. This effort to preemptively release incomplete and selectively chosen information undermines the Department’s claims that it is responding in good faith.

The senior OPA official to whom Issa refers is Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Although his name was not mentioned in the letter, he confirmed that he made the call, which took place last Friday at 5:01 p.m. EST. As Issa indicates, he believes Fallon thought he was talking to members of Rep. Elijah Cummings staff.

(Fallon) then asked the Committee employee if the Committee would agree to release the material to selected reporters and thereby allow the Department an opportunity to publicly comment on it.

The subject of the conversation was attorney Andrew Strelka, who is defending IRS commissioner John Koskinen in litigation initiated by the pro-Israel group Z Street. Prior to his job in the DOJ’s civil trial section, Strelka worked for Lois Lerner in the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organizations Division—where Z Street’s alleged mistreatment occurred. Documents indicate Strelka was kept in the loop about the IRS’s targeting practices.

The Committee wants to talk to Strelka about this apparent conflict of interest, but the DOJ has refused the request, prompting a Sept. 3 letter to Holder from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) accusing the DOJ of “conspiring with Mr. Strelka to prevent the American people from learning the truth.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-state-is-not-islamic-on-the-glazov-gang/

In his recent speech about his ISIS “policy,” President Obama emphasized one of his favorite themes: that ISIS is not Islamic. “No religion,” he assured the world, “condones the killing of innocents… ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”

In response to the president’s statement on the supposed un-Islamic nature of the terrorist Islamic State, Frontpage is re-running The Glazov Gang’s feature interviews with two of the world’s leading scholars on Islam: JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer and Shillman Journalism Fellow Raymond Ibrahim.

Both discussions unveil the true roots of Jihadi terrorist groups such as ISIS and reveal the lie behind the statements such as those recently made by Obama denying the Islamic role in Islamic terror. Spencer and Ibrahim both issue a dire warning about the hazardous danger our society faces by deceiving itself about the real enemy we face.

See both interview below:

Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.

You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.

If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.

Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.

This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.

Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.

Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.

To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.

In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.

On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.

“A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow…”

Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when they count up their numbers. Compound death is more than a statistic; it is incomprehensible.

The banal media coverage of September 11 grapples with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.

This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.

The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.

The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.

When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/9-11-thirteen-years-ago-we-vowed-never-forget-but-do-we-still-mean-it

“If September 11, 2001, was a wake-up call, clearly America has fallen back to sleep.”

Stephen Flynn

As we come up on the 13th anniversary of 9-11 we should take a moment to think about the significance of that fateful day, the courage displayed by average citizens and professional responders alike, and the legacy they have left us. Have we been good stewards of their sacrifice, their memory, that legacy?

Some might argue that rebuilding a tower, and placing memorial fountains at Ground Zero, as well as creating the 9-11 Museum are all evidence of our gratitude. No argument there. But it must go further.

For many of us, 9 – 11 has always been very personal, as thoughts turn to the friends and colleagues we lost that fateful day, after having made the ultimate sacrifice. We owe their memory much more than a passing thought. 9-11 reminds us of the work of preparedness we embarked upon, the firefighters and responders to Ground Zero we treated, and the resolve with which we all pledged “never again on my watch.” That was the motto for so many of us who headed various forms of terrorism, bioweapons, or general preparedness enterprises.

Perhaps that was because some of us remembered all too well the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. It was not the random act of madmen. It should have been the wake-up call that America and the West were facing an adversary unlike any we had ever encountered. Instead it was all too readily forgotten. Recognizing the effort, and resolve it took to mount such a concerted attack on the United States in 1993 and again in 2001 gives us pause to think about our own efforts and resolve to counter future attacks.

Unfortunately it took the second and fatal attack of the World Trade Center to spark, albeit it seems in hindsight a fleeting recognition that 9-11 was just the beginning. Even with the Boston bombing on 4-15-13 as a reminder, we as our nation retain a persistent disbelief about the reality of facing an organized, dedicated, resource rich, and hate-filled enemy committed to punishing, taming, perhaps even conquering the West. In spite of three loud, high profile, and deadly attacks in 21 years, we as a society don’t seem to fully grasp the notion that not everyone thinks as we do, believes in what we hold sacred, shares the same goals in life, or wants to peacefully coexist in a ‘live and let live world.’

Over the past week a number of articles have appeared in mainstream Western publications, penned by respectful Western authors, which are (in all likelihood unwittingly, I must add) out-Trifkovicing Trifkovic in their assessment of the tragedy in Ukraine. Having made many of the same points over the past nine months, I am glad to say that Chronicles is no longer providing a lone voice of sanity regarding this unnecessary, avoidable and solvable crisis.

Sir Anthony Russell “Tony” Brenton, KCMG, served as Britain’s ambassador in Moscow from 2004 to 2008. His other credentials are too long to quote. On September 10 he published an article in The Daily Telegraph (“It’s time to back away from the Russian wolf: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin won’t be thwarted by NATO or economic sanctions and his aim of a neutral Ukraine is acceptable”) which opens with the Russian proverb that if you can’t face the wolf, you should not go into the forest. The West has blundered into the Ukrainian forest and enraged the Russian wolf, Brenton says, “only to discover that we cannot face him. We should now be looking for the path out.” He says that Western policy has been built on two false premises: “The first is that we must stop a revanchist Russia. As this narrative runs: yesterday Russia took Crimea; today Eastern Ukraine; tomorrow – who knows – Estonia, Poland? This precisely mirrors the Russian nightmare of predatory NATO expansion; yesterday Poland and Estonia, today Georgia, tomorrow – who knows – parts of Russia itself?” The mutual suspicions of 1914 spring worryingly to mind, Brenton warns:

In fact, before what the Russians (with some justification) saw as a Western grab last February for control in Kiev, there was no evidence of Russian revanchism. Those who point to Georgia are wrong – it was the Georgians who started the 2008 war. Meanwhile, Ukraine is a uniquely sensitive case for Russia; the countries are bound by deep social, cultural, and historical ties. Kiev is known as the “mother of Russia cities”. And even in Ukraine the Russians want influence, not actual territory. The “we must stand up to Putin as we did to Hitler” line is pure schoolboy politics. Putin, of whom I saw a fair amount as UK ambassador to Moscow, is not an ideologically driven fanatic, but much closer to Talleyrand – the calculating, pragmatic rebuilder of his country’s status in the world.

The idea that sabre-rattling is necessary to convince Russia of NATO’s seriousness is ridiculous, Brenton writes: “If the Russians didn’t take the NATO security guarantee seriously, why would they be so worried about Ukraine joining?” He is entirely right on his second key point, that sanctions will not work: “There was an air of desperation around claims at last weekend’s NATO summit in Newport that sanctions pushed Russia into the current ceasefire. In reality the US, UK and Ukraine resisted a ceasefire that left Russia in command of the field in East Ukraine. As it happens, Ukraine only moved to accept the ceasefire because it suddenly started losing the war:

Sanctions are a potemkin policy, deployed in the absence of any effective alternative. They have probably done some economic damage, but their sole political effect has been to rally the Russian people behind their president, and reinforce Putin’s conviction that this is a struggle he cannot afford to lose, whatever the cost. Even the Russian opposition doesn’t support them.

At least it is better than ” religious” indoctrination by radical Moslem Imams….rsk
Spending time in prison shouldn’t be so miserable that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, but that doesn’t mean that prisons should be luxurious. An overview of spending by the Federal Bureau of Prisons suggests that excessive taxpayer dollars are being spent just to make prisoners’ lives more enjoyable.

Take a look at this list of questionable prison spending over the past two years:

Flat-screen TVs — $119,244.20. That is, $59,068.80 for 120 flat-screen 42-inch LCD televisions, $40,776.30 for 90 wide-screen 42-inch plasma HDTVs, and $19,399.10 for 74 40-inch LED HDTVs.
Workout equipment — $49,490.26. Taxpayers funded three treadmills, a commercial rower, and slam balls, perhaps so prisoners could “let out some aggression during [their] cardio work.”
Beauty-salon equipment — $30,410.23. Spent on manicure and pedicure stations, reclining shampoo chairs, wig dryers, and massage tables.
Magazine subscriptions — $15,820.23. To provide, for prisoner entertainment, magazines including Sports Weekly, Sports Illustrated, American Football, Basketball Digest, ESPN, Hot Rod, NASCAR Illustrated, Fitness Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People, People Español, Star Magazine, and Esquire.
Hair-styling supplies — $25,928.20. For professional straightening irons, hair-coloring supplies, curler sets, and hair-styling chairs.
Books — $13,560.00. Including 2,750 fiction books, 2,750 science-fiction books, and 2,750 mystery books.
Sports equipment — $9,959.57. For 144 Ping-Pong balls, 30 softball gloves, 30 yoga mats, ten sets of poker cards, and 15 sets of the board game Monopoly.
Stair steppers — $12,488.75.So prisoners can stay in shape by providing them with high-end commercial fitness steppers.

Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, tells National Review Online that this type of spending “definitely raises some questions.” He explains, “Our view is that prisons shouldn’t be Holiday Inns, but they also shouldn’t be cruel and inhumane.” One way to maintain balance, he suggests, is to provide less-sophisticated health facilities. “If you’ve got a yard and track,” Levin notes, “there are ways for prisoners to exercise without having a full-scale health club.” He maintains that “the Bureau [of Prisons] needs to be able to explain to the public why this spending is necessary and in the interest of the taxpayers. If they can’t explain that, then we need to question what the real purpose is for the amenity they’re providing.”

— Caroline Craddock is an Agostinelli Fellow and research intern at National Review.

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb — or both, or neither?

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and as bipartisan leadership in Congress push to approve as much as $4 billion to arm the Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State.

This confirms our reporting about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups here at PJ Media last week.

On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border.

“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade.

“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal.

“Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance.

Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December.