RUTHFULLY YOURS

One reason American politics is so polarized is the White House tendency to blindslide critics with personal attacks that misrepresent their views. This week’s school lunch drive-by is a classic of the genre, with first lady Michelle Obama and even the White House cook claiming Republicans are in favor of childhood obesity.

In remarks Tuesday, Mrs. Obama denounced what she called “efforts in Congress to roll back” federal nutrition standards for school cafeterias. “It’s unacceptable to me not just as first lady, but as a mother. . . . Our kids deserve so much better than that. They really do,” she said. The first lady followed up with a New York Times op-ed, “The Campaign for Junk Food,” in which she assailed “a bill to override science.”

Meanwhile, Sam Kass, who used to be an executive chef and now runs Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move program, declared that this anti-science bill would be “absolutely devastating” for child health, adding that “industry interests are definitely at play.” So Republicans aren’t merely wrong, they’re also on the take from the food lobby.

First lady Michelle Obama and Food Network chef Rachel Ray discussing lunches with students from the Eastside and Northside Elementary Schools in Clinton, Miss. in 2013. Associated Press

The GOP apparently provoked this carpet bombing by asking for modest flexibility in the nutrition regulations meant to promote more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and reduce meats and starch. The changes were mandated by a 2010 bill that passed with rare bipartisan support, but their implementation by the first lady and Agriculture Department has become a rolling fiasco.

The rules impose very specific quotas for the type and amount of food served. Cafeterias, for example, must feature five “vegetable subgroups” across “dark green, red/orange, beans/peas (legumes), starchy and ‘other’ vegetables.” Schools have had to eliminate popular menu items such as sandwiches. Two slices of bread over five days exceed the weekly grain limits.

There are two kinds of people: those who think that everyone will (or should be) saved, and those who don’t. Among the former are many – communist, socialists, and most present-day liberals – who assert that human agency can right all the world’s wrongs. There also are religious millenarians who believe that God has a plan for universal salvation, but because things do not work out this way, they feel obliged to help God accomplish what he does not seem eager enough to do on his own.

That is a religious outlook rejected by the Catholic Church. [1] After Pope Francis I’s journey to the Holy Land this weekend, though, it is hard to suppress the perception that in his heart he yearns for universal salvation, although his public discourse, to be sure, is consistent with Church doctrine. The Holy Father really seems convinced that he can fix the world, starting with a part of the world that no-one has been able to fix, and in any case does not especially require fixing.

His intervention into Middle Eastern politics, I believe, arises from deep theological convictions that override perceptions of fact and practicality. He appears to believe that a miracle will move the recalcitrant hearts of the contending parties in the Middle East. I believe in miracles, but I don’t think they can summoned at will.

Why focus on the Israel-Palestine issue to begin with? The Muslim world long since put it on the back burner, as Lee Smithobserved last year. In the pope’s mind, the problems of the Palestinians – benign as they are compared to those of Syrians, Iraqis or even Egyptians – stand as a symbol of the ills of the world that a just God would want to fix. Francis has mistaken windmills for giants.

The pope’s strangest gesture, but perhaps his most characteristic, was to invite Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestine Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to the Vatican next month to pray for peace. Peres does not pray, as he hasacknowledged in public.

In the unlikely event that he were to pray, he could not do so in the Vatican, for Jews are forbidden to pray in buildings with Christian religious images. In any event he has no mandate to speak on Israel’s behalf, and will resign his largely ceremonial position in July. Outside of the world of miracles the exercise is triply pointless. According to most Islamic authorities, the same stricture applies to Abbas, who is not a religious man, either. A prayer session with Peres and Abbas is the stuff of the real maravilloso.

I endured a seven-hour TV marathon yesterday, beginning with Marine Le Pen’s press conference at the EU Parliament press center in Brussels, hopping from station to station, from newscast to debate, and ending with a 2-hour documentary on the Front National.

The Press Conference: a triumphant Marine Le Pen at the center and in the lead, flanked by Geert Wilders (PVV Netherlands), Harald Wilimsky (FPÖ Austria), Gerald Annemans (Vlaams Belang, Belgium), and Mateo Salvini (Northern League, Italy). Certain that her victory in France’s European elections has radically changed the face of Europe—“nothing will ever be the same”—she is supremely confident that she’ll find the two missing nationalities to complete her group and exert a strong influence in the EU Parliament as in domestic politics. The prospect is appetizing: if she can form a 7-nation group, she’ll get an operating budget of as much as 4 million euros, plus countless privileges and facilities. It’s not exactly equivalent to a seat on the UN Security Council, it will have little or no effect on the sluggish workings of the EU Parliament, but it will be hard cash and a sounding board to boost her French presidential ambitions.

The press conference was—theoretically—broadcast on the all-news BFM TV… except that they slipped coverage as soon as Geert Wilders began to speak… in English. I zapped, finally caught up with the event on France 24 / English in time to hear the last words of Wilders’ contribution. Then Wilinsky started to speak in German. No translation. And I haven’t been able to find a video of the entire press conference online.

From what I can gather, Marine is the Leader, the guys played supporting roles. L’Express cites a telling remark by Matteo Salvini: he says he is perfectly comfortable with Marine Le Pen even though members of the [Italian] Jewish community told him if he sat with her he would be outside the limits of democracy.

As it happens, President François Hollande was also in Brussels yesterday for a meeting of the EU Council (scheduled well in advance, not a crisis meeting as Marine Le Pen gleefully claimed). Hollande, known for his inveterate optimism, used his party’s disastrous score as leverage to warn the EU that it must heed the message and address the grievances of European citizens. This is a logical conclusion to the Socialist party line during the brief, pale, and unprofitable campaign. The problem with the EU, they argued, is not essential it’s partisan. Dominated by conservative parties, it produces austerity, inequality, injustice. When Europe-wide voters send a left wing majority to the EU Parliament, the people will have the Europe they want and need.

The arrogance of President Obama and his Administration know no bounds. A recent example being a comment by the director of the White House Policy Council, Cecelia Muñoz, as quoted in Monday’s New York Times. The article, “Colleges Rattled as Obama Seeks Rating System,” dealt with a rating system the Obama Administration is designing for the nation’s 7000 colleges and universities that receive a total of $150 billion each year in federal loans and grants.

The problems the Administration cited as an excuse for another government bureaucracy are real: tuitions are rising at rates that exceed inflation, graduation rates have been declining, student debt is a growing concern and the job market sucks. All of these problems have at their source the incompetent hand of government. Assigning another government bureaucracy to fix the problem is akin to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

The article in the Times mentioned that many college presidents have taken umbrage with the idea that Washington is dictating a mandate that directly affects them. The president of a Virginia university is quoted: “This is a take-it-or-leave-it approach.” Ms. Muñoz countered that Mr. Obama had no patience for anyone who attempted to block the effort. “This is happening,” is the way she so imperiously put it.

Ignoring any feelings of schadenfreude at the squirming of college presidents who otherwise are so blindly liberal, it is the chutzpah of those like Ms. Muñoz and Jamienne Studley that is so disconcerting. The latter, a deputy under-secretary at the Department of Education flippantly announced that rating colleges would be “like rating a blender,” a curious but telling analogy, as blenders produce a uniform product from a variety of sources, while a university expects to produce thousands of products, differentiated by hundreds of fields of studies. While we blame these supercilious remarks on the individuals making them, they reflect the Administration.

Easy availability of student loans has allowed colleges to raise prices at a more rapid rate than free markets would have permitted. Pressure to increase funding for qualified students from low-income families has meant that those who can pay full freight must pay more. It has meant that only those in the top one percent of incomes can afford to pay full tuition. Many colleges have become bloated with administrative staffs that have grown more quickly than instructional staffs.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-is-quite-literally-unbelievable

For Barack Obama speeches are not just motivational instruments or representations of a desired state of affairs, but feats of political transubstantiation, where, if he utters them, words become reality.

It is a behavior not dissimilar to Adolf Hitler maneuvering imaginary German divisions from his Berlin bunker while Russian troops rampage throughout the city above him.

Delusional is the only term that I can muster to describe the chasm that exists between the words Obama uses and the differing reality into which they are dispensed.

In politics and foreign policy, words have power if they are truthful and followed by corresponding actions. When they lack authenticity, however, words degenerate into the coarse tools of a con artist, receptive only to the cynical or the equally delusional.

It is as if Obama is following the George Burns axiom, the key to success is sincerity, if you can fake that, then you’ve got it made.

Case in point was his 2014 commencement speech at West Point, which was little more than a collection of false assumptions and imaginary accomplishments.

“Al Qaeda’s leadership in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated, and Osama bin Laden is no more. “

Ben Carson’s Prescription for America Why charity and responsibility matter for the country’s future

At the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, with the president seated only feet away, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson delivered a keynote address in which he criticized the Obama administration’s policies on key issues, including health care and taxes. Owing to the courage of his convictions and apparent common sense, there are now calls for Carson to run for president. For now, Dr. Carson says, “the more important thing that can be done with the platform I have been given is to try to convince the American populace that we are not one another’s enemies even if a (D) is by some of our names and an (R) by the names of others.” The author of the new book, One Nation: What We Can Do to Save America’s Future, Carson talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about his future plans and America’s hope.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: After an accomplished career as a brain surgeon, is it odd to be referred to as a “pundit”? Do the two have anything in common as best you can tell?

BEN CARSON: Technically I guess anyone who has opinions and expresses them is a pundit, so I don’t find that particularly strange. Certainly neurosurgeons have strong opinions about many things just as pundits too.

LOPEZ: Do you worry that all the people encouraging you to run for president could go to your head and affect your discernment?

CARSON: I do recognize the danger of being deceived by the overwhelming enthusiasm of the many crowds to which I speak. This is why I am taking into consideration many things and looking at the landscape and evaluating the pros and cons before making any decisions.

LOPEZ: What might you say to anyone surprised (both favorably and not favorably) to find you writing about “The Art of Compromise,” which is the title of one of the chapters in your new book?

CARSON: No one should be surprised that I am writing about compromise. We live in a diverse society and it is impossible to make progress if you can’t talk to each other and compromise.

LOPEZ: You explain the positive reaction to your most recent prayer-breakfast speech as people responding to common sense. But do we really have such a thing anymore? Agreed-upon good sense? There seems be so many conflicting truth claims out there.

CARSON: There is still plenty of common sense left in America. The problem is that people are afraid to express it because they will frequently be attacked by those who have a different vision for America. Common sense should reside in both parties and in all segments of the population by definition. Those interested in dividing America appeal to selfishness and sensitivity to accomplish their goals. Those things frequently do not include common sense.

LOPEZ: You write that “Each of us can control only our own behavior, but if we all take action individually, our actions will collectively have a significant impact on the direction of the country.” Is that quantifiable, or is there a danger that it is merely a leap of faith, or wishful thinking?

http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/05/thomas-hardy-in-judea/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=7e734d58e9-2014_5_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-7e734d58e9-41165129
Shavuot, the Jewish Holiday which celebrates Ruth begins on June 3….rsk
It’s impossible to describe the sound of good preaching in Hebrew. It’s not like the sonorous English of the King James Version, and it doesn’t have the soaring voice or the roars and whispers of preaching in the Baptist tradition. But in the hands of a master preacher and teacher, the Hebrew language yields colors, textures: the fields of the Bible take on shades of red and gold, and the women in the fields have names.

I once heard such a master, Rachel Keren, teaching the biblical book of Ruth to a group of seminary girls. I was the only man in the room; I can’t now remember why. She spoke about the dangers the widowed Ruth, a Moabite, faced on behalf of Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, when she went in the dead of night to lie in a harvest field in Judea. She was there to try to persuade Boaz, a cousin of Naomi’s late husband, to marry her and impregnate her with an offspring, thereby continuing the family line and incidentally saving both her and her mother-in-law from death by starvation.

So far, so convoluted. But Rachel Keren taught the Bible as if it were a slightly scandalous novel for young women. In fact a novel by the great and not so pious Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), set not in rural England but dry, rural Judea. There the color of the land was red or yellow unlike England’s green and brown, but scandal, hostile fate, and an ever-present chorus of gossiping neighbors were facts of life just as much as in Hardy’s fictional Wessex. There was also in Rachel’s version a full sense of the looming danger of rape or other injury as the young widow picked her way among the sleeping shepherd boys to the only one who counted, the one she had to marry in order to put her family history right. As Rachel told it, this was a living and immediate story that could have happened anywhere (but not, she gave the girls to understand, just between us, in Jerusalem where she came from, and certainly not if the mother-in-law had had her wits about her).

The story starts with Elimelekh, a rich man who leaves Israel at a time of famine. The rabbinic commentators ask: why? The answer: Elimelekh wasn’t leaving because he would starve, since he was too rich to starve. He was leaving because he didn’t want to meet his social responsibilities and help his neighbors. That’s not only why he left, but why he was wrong to leave, and why things went downhill from there.
It was in the days when the Judges judged
and there was hunger in the land
and a man went from Bethlehem in Judea
to stay in the fields of Moab,
he and his wife and his two sons.
And the man’s name was Elimelekh
and his wife’s name was Naomi
and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Kilyon
of the house of Efrat, in Bethlehem, in Judea.
And they came to the fields of Moab and stayed there.

John Bolton states “For years, there has been a rising tide of Islamic radicalism, starting in the Middle East, providing a hospitable environment in which terrorism grew naturally. This radical wave has been spreading throughout northern Africa, into Asia, and now around the world.”—–No! Not for years Ambassador Bolton. For centuries, virtually since the advent of Mohammed-Koran driven Islam has been on a drive to create a global caliphate ruled by Sharia law, and enabled by atrocities and terrorism…..rsk
Los Angeles high society is in turmoil following the decision of Brunei’s sultan, owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel, to implement Shariah criminal law in his country, including brutal restrictions against homosexuals and lesbians. Of course, there is nothing really new here. In 2007, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asked at Columbia University about Iran’s treatment of homosexuals, said, “We don’t have this phenomenon.” Indeed, since Shariah’s penalty for “this “phenomenon” is death.

Americans nationwide were shocked at Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 young girls in Nigeria, and the threat they will be sold into slavery or forced marriage. Their crime was being educated, but sadly was no different from Boko Haram’s many prior indiscriminate attacks against nonbelievers. Under criticism for not designating the group as a terrorist organization until late 2013, despite its well-known, bloody history, President Obama dispatched U.S. personnel to aid Nigeria’s ineffectual response to the kidnappings.

Most recently, President Omar Bashir’s repressive regime in Sudan has condemned a pregnant woman to death for apostasy by marrying a Christian and refusing to reconvert to Islam. The facts are disputed, but the government’s death sentence and its wider implications are not. Lt. Gen. Bashir’s bloodthirsty suppression of Darfur, the long civil war against Christians in now-independent South Sudan, and providing Osama bin Laden asylum in the 1990s are all too painfully evident.

The key point, generally missed by America’s news media, is that these three incidents have a common foundation. For years, there has been a rising tide of Islamic radicalism, starting in the Middle East, providing a hospitable environment in which terrorism grew naturally. This radical wave has been spreading throughout northern Africa, into Asia, and now around the world.

Most immediately threatened, of course, are those who actually live under this extreme, politicized Islam, especially other Muslims. Beyond the radicals’ immediate neighborhoods, though, the rest of the world, particularly America, has already suffered direct attack, and could well be the target again.

The United States and those who share our faith in freedom of conscience have several possible options. We can pretend the threat posed by the radical and terrorist Islamic fury doesn’t exist, hoping not to experience another Sept. 11, 2001. We can express selective indignation at abuses that offend our sensibilities, treating them as discrete offenses to which we react in an ad hoc fashion. Or we can recognize that a distinctive political ideology is at work here, one based on distorted religious precepts rather than a secular authoritarian philosophy like Nazism or communism.

Mass murders on the Elliot Rodger model are not a modern thing; we all know the story of Columbine, but the worst school slaughter in American history happened in 1927 in Michigan. Nor are they a gun thing; that Michigan massacre required no firearms, and neither did the crimes of Timothy McVeigh. They are not a “white privilege” thing, soiled as I feel for being obliged to write the words “white privilege”; the worst such massacre in recent U.S. history was carried out by a Korean-born American. They are not a male thing; Brenda Spencer’s explanation of her shooting spree in San Diego inspired the song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” They are not an American thing; Anders Breivik of Norway carried out the largest mass murder in modern history, though it is possible that Beijing’s Tian Mingjian killed more; Europe, the Americas, and Asia have experienced roughly comparable numbers of mass murders, with the Asian numbers slightly ahead of the rest. They are not an ideological thing; mass murders sometimes issue manifestos, but they are generally incoherent and shallow. The phenomenon of mass killings has little to do with race, sex, politics, economics, or the availability of legal firearms. Such episodes are primarily an act of theater.

Modern technology empowers individuals to an extent that is utterly radical from the long-term perspective of human history. One might think that sometimes that means mind-controlled exoskeletons and sometimes it means Elliot Rodger, but that is not quite right: The truth is that always and everywhere it means both mind-controlled exoskeletons and Elliot Rodger. There’s nothing for it. There is no law to be passed or policy fix to be implemented. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is a very old one, that man is a fallen and unpredictable creature. And if you have not learned that lesson by now, no headline, no matter how bloody, is going to help. You cannot reduce a mass murderer to a set of motives. South Korea’s Woo Bum-kon, who led the lone-gunman rankings until Breivik superseded him, flew into a homicidal rage after his girlfriend woke him up by swatting a fly off his chest. South Korea has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, but Woo was a police officer with access to the local armory. The data suggest that in the U.S. context police officers are more likely to commit homicide than are members of the general public. Pass all the laws you like, but remember who enforces them.

Barack Obama gave the commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Wednesday, and piled absurdity upon absurdity.

“For the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism,” he said, but steadfastly refrained throughout his speech from explaining the source of that terrorism threat, much less its ideological foundation or goal. This is, of course, the President who in October 2011 placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists, overseeing the scrubbing of all counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism.

Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared at that time that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” removed all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity.

At the same time, Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder was “firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials posed “a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole declared: “We must never allow our sorrow and anger at the senseless attack of 9/11 to blind us to the great gift of our diversity.” And this, he said, must involve a rejection of the stereotyping of Muslims: “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim. As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.”

Of course, the controversial training materials did not really claim that all Muslims are terrorists or that all terrorists are Muslims, and it is noteworthy that Cole had to resort to dismissive caricatures to make his point. And the end result of this whitewashing effort, three years later, is that the President of the United States has to acknowledge that “the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism,” but cannot bring himself to explain where that terrorism is coming from.