RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/kerrys-centuries-of-error?f=puball

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” said Secretary of State John Kerry on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The 19th century reference is one Kerry has used frequently since the Ukraine crisis erupted, but there are a couple of problems with this attempted use of history.

First, invasions are not an event unique to the 19th century. Indeed, there are many more recent examples from the 20th century Kerry could cite, including both world wars, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and the Gulf War among others. Soviet Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep puppet governments in power against popular calls for reform. In both cases, Soviet troops were told that they were stopping an impeding counter-revolution. If Moscow did not intervene, the “enemies of socialism” were going to open to the West and let NATO forces into the countries being defended by the Red Army. The similarities to the current Ukraine situation are obvious, perhaps too much so for Kerry who wants to avoid anything that would imply a revival of the Cold War.

Yet, President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine given March 4 sounded like they came out of the Brezhnev Doctrine expounded after the Czech invasion. No change in neighboring governments hostile to Russian interests will be tolerated.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4203/israel-rest-of-world
LONG BEFORE THE NAZIS EVEN USED THE WORD “JEW”- JEWS WERE DESPISED, OPPRESSED, DENIED BASIC RIGHTS, HUMILIATED AND KILLED IN THE MOSLEM/ARAB WORLD- READ DR. ANDREW BOSTOM’S BOOK
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The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (May 30, 2008)

The Nazis invented the Jewish boycott, and went on from there to the Holocaust.

The world excuses Islamic murder, but focuses on flaws, often imaginary, on the part of Israel.

This is the wrong boycott in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everybody hates Israel. That is not just accepted wisdom, it is a reality that chokes all rational debate on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. There are exceptions, of course, such as Canada, but most of Western Europe has slipped from support for Israel to support for the Palestinian cause, as if both sides might not have valid claims to the disputed land.

Most Americans are enthusiastic about Israel, but the U.S. government under Barack Obama, has, in recent years, shown increasing antagonism. Unsurprisingly, not a single Muslim nation likes Israel at all.

Many hate the Jewish state precisely because it is a Jewish state — there seems no other reason why they might hate it. Many, in a display of true prejudice, have never even visited it.

In the world in general, and Europe in particular, anti-Semitism is growing at a rate not unlike the 1930s. It does not take much mental grip to see the link between that escalation of the “oldest hatred” and the refined political and religious rejection of Israel as the one and only state in the world that deserves to be abolished. Or, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once put it in Farsi, “exterminated” (Umam-e Eslami bayad Isra’il-ra qal’ o qam’ kard: The nations of Islam must exterminate Israel.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303630904579419293477469018?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4

There are plenty of candidates for that title, but after Tuesday the prize belongs to attorney Steven Donziger. Federal judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the environmental activist had engaged in a massive racketeering scheme and declared that a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court cannot be enforced in the United States.

As our readers know, in 1993 Mr. Donziger sued Texaco (now merged with Chevron) for what he said was the company’s failure to clean up oil pits it drilled in Lago Agrio in the 1970s with state oil company PetroEcuador. Chevron had signed proof that it had cleaned its portion of the pits and had been absolved of any liability, but Mr. Donziger sniffed the potential windfall of a media-ready environmental “disaster” and sued the company for $113 billion. He enlisted all manner of celebrity helpers, including actress Daryl Hannah.

He won in Ecuador, but only thanks to what Judge Kaplan found were “dishonest and corrupt” measures including bribery, coercion and engaging an American consulting firm to ghostwrite an independent expert’s reports. In a 485-page opinion, the judge called the case “extraordinary,” calling the actions of Mr. Donziger and his legal team “offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law, including Ecuador.” The corrupt extortion was intended to “instill fear of a catastrophic outcome in order to increase the amount Chevron would pay to avoid the worst,” Judge Kaplan wrote.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304815004579417541596103908?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop&mg=reno64-wsj

If Russia’s Ukraine incursion goes unpunished, Moscow may turn to ‘rescuing’ ethnic Russians in NATO countries.

If Russia’s Ukraine gambit works, an emboldened Vladimir Putin may be tempted to take on the NATO alliance directly. How? By claiming danger to ethnic Russians in one of the Baltic states and intervening to protect them. President Obama’s challenge is to head off the possibility of such a challenge, one that could lead to war in Europe.

The stakes in Ukraine, President Putin’s motives and the region’s anxieties are rooted in history that Americans tend not to know. For those who lived in the Soviet empire, however, it is history that hasn’t been forgotten. It shadows today’s events and wracks the nerves of those who knew Soviet domination.

In 1917, during World War I, revolutionaries overthrew Czar Nicholas II, and the Bolsheviks soon took control of the revolution. A civil war then raged for several years between the revolutionary Reds and the monarchist Whites. Ukraine took advantage of the upheaval to declare independence. Azerbaijan, Armenia and other parts of the Russian empire, singly and in groups, did likewise.

The Bolsheviks wanted to change Russia’s government and rename the country, but they didn’t want Russia to lose its empire. When they defeated the Whites and consolidated power, the Bolsheviks forced the split-away states to reincorporate into the empire, newly dubbed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Westerners in general may be unaware of the short-lived independence of those Russian imperial lands in that time of civil war, but the people in those lands know the story well.

Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/if-he-believes-it-it-must-be-so_783721.html

On the eve of the Netanyahu visit to Washington, President Obama gave a lengthy interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that shows a chief executive who has learned next to nothing about the world in his five years in office.

First, kudos to Goldberg: he pressed Obama repeatedly, challenging vague formulations and seeking clarity. Goldberg pushed Obama hard, especially on Iran and Syria.

Obama isn’t good off the cuff, especially when challenged; he is far better with a prepared speech. And what emerged is an awful portrait of the president and his conception of the world.

Take Syria. Here’s what Obama said:

“I think those who believe that two years ago, or three years ago, there was some swift resolution to this thing had we acted more forcefully, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the conflict in Syria and the conditions on the ground there. … Over the last two years I have pushed our teams to find out what are the best options in a bad situation. … But I’ve looked at a whole lot of game plans, a whole lot of war plans, a whole bunch of scenarios, and nobody has been able to persuade me that us taking large-scale military action even absent boots on the ground, would actually solve the problem. And those who make that claim do so without a lot of very specific information.”

Who are these people who have inadequate information, misunderstand the conflict in Syria, and think there is much more the United States could have done? They include both of Obama’s secretaries of state, Clinton and Kerry, his former defense secretary Leon Panetta, and his former CIA director David Petraeus—all of whom wanted much more U.S. support for the Syrian rebels. And perhaps more to the point, take the case of Fred Hof.

Hof has been working on Syria and the broader Middle East since the 1970s, first as a career Army officer and then for the State Department. He was given the rank of ambassador and the title of “special adviser” on Syria by Obama in 2012. Hof has left the government and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he writes regularly about Syria at the Council’s web site. He knows far more about Syria than Mr. Obama and saw the same intelligence Mr. Obama did (in fact, he no doubt read a lot more of it). And what he writes is filled with growing anguish and anger about Obama’s failure to act in the face of mass murder by the criminal regime in Damascus. But to Obama, any such criticism “fundamentally misunderstands…conditions on the ground there,” which of course only Obama really understands.

Obama’s “arguments” about Syria in the Goldberg interview are insulting to his former (and, in Kerry’s case, current) top advisers, whose advice he rejected, and misleading about their advice. He describes a situation where ignorant critics seek “large scale military action,” which is akin to the administration’s claim that those who want sanctions on Iran are “warmongers.” But that is a false description, for what was recommended time after time was serious help to the rebels, and a one-time strike (“incredibly small,” said Kerry, not “large scale”) at chemical weapons assets. So we have the president deriding those who disagreed with him—who include his top aides and top experts—and refusing, even now, to understand that his policy of passivity in Syria has produced nearly the worst of all possible worlds: 150,000 dead, 6 million homeless, and a menacing gathering of perhaps 25,000 jihadists at the heart of the Middle East.

http://politicalmavens.com/

After learning that the attic space at Gracie Mansion had once been occupied by Mayor Koch’s chef, Chirlane McCray, First Lady of New York City responded to the question of how the de Blasio’s might use it: “I can tell you with confidence, there will not be a servant living there.” Let’s overlook the slap in the face to Mitchell London, the chef who rightfully never viewed himself as a servant. Let’s focus instead on why Ms. McCray chose that word instead of staff and let’s object to the hypocrisy implied in her statement. It’s clear that our First Lady has not seen “The Butler” in which Oprah lashes out at her son for disparaging his father’s ’servile’ position and reminds him that not only was the butler a man of dignity and integrity but he had also paid for everything that the son had ever gotten and enjoyed. Perhaps Ms. McCray has forgotten how many New Yorkers perform cleaning or child care work in homes, offices or hotels; how many of them are people of color; how many of them earn very respectable wages – sometimes considerably more than Wellesley graduates. Rather than showing respect for people who are willing to work hard to earn a living, the First Lady dismissively refers to them as servants, a rank marginally higher than slaves.

In America we don’t use the word servant – we euphemize with housekeeper, butler, chef, cook, nanny, babysitter, personal assistant, steward, chambermaid. Ms. McCray knows all this and she also knows by now how sizeable a staff it takes to clean and maintain her new residence. She will not be doing any of that work herself – she has chosen to work in her husband’s administration and has a personal assistant who will receive a salary of $175,000 on the public payroll. The First Lady will not be cooking for or organizing the various functions which she and her husband will host – she will be the recipient of all of that, supplied by public funding. In fact, if we added up all the expenses related to Mr. and Mrs. de Blasio’s new lifestyle, you can be sure that it would more than cover the budget of at least one of the three charter schools which the mayor has closed. I challenge Chirlane McCray to ask those mostly black and Hispanic parents what their preference for spending their tax dollars would be – keeping Gracie Mansion clean and well-oiled or re-opening their children’s best hope for a decent educaation.

http://acdemocracy.org/obama-putin-kool-aid/#sthash.2rfrlpb3.dpbs

Media coverage regarding America’s response to Putin’s takeover of Crimea demonstrates the success of the Obama administration’s propaganda maxim blaming successive American administrations for atrocities at home and abroad. Some of our pundits apparently have drunk what might be called the Obama Kool-Aid, i.e., apologies for the United States’ mostly fabricated evil past, as have been offered since the beginning of the first Obama administration.

Accordingly, we have no enemies, only disagreements that could be resolved by giving in to our contenders. Thus Russia, Iran, and even al-Qaeda will eventually leave the “nineteenth-century,” “medieval” and “Cold War” past and come around to the administration’s worldview of equally respected and pacific states

One of the earliest of Obama’s apologies came on January 27, 2009, in an interview with Al Arabiya:

“My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.”

New Yorker editor, David Remnick, who served as the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, is apparently one of the Kool-Aid drinkers. “The United States also does not have the leverage it wants in historical terms. Invading countries is something the United States knows about from really raw experience. And Russia knows that and asserts that day in and day out on Russian television all the time,” he commented on Monday morning on NBC’s Today show. Remnick, who praised Putin during the Sochi for showcasing Russia on the world stage in pop cultural terms during the Olympics, saw nothing wrong in Putin’s intervention in Ukraine “to assert Russia strength in a country where they have legitimate interests.”

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/are_liberals_less_selfish_than_other_people.html

Liberals claim to be better than other mortals. Liberals, they tell us, are a political anomaly who vote for other people’s benefit, not their own. Democrats see themselves as the generous party, the saviors of the needy, the elderly, the minority underdog against the cruel hand of fate and Republicans.

Liberals are right: there is a difference in caring that shows up along party lines. Conservatives give more, a lot more. They aren’t content with good-hearted wishes, they do good deeds, turning wishes into actions. Conservatives are ten times more personally charitable, even to secular causes. They do far more volunteer work. They even give more blood. Conservatives do more to help the poor, the sick, minorities, the environment. People who want small government give an average of $1600 a year versus a measly $140 given by redistributionists. It’s not because conservatives are richer; the opposite is true.

Liberals rationalize their stingy behavior by saying government welfare is a right. They will tell you that voting for higher taxes (on other people) is morally superior to charity. Really? Out of a $1000 “donated” to the IRS a meager $30 reaches the poor, versus $700 from a private charity. Our neediest citizens would be in tough shape without the $126 billion in church programs, from soup kitchens to adoption centers to shelters to hospitals.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-liberal-media-meme-obamas-inaction-makes-him-strong-putins-invasions-make-him-weak/print/ Courtesy of a cursory reading of 1984 and several sharp blows to the head, the media has gathered up the tattered remnants of its dignity and has a new meme out to explain everything. “Strength is weakness, Weakness is strength.” Think Progress, CAP’s little spin factory, deployed the meme, “an act of weakness, not […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela/print/

Last week Jimmy Carter fired off letters to Venezuela’s fraudulent President Nicolas Maduro and to Venezuela’s defrauded Presidential candidate Enrique Capriles expressing “grave concern” regarding the political turmoil and bloodshed convulsing their nation. From his pulpit at Emory University’s Carter Center, the former U.S. president calls for “dialogue” among the embattled Venezuelan parties and offers to visit the troubled nation — but not as a formal “mediator.”

The news of Carter’s proposed Venezuela visit was only hours old when alarmed Venezuelan anti-socialists sent out an SOS: “Please, desist from your trip,” reads an open letter from Venezuelan blogger/journalist Daniel Duquenal. “You have absolutely no credibility in Venezuela…You have cursed us enough as it is. I can assure you that half of the country has no respect nor credibility for you and the other half (the Castroites) thinks you are a mere fool that they can use and discard as needed.”

Venezuelan continues as a veritable battleground between hundreds of thousands of protestors and thousands of Cuban-trained government police and national guardsmen. Fifteen protestors have been shot dead, hundreds arrested and thousands injured. “I feel as if this were a war zone,” said one resident of the far-western city of San Cristobal, long known for it’s anti-Chavista activism.

Desperate to cow that area’s rebellious residents Maduro even sent some of his regime’s Russian-built Sukhoi warplanes to buzz (but not yet bomb) the area. “It doesn’t matter if it takes a month, two months, three months. We have to get rid of this government,” said one desperate protestor.