RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.steynonline.com/6067/al-gore-contemplates-the-inconceivable

Barry Rubin, a great strategic thinker and cartographer of the emerging post-American world, died today in Tel Aviv. I read him regularly and cited him in After America re the collectively insane urge of almost everyone Nidal Hasan encountered as he wafted upwards through the US Army to look the other way and not see what was staring them in the face:

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in US history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave it to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors – some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic”, the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”.

I remember when I read Rubin’s line about the PowerPoint presentation. Many of us had been groping in the same direction, but he was the one who came up with the perfect, piercing image for the madness that was going on. He did that a lot, right up to the end. Rest in peace.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370259/print

Obama’s global fantasies are falling to earth along with him.

In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the Sunni Gulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.

Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.

In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.

The Dreyfus Affair, which splintered French society of the fin de siècle and continued to divide it well into the 20th century, began on the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, with the arrest for high treason of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old artillery officer, a high-ranking graduate of the elite École Polytechnique and […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/03/dinesh-dsouza-gets-israel-wrong-in-acclaimed-debate-with-bill-ayers/?print=1

D’Souza is wrongly prosecuted and Ayers is a superannuated radical…but D’Souza has gotten a lot wrong…..This is what he said about 9/11 in his book “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11”-

“In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice—but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.”

Well I make no excuses for the vulgarity and moral decadence-but- and this is a big but- their motivation came from Islam and Jihad- and all “infidels” including conservatives are the enemies they wish to conquer…..rsk

After their anticipated debate at Dartmouth College, Dinesh D’Souza and Bill Ayers took questions from the audience.

D’Souza’s answer to an audience member’s question about Israel was unfortunate (see 1:31:31 of the debate).

The audience member libeled Israel as an apartheid state, accused it of codifying into law discrimination against Arabs, then asked the debaters why the United States supports such a country.

The answer to this question is obvious.

Israel is not an apartheid state.

More than 1 million Arabs live in Israel and have full civil rights. Arabs constitute 10 percent of the Israeli parliament, and one sits on the Israeli Supreme Court. Arabs make up a large portion of the student population at elite Israeli universities where Arabs teach and have full tenure. The only place where Arabs have freedom of speech and association is in Israel.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/i-am-afraid-of-my-government?f=puball

I came into this world when Franklin D. Roosevelt was President and I have never been afraid of my government until now.

I am not alone. A consistent and growing theme of commentaries on the conservative news sites and blogs that I read every day is the fear of the Obama administration that has been cracking down on those who criticize it. They get audited by the IRS. They are refused the same status as non-profit entitles engaging in public education as Left-leaning organizations. They are accused of being racists, homophobes, anti-immigration, and anti-women.

This goes beyond the ordinary disagreements between individuals and groups that express opposition to the Obama administration. It has the look of a deliberate campaign and we have three more years of Obama as President in which to endure it.

In a speech to the leftist nonprofit Center for American Progress, Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-BY) recently urged the IRS to “redouble” its intimidation tactics against the Tea Party. He represents a State whose governor recently said that conservatives were not welcome to live and do business. Its largest city, New York, just elected a Marxist as its mayor.

Jim Lakely, the director of communications of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has led the effort to debunk the global warming hoax, recently posted a commentary, “The Unceasing Political Thuggery of Obama’s Gangster Government.” He noted Michael Barone’s description of the Obama administration as a “gangster government.”

Lakely cited the growing list of actions taken against who have expressed criticism. It includes Dinesh D’Souza who produced a documentary about Obama’s life, “Obama’s America” and who arrested on felony charges for violating campaign finance law. “This is beyond absurd-especially in light of what the FBI and IRS have found not worthy of any investigation, let alone indictment” in the past. A Hollywood group of conservatives, the only one there, received an IRS demand for its complete donor list; this is a repeat of similar demands of Tea Party groups seeking non-profit status. James O’Keefe whose Project Veritas exposed the nonprofit status of the leftist ACORN is being audited as was Frank VanderSloot, a big Republican donor as was conservative journalist Wayne Allen Root-twice. The list keeps growing.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/build-the-keystone-pipeline-already?f=puball

KXL was AWOL from SOTU – along with real energy, job, economic and revenue solutions

President Obama frequently says he wants to turn the economy around, put America back to work, produce more energy, improve public safety, and open new markets to goods stamped “Made in the USA.” In his State of the Union address he said, if congressional inaction continues, “I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible.”

Unfortunately, like Arafat, he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do all these things.

Most Americans are no longer fooled by empty hope and change hype. In December only 74,000 jobs were created (many of them low-paying part-time seasonal positions), while 374,000 more people gave up looking for work. Not surprisingly, recent polls have found that three-quarters of Americans say the country still appears to be in a recession, two-thirds don’t trust the President to make the right decisions for the country, and barely 30% say the nation is “heading in the right direction.”

The President needs to use his pen and phone to free our energy, economy and entrepreneurial instincts. But ANWR, OCS, HF, KXL and other solutions were AWOL from the SOTU. They were sacrificed on the CO2 and CMGW altar, by the POTUS, EPA, DOI and DOE, in obeisance to the EDF, NRDC, other environmentalist pressure groups, and assorted unelected, unaccountable, unconstitutional autocrats.

(Don’t you love Washington-speak – from the land of acronyms, that pricey patch of real estate on the banks of the Potomac River, bordered by reality and places where people actually work to earn a living, despite presidents and hordes of legislators and regulators doing their level best to make that difficult. For those whose Wash-speak is as bad as their Spanish and German, translations are provided below.)*

Our nation is blessed with vast energy, metallic, mineral, forest and other resources, waiting to be tapped. But they are locked up in favor of crony-capitalist, eco-unfriendly, land-hungry, subsidy-dependent, nigh-useless pseudo-alternatives that are dearly beloved by utopian environmentalists – and by politicians hungry for campaign contributions from businesses that they repay with billions in other people’s money, taken from taxpayers at the point of an IRS gun to prop up renewable energy schemes.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-necessary-war-part-i?f=puball

World War III has begun, and the enemy is not the one we expected. America and the Western world are facing a danger they have never faced before. Our enemy is not a government or a country. We are fighting enemies who hate us so much that they are willing to kill themselves in order to kill us. This war puts our conventional military forces at a serious disadvantage. There is practically no defense against this kind of warfare. The enemy is Islam, and it is waging this war against our civilization. The Quran teaches its followers:

Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is their destination. Quran 9:73

And, if history is any guide, religious wars have been the bloodiest in human history. The contention that all wars eventually should end may not be applicable this time. This one is different; with new generations of Islamists willing to kill themselves in order to destroy the infidels, it may take generations, centuries, to end, especially given the high birth rate of the enemy. At this juncture it is impossible to predict how it may end. In previous world wars the winner typically out-produced the loser. During the Second World War Americans were losing, on average six Sherman tanks for every German Tiger tank lost. But at the same time, American industry was manufacturing six Sherman tanks faster than Germans could produce one Tiger. Americans were producing more bombers than Germans were shooting down, and that was true for every other piece of military equipment. The United States, despite heavy losses at Pearl Harbor, not only replaced those losses in short order but also built a greater and more modern fleet than that of the Japanese. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were facing the unlimited industrial capabilities of the United States, further multiplied by the unlimited human resources of the Soviet Union. There was not a chance that the Axis powers could possibly win the war; they were out-produced and out-manned. The longer the war went on, the weaker Germany and Japan became.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/global-nuclear-zero-more-befuddlement?f=puball The current push to reduce America’s nuclear deterrent to zero is increasingly becoming nothing more than one foolish statement piled on top of another wrong-headed assumption all wrapped up in questionable assumptions and outright fantasies. The most example is an essay on January 20, 2014 by Eugene Chow in “The Week”, titled “Why are […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/to-the-marines-let-sgt-hutchins-go?f=puball

I can’t believe I’m writing these words: Marine Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III is going on trial – again.

Twice, Hutchins’ conviction by a military court martial for unpremeditated murder in Iraq has been overturned due to factors precluding a fair trial. That means that twice, following Hutchins’ initial conviction in 2007, he has been released from the brig a free man.

After his conviction was overturned the first time, there were eight months of freedom in 2010. Then, on the day his wife Reyna found out she was pregnant with their second child, Hutchins, a third-generation Marine, returned to prison. Last summer, the military’s highest appeals court overturned his conviction a second time. For the past six months, Hutchins has been living with Reyna and their two children, Kylie, 8, and Aidan, 2, while teaching marksmanship at Camp Pendleton. A new baby is on the way. Now, he – and they – must prepare for a new trial, his third. Why?

This twisting story with serial breaking points goes back to the night of April 26, 2006, somewhere in the Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad. Remember the Sunni Triangle? This was the pre-“surge” center of insurgent operations against our forces, who were daily coming under attack, usually by roadside bombs, or IEDs. They were also daily encountering the insurgents behind these IED attacks, capturing “high-value targets,” and then being ordered to set them free again. Sometimes there was insufficient “evidence” to hold them. Often, there was no jail space. Remember the bad old days of “catch and release”?

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/02/selling_out_israel_the_obama-kerry_plan.html Israel is being urged to give up major portions of the West Bank of the Jordan River to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  That outfit is now known in Western media as the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it comprises the major terrorist group Fatah.  That’s the Arabic word for conquest.  And conquest of all of the land […]