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BOOKS

MY SAY: WHO’S INSANE BY RUTH KING

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/whos_insane.html

Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump

by Sheldon Roth M.D.

 

The media and the leftist body politic have coopted psychiatric diagnoses without any real understanding of neurology, psychology, and normal human behavior. They bandy words like sociopath, unstable, unfit, and crazy to vent their unmitigated hatred of Present Trump.

Dr. Sheldon Roth, a physician with decades of practice in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, as well as past member of highly acclaimed Psychoanalytic Institutes, is highly qualified to make a diagnosis of sanity in his book The Mind of Donald Trump — Psychologically Sound.

In a grim coincidence of events, Dr. Roth’s analyses are borne out by the President’s nightly press conferences occasioned by the COVID-19 virus.

As Dr. Roth informs us in his 2008 book Never Give Up, co-written with Meredith McIver, Donald Trump outlined “A Top 10 List for Success “virtually a script for his current role as captain during a time of crisis and pandemic. Three examples that highlight his present strategy:

“See yourself as victorious! That will focus you in the right direction.”

“Ask yourself: What am I pretending not to see? There may be some great opportunities right around you, even if things are not looking so great. Great adversity can turn into a great victory.”

“Look at the solution, not the problem. Never give up! Never, never, never give up.”

He is flamboyant, narcissistic, and hardly a great orator, and Dr. Roth includes the warts, but see how masterful is his handling of the present danger.

He has seen himself as victorious, and he has seen opportunity in great adversity, and he can never just give up.

He has engaged the private sector where more than fifty companies — manufacturing, big pharma, tech giants, fashion, food and home goods production, and the automobile industry — are retooling to manufacture and distribute and donate essential medical technology and equipment. 

He has made capitalism a force for the public good.

“When the President graciously introduced some of the CEOs he said: “Joining us this afternoon are CEOs of the great American companies that are fulfilling their patriotic duty by producing or donating medical equipment to help meet our most urgent needs. What they’re doing is incredible. And these are great companies.”

He has brought giant Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles harbors to free hospital beds for treatment of coronavirus and provide beds for critical surgeries and treatments for non-infected patients.

He pressured the National Guard to build a 1000-bed facility in the Javits Center in New York in record time and others are planned for myriad sites.

He has helped distribute masks, testing supplies, and most important, he defied the skepticism of his task force in promoting medications which now show great promise for those who are critically ill, as well as in prevention.

Not since FDR has any president been so successful in galvanizing American pride and patriotism.

How sane can you get?

Read the book. It is persuasive, meticulously documented and researched. As Dr. Roth documents, the “deranged” are those who will use libel, and bias to further a vile political agenda fueled by an irrational hatred of our President.

Free speech comes at a price In the age of microaggression, fighting words are ubiquitous David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

“Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished law professor and prolific writer, proposes to set limits to free speech in order to protect it. The matter is a minefield, and he wades into it fearlessly. But I am not convinced that he has found a solution.”

Saving Free Speech From Itself, by Thane Rosenbaum. Fig Tree Books; 305 pages, Hardbound. US$24.95

With some trepidation and the dissent of men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the founders of the United States included in its Constitution a guarantee of free speech unlike any other in the world. The First Amendment bars restrictions on public expression. That does not include speech or writing that amounts to an act of violence.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the standard for prohibited speech with the celebrated dictum that one does not have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. The case in question was Schenck vs. United States, in which the court ruled that a defendant did not have the right to oppose mandatory conscription during the First World War. That shows how difficult it is to define violent speech: By today’s standards, verbal opposition to a government’s policy in wartime surely would be protected.

For the past 80 years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire has defined prohibited speech as “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words – those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

1620 – 2020: The 400th Anniversary of the US-Israel Kinship Yoram Ettinger

1620 – 2020: The 400th Anniversary of the US-Israel Kinship
**Just published**
March 2020 eBook available on Amazon and Smashwords
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”

From the 1620 “Mayflower,” through the 1752 Liberty Bell, 1891 “Blackstone Memorial” and the 1968 “Apollo 8,” to the 2005 Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s  decision on the Ten Commandments, and the 2020 statues of Moses in the US Supreme Court , Chamber of the House of Representatives, Justice Department and the Library of Congress….

Table of Content:
The Early Pilgrims and the Modern Day Exodus
The Hebrew language embraced by the early US intelligentsia
The Founding Fathers, the Ten Commandments and the Bible
The Abolitionist anti-slavery movement inspired by Moses
400 years of US identification with the idea of a Jewish State
Modern day Presidents highlight the Bible
Biblical footprints in modern day USA
The US civil religion
The lasting US-Israel kinship
John Adams, the 2nd US President: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”

Sydney Williams: Burrowing into Books “A Time to Build,” Yuval Levin

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Yuval Levin is the founder of “National Affairs,” a director of the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. His belief is that we need to rebuild our institutions (“The durable forms of our common life”) – families, schools, universities, church, the military, civic organizations and legislatures – into the formative organizations they once were.”

The book (short at 204 pages) is divided into three parts – a description of the crisis, institutions in transition and a suggested path forward. “Everybody,” he writes in the introduction, “knows that Americans have long been losing faith in institutions.”  In losing faith, “…we have lost the words with which to speak about what we owe each other.” These institutions, which were once molds that formed who we were, have become platforms for those who use them for their own purposes. This is not the only problem confronting us, but it is the one, he writes, “…about which we tend to be most blind.”

Yuval Levin takes us through the political world where he claims problems are not so much ones of ideology, but of social psychology, “…unleashed and unmoored from institutional constraints.” Thirty pages of the book are devoted to campus culture where “…our degraded capacity for unity and solidarity is the result of a degraded capacity for accepting differences…The trouble is not that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.” Abetted by administrations and faculty inculcated with a culture of moral activism that does not allow for dissent, colleges graduate students endowed with a sense of political correctness that was “…utterly unfamiliar in the world of work until the last few years.” Writing of the effect of social media, Mr. Levin notes: “In some important respects, this has been an age of isolation not despite but because of social media.” Social media affirms us, rather than shape us. Shopping on-line is convenient, but is there the same sense of loyalty one has to real stores and the people who work in them?

A Psychological Study of Trump Worth Reading By Stephen Rittenberg

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/a_psychological_study_of_trump_worth_reading.html

“I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” —Samuel Johnson

Donald Trump inspires almost universal disapproval and scorn among wordsmith professionals in the mental health field.  He has been the target of diagnoses ranging from “pathological narcissism” to “bipolar disorder” to “dementia.”  

At last we can be grateful among the torrent of books about the president for one that justifies what Dr. Johnson called the “epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper.”

Sheldon Roth, M.D. has performed an important  service, not just to history, but to the field of depth psychology.  He has demonstrated ways in which it can illuminate the deep motivational wellsprings of a unique individual like Donald Trump.  His psycho-biography, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, makes real and clear the truth of Wordsworth’s observation that “the child is father to the man.”

Trump is in the middle of a remarkable first term during which he has disrupted the various myths of our present-day wordsmith Utopians.  Their favored story has been of American decline, a decline well deserved by a racist and sexist country.  Donald Trump utterly dismissed this story, laughing at its politically correct absurdity.  His humor offends them while shattering their belief that presidents should be austere and solemn.  How did he manage to prevail in reviving American optimism, growing the economy while destroying the ISIS caliphate and reversing our appeasement policies toward Iran and China?  And he did all of this under constant siege by the wordsmith graduates of our elite universities and journalism schools.  Laughter and optimism helped.

Woody Allen’s Life Story: Canceled A publisher yields to the mob and drops a ‘challenging’ book. By Roger Kimball

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woody-allens-life-story-canceled-11583645773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Hachette Book Group announced last Monday that it would bring out “Apropos of Nothing,” a memoir by Woody Allen, in early April. CEO Michael Pietsch told an interviewer that the publisher “believes strongly that there’s a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen’s life as told by Woody Allen himself.”

There was also a noisy audience that didn’t—and that didn’t want anyone else to hear it either. Last Thursday Hachette employees staged a walkout to protest the book, and on Friday Hachette dropped it.

“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one,” said a spokesman for the publisher. “At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books.”

My own interest in Woody Allen is approximately zero. I used to find him funny, but the prospect of wading through “a comprehensive account of his life,” as Hachette put it, fills me with gloom. Hachette had nonetheless determined that many readers would be interested in Mr. Allen’s life story. They simply forgot to check with the feminist commissars to see if he passes muster in the age of #MeToo.

What Real Resistance Looks Like By Mary Spencer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/book-review-last-letters-what-real-resistance-looks-like/

A new translation of letters between a husband and wife who resisted the Nazis offers a portrait of steadfast grace and courage.

In 2020, it is not difficult to find books, podcasts, and other media about resisting fascism and living in a political dystopia. But not all “resistance” manuals are created equal. One recent addition should be lauded for offering more than a simple picture of oppression.

In Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence 1944–1945, Shelley Frisch faithfully translates a compilation of letters between Helmuth von Moltke and his wife, Freya, written between September 1944 and January 1945. The letters were exchanged during the months that Helmuth was in Tegel prison, in Berlin, and were carried in secret by the prison chaplain, Harald Polechau. The Moltkes’ stoic refusal to give in to spiritual or moral defeat, even in the face of Helmuth’s death, is striking.

Count Helmuth von Moltke was a law student in Berlin when Hitler rose to power in January 1933. Helmuth was the great-grand-nephew of the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke the elder, a celebrated military commander, and was the great nephew of Helmuth von Moltke the younger, a German general during World War I.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Ilhan Omar?By Kyle Shideler

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/27/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-ilhan-omar/

Ben Weingarten’s new book ‘American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of The Democratic Party,’ makes a compelling argument that Democrats’ sharp leftward turn threatens both American ideals and national security.

There is always a temptation in politics, and indeed in all human life, to reduce people to symbolic representations. Storytelling — or, if you prefer the D.C. swamp lingo, “the narrative” — remains the evolutionarily prescribed way to relay complex information to large groups of people and ensure they retain the core message. Narratives need heroes and villains, someone who will embody within himself the key ideas being transmitted.

Understanding this is important to getting to the heart of Ben Weingarten’s American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of The Democratic Party. While ostensibly it is a book about Ilhan Omar and her sordid history – allegations of immigration fraud, long-standing ties to anti-American regimes and terror-linked groups, her long train of antisemitic remarks – this is not Weingarten’s real focus.

Weingarten has not really written a book about Omar so much as a book about how it is that a person with Omar’s baggage became a battle standard to which all the left now repairs. They do not defend her in spite of her foibles, but because of them.

What the Mizrahim Lost, and What Fairness Demands Be Done About It

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/jewish-world/2020/02/what-the-mizrahim-

Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century”—the most recent American effort to advance a plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians—was released last month. Among those potentially affected by the implementation of such a plan, one group in Israel had been watching with particular interest: Mizraḥi Jews whose families had lived continuously in Arab and Muslim lands from biblical times until the late 1940s when they became the targets of organized violence on the part of their own governments and in the ensuing years suffered wholesale expulsion from their homes.

These ancient communities, whose roots in the Middle East predated by a millennium the advent of Islam, numbered close to one million people. After 1948, they were cast out root and branch from Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, North Africa, and Iran. Most found refuge in the newly established Jewish state. There, the Knesset, initially slow to demand compensation for their losses, would eventually mandate that no settlement with the Palestinians would be acceptable if it failed to include recompense for individual and communal properties—estimated, in area, to amount to nearly 40,000 square miles, about five times the size of Israel, and valued at $150 billion—that had been confiscated by Muslim governments in the Middle East from their Jewish citizens.

The new American plan does indeed address the case of the Mizraḥi Jews. Noting that the Arab-Israel conflict “created both a Palestinian and Jewish refugee problem,” and that the numbers displaced were approximately equal on the two sides, the plan goes on to state unequivocally that, separate from any peace agreement, “a just, fair, and realistic solution” for the Jewish refugees, “including compensation for lost assets” as well as compensation to Israel for the cost of absorbing them, must be “implemented through an appropriate international mechanism.”

All of this,of course, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, and whether or not the Trump plan ever comes to fruition, the Mizraḥi story deserves telling and retelling. For an engaging treatment, the 2018 book Uprooted by Lyn Julius, a British-born descendant of Iraqi Jews, can serve as a useful introduction.

“AMERICAN INGRATE” BY BEN WEINGARTEN

https://mailchi.mp/7a206fee7c5e/bhw-2374242?e=a0fa704ef6

In American Ingrate, Federalist Senior Contributor Benjamin Weingarten exposes Ilhan Omar’s radical and revolutionary Left-Islamist agenda, her seminal role in the progressive takeover of the Democratic Party, and the dire threat she poses to U.S. national security by way of her collusion with subversive anti-American forces.

She says that America was “founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves,” and that “ignorance really is pervasive” among Americans today.

She says America must “dismantle” capitalism and “demilitarize” U.S. foreign policy, which she sees “from the perspective of a foreigner,” tweeting “thousands of Somalis [were] killed by…American forces…#NotTodaySatan.”

She says American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby;” and that American Jews disloyally pledge “allegiance” to Israel’s “apartheid…regime,” which has “hypnotized the world.”

She says of the 9/11 attacks: “some people did something.”

Shockingly, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) words merely scratch the surface of her hatred of America—and the West—and divert our gaze from the nefarious actions she is taking to sabotage it from within.

American Ingrate is the defining book on the size, scope, and nature of the threat posed by Representative Omar—the personification of the anti-American Left-Islamist nexus—heightened by her hidden collusion with like-minded adversaries foreign and domestic, and alleged criminality and corruption.

This is a clarion wakeup call to the dangers epitomized by Rep. Omar. For she is not merely a lone radical in Congress, but the archetype of the new Democratic Party—and a uniquely dangerous figure at the heart of a uniquely dangerous challenge to America.

Among other things, this heavily researched work:

Makes the definitive case that as President Trump has argued, Rep. Omar is the face of the Democratic Party, while delving deeply into her unexplored background, unchallenged beliefs, and under-appreciated effort in leading her party to advance a fundamentally subversive, intersectional- and identity politics-based agenda geared towards destroying our core institutions under the guise of “social justice;” 
Sets forth the argument that she not only personifies but leads the unholy progressive-Islamist alliance–held together by the glue of Jew-hatred as a proxy for hatred of Judeo-Christian Western civilization–that truly has triumphed over the Democratic establishment; and
Builds the as yet ignored case for her collusion with corrupt and anti-American actors and regimes foreign and domestic–on top of credible allegations of criminality and corruption, including previously unreported details pointing to her fraudulence