RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It’s Virtually Impossible to Be a Successful Modern President” declares the headline of a blog post by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. The post has drawn a great deal of ridicule, but to our mind most of the critics fail to appreciate just how feeble an effort it is. Our aim is to correct that.

Cillizza’s argument is based on four observations: First, the presidency is a difficult job. Second, the “bully pulpit” isn’t what it used to be. Third, the electorate and elected officials have become more ideologically polarized. Fourth, the “mainstream media” are no longer a coherent and powerful entity, in part because of the rise of social media.

These utterly banal observations add up to a causal claim: that because of the last three factors, it has become impossible for a president to succeed. Well, no, not impossible, he admits at the very end, and the headline does include the weasel word virtually. “But failure is far, far more likely. Ask Barack Obama. Or George W. Bush.”

One suspects if asked, either Obama or Bush would dispute the premise that he is a failure. But rather than argue over specific cases, let’s ask Cillizza to define his terms. What constitutes a failed presidency? Here’s his answer: “A president who [sic] a majority of the country disapproves of and a country even more split along ideological lines on, well, everything.”

The second component of this definition begs the question. Cillizza claims ideological polarization causes presidential failure, which he defines in part as ideological polarization. So ideological polarization causes ideological polarization. At the end of the post, Cillizza tries to isolate disapproval from polarization and comes up with this:

I was talking to a Democratic pollster recently about President Obama’s weak job approval ratings and what it might mean for Democrats on the ballot this fall. I asked how Obama could move his numbers up and what a “good place” for him might look like. The pollster responded that the political world needed to change its definition of what being a popular president entails in this day and age. His point was that if Obama could somehow crawl back to 50 percent approval before November, that would be a huge success. Obama’s ceiling–almost no matter what he said or did–was around 52 or 53 percent, the pollster argued.

Of course that goes both ways: A polarized electorate means that a president’s approval rating has a floor (in Obama’s case a bit below 40%) as well as a ceiling. But in any case, if contemporaneous approval ratings were the measure of presidential success, Truman would be considered a failure and Harding would be on Mount Rushmore.

The supposedly independent agency harassed the administration’s political opponents and saved its health-care law.

One of the big questions out of the IRS targeting scandal is this: How can an agency that engaged in such political misconduct be trusted to implement ObamaCare? This week’s Halbig v. Burwell ruling reminded us of the answer. It can’t.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Halbig that the administration had illegally provided ObamaCare subsidies in 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Yet it wasn’t the “administration” as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS.

And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election.

The White House viewed it as imperative, therefore, that IRS bureaucrats ignore the law’s text and come up with a politically helpful rule. The evidence shows that career officials at the IRS did indeed do as Treasury Department and Health and Human Services Department officials told them. This, despite the fact that the IRS is supposed to be insulated from political meddling.

There are two dimensions to fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional warfare there isn’t that much of a difference between fighting men and their tactics. There is a wider space between fighting terrorists and their tactics.

Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular block. He is out to change how the enemy and his side think about that city block and the larger conflict.

Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East Jerusalem worth?

This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.

Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.

The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.

That is what has been happening to Israel. The entire carrot and stick of the peace process and the suicide bombing, the final agreement that never comes and the final solution that is coming, were designed to wear down Israelis, to make their leaders and people chase down empty hopes and argue among themselves over who is to blame because there is still no peace.

The Christians of Mosul had 24 hours, the infidels of the West have a bit more time.

The just and merciful caliph gave the Christians of Mosul 24 hours to convert, leave, or die. The payment of the jizya (= dhimmitude) option, initially included in the multiple choice injunction, was withdrawn. A church dating back 1800 years, before the advent of Islam, was burned to the ground before the Christians left. The infidels of the West were too busy decrying the “massacre” in Gaza to ask for whom the bell tolls.

Ali Khamenei proposes the elimination of Israel by referendum. Former French MFA Dominique de Villepin thinks an imposed peace plan enforced by UN peacekeepers would do the trick. Hamas leaders, safely hunkered down in tunnels or abroad, exult in victory. Western media launch lethal narratives from morning to night and Jews look for the nearest shelter. Israel’s bosom buddy, the United States of America, wants an imposed ceasefire, presumably before joining in on an imposed peace plan, while slapping a brief but telling blockade on air travel to and from Israel. Did you get the message, haverim? Do unto the blockaders as they do unto Gaza.

In the aftermath of the shocking violence unleashed last weekend in Barbès and Sarcelles, benevolent French judges smiled upon the meager handful of culprits who were arrested after the Barbès operation. Suspended sentences of 4, 6, or 10 months were handed down like feeding candy to the wolves. The justice ministry has exercised its right to appeal these lenient sentences. Those arrested for mayhem in Sarcelles will theoretically go to jail, but perhaps not. Short sentences rarely lead to actual imprisonment here. It’s hard to prove that a given actor in an enraged mob actually committed this or that infraction. And it’s hard to have confidence in the government when thousands of punk jihadis show up for a banned demonstration and are not immediately dispersed. All the more so when a political party, the anti-capitalist NPA formerly led by the phony mailman Besancenot, brazenly maintains its call to demonstrate.

62% of French people polled said the pro-Palestinian demonstrations should be banned. But who’s listening?

Under pressure from interested parties, the Hollande government decided to authorize demonstrations on the 23rd and 26th of July… because every possible guarantee had been given by the organizers that there would be no débordements [literally, “overflow”]. The Communists had by then joined the NPA in fronting for the Brotherhood. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was there under the banner of the Front de Gauche that is part of the governing coalition, along with a handful of Socialist deputies. PM Manuel Valls had tried to stick to his guns. All last week he defended the ban, refuting claims that the ban was the cause of the violence. Note the lethal narrative: An authorized demonstration on July 13th replete with Death to the Jews culminates in attacks on synagogues. Therefore, demonstrations banned the following weekend yield 50 times more incitement and violence. Logical, n’est-ce pas? If I park in a no-parking zone and you tow my car away, it’s only to be expected that I will burn down the city hall and invite the assassination of the mayor.

During a visit to Cuba two weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly reached an agreement to reopen the huge Russian spy base in Lourdes, on the west side of the island nation.

The Lourdes base is south of Havana and about 155 miles from the U.S. During the Cold War, the enormous base – about 28 square miles — was the home to thousands of Russian military and intelligence-gathering personnel. In about 2001, it was closed apparently because it cost too much to rent from the Cubans. Now, with oil and gas revenues propping up Putin’s neo-Soviet autocracy, the Russians are able to afford a lot more than they could 20 years ago.

Lourdes is supposed to be housing one or more Glonass ground stations. Glonass is a Russian GPS satellite system and it requires, like all such systems, ground-based calibration. Because it may hide other capabilities, such as secure communications, Glonass isn’t “glasnost” – roughly “transparency” – which was one of the final unmet promises from the Soviet regime. But Putin’s motivation for reopening Lourdes – which will be an expensive operation – aren’t very obvious.

The reality – from a military and technological viewpoint – is that Russia doesn’t need Lourdes. Espionage can be conducted from Russia and other nations. So can cyberwar. Russian cyberwarriors, who have proven themselves quite capable in attacks against Georgia, Estonia and Ukraine, can mount attacks on U.S. military, defense and industry computer networks from anywhere. They are highly active in doing so, but there’s no benefit to them in operating from Cuba that they don’t already have.

If the reasons aren’t technological, military or intelligence related, then they have to be political. By reopening Lourdes, Putin is again putting a sharp stick in President Obama’s eye. He’s grabbing at the prestige and influence in Central and South America that Russia lost when the Soviet Union ended its operations in Cuba and then fell apart entirely.

What Putin seeks is a Cuban base for Russian efforts to do the same thing that they’re doing in Eastern Europe. Reopening Lourdes restores Cuba as a primary base for Russian destabilization of Mexico as well as Central and South America. At the end of the Cold War, that danger was limited severely by the fact that the Soviet Union was rapidly going broke. But now, with Russia again able to afford military adventurism – such as the funding and arming of its insurgent proxy force in Ukraine – Russia is apparently able to afford more aid, including military aid, to regional troublemakers.

There are plenty on hand. The Soviets’ old friend from the 1980s, Daniel Ortega, has been the president of Nicaragua (again) since 2007. Ortega and other anti-American dictators (and dictator-wannabes) such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia’s Evo Morales will be eager recipients of Russian aid tied to destabilizing their neighboring nations.

Barack Obama declared six years ago that the ultimate goal of his presidency was to fundamentally transform America. This has been not only his agenda, but for decades the goal of America’s political left wing. To transform a country one must first transform its people. Transformation takes place by changing the values by which people live and by changing their self-perception of who they are and what they are supposed to become.

Common Core does exactly that.

Common Core is to education what Obamacare is to healthcare. The purpose of both programs is to take away one’s individual choice, be it regarding healthcare or local influence on education. Both programs are transformative since they assault the most fundamental American liberties, the freedom to choose one’s doctor and medical remedies, and the freedom to educate one’s children by local values. Both programs give federal bureaucrats control over these most important aspects of life. They disenfranchise us as patients and parents. Controlling the lives of “those below” is the animating principle of Leftism and the elitists who wish to do the controlling.

A communist society takes choice away from the people and places it in the hands of a centralized apparatus removed from the people. In other words, it deprives the individual his liberty. Through centralization, the individual loses not only his liberty but is socially engineered to think a certain way and act in conformity and lock-step with how the ruling elite want its new underclass to act. Common Core seeks to create a common-ness among people, what the Communists refer to as “the masses.” America’s students are being groomed today to be future members of the “Commie Corps,” advocates and robots of a trans-individual system.

Americans have succeeded because of our special Judeo-Christian outlook on life, local control, and the confidence in a rugged individualism that inspired us to be the best we can be. Common Core changes all that. Our children will be trained by educators not to be rugged but common; not masters of our own fate but subjects of a ruling bureaucracy; not the possessors of a unique Judeo-Christian outlook but proponents of a transnational, socialist worldview.

One of the hallmarks and goals of socialist Marxism is to strip a country of its unique culture, history, attitudes, and self-perception. The first order of business for the Russian communists was to denude Russia of its Russo-ism as did Mao when stripping his country of its unique Chinese heritage. Thus, throughout the curriculum of Common Core, American heroes are minimized and castigated, our history maligned, our historic values seen as an affront to multiculturalism. Much of Common Core is an indictment of America. It indicts so as to remove.

Seldom do I venture outside the subject matter of constitutionalism, ideology and/or politics, but when I do it is either something personal, remarkable or both. The unique and innovative research and development taking place at Galectin Therapeutics™ is just such a subject. Should the scientists of this corporation succeed in bringing their product to market, the lives of millions of people in the United States – and potentially tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world – could be saved.

This issue is important to me because I have a personal experience with the evils of cancer and the fibrotic diseases. In 2000, my best friend from high school (a brother from the moment we met until the day he died) was taken from me, from his family, by the ravages of these diseases. He was diagnosed and taken in less than 30 days. The emotional toll on all his survivors was all encompassing and intense. It is with this personal understanding of the issue that the discovery of what Galectin Therapeutics is doing captivated my attention.

What would you say if I told you that a company – a gifted group of scientists – has developed a therapy that will save the lives of well over 15 million Americans suffering from diseases that currently have no cure, and that today can’t be detected until it is too late?

What would you say if I told you that the Food & Drug Administration is so impressed with the data surrounding this new drug therapy that they have awarded “Fast Track” status to this drug, and that, according to Morgan Brennan of CNBC Business News, there has never – never – been a Fast Tracked drug that has failed to come to market?

And what would you say if I told you that not only will this drug be extremely affordable when it comes to market, but that you – you – could be a part of this history-making endeavor?

Well, it is all true…and none-to-soon for the many people who suffer from fibrosis of the liver, kidneys and lungs, and some forms of cancer, thanks to groundbreaking work being done by the scientists at Galectin Therapeutics.

The UN Human Rights Council held a special session in Geneva on July 23, 2014 to declare effectively that Israelis do not have human rights. The vote was 29 in favor, 1 against and 17 abstentions.

The Obama administration voted against – after joining and legitimizing the virulently anti-Jewish Council for the past five years, and now feigning disappointment for American cameras.

The Europeans abstained because they did not want to upset their violent Muslim minorities, and because their sordid past didn’t leave the resolution’s message too foreign in any case. A few cowardly countries that Israelis have magnanimously befriended over the years also abstained.

But the majority of the UN world cheered – literally. Speakers during the procession of hatemongers at the Council were greeted with applause.

As is their wont, CNN, the New York Times and company derived from this spectacle the lesson that Israel is pathetic, isolated and doomed.

But the real takeaway is the polar opposite.

Israel really is a light unto the nations.

The light years between the UN “human rights” machinery and genuine human rights is actually pretty obvious. At least to folks without years of foreign policy wonking, diplomatic double-talk language schooling, or blinkered war correspondence training.

Here is how it went down.

The “Human Rights” Council session on Gaza was presided over by President Baudelaire Ndong Ella of Gabon, a member of the Islamic bloc of states (OIC), and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

There you go again,” as Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter. Once again the United Nations Human Rights Council has voted – with the United States dissenting – to conduct a so-called “investigation” of Israel’s military responses to Hamas’s double war crimes. Once again Israel will have to decide whether to feed the kangaroos that make up this court by cooperating with yet another phony investigation whose outcome is predetermined. Yet again Israel is presented with a Hobson’s choice: If it refuses to cooperate, it will blamed for denying the investigatory commission relevant information; if it cooperates it will lend credibility to a conclusion that has already been reached.

This Hamas-inspired investigation is an important part of Hamas’s double war crime strategy: By firing its rockets from civilian areas and buildings – even Ban Ki-moon acknowledges that it does – Hamas seeks to have Israel kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible. This Hamas-designed body count, and the accompanying photographs, inevitably leads to the kind of one-sided investigation in which the UNHRC specializes. The resulting one-sided condemnation, which Hamas can always count on, then helps it win support in Europe, South America and other parts of the world, as well as in the media and universities.

By joining in this Hamas strategy, indeed becoming a central part of it, the UNHRC encourages Hamas to repeat its rocket fire against Israeli civilians, its tunneling into Israel to kill and kidnap Israelis and its placement of rockets and tunnel entrances in civilian areas. The countries voting for this investigation are fully aware of what they are encouraging. They have the blood of future innocent Palestinians and Israelis on their hands.

Last time around the commission found a willing dupe in Richard Goldstone, who was prepared to put his personal ambition to elevate his status within the international community above any commitment to truth. Because Goldstone is Jewish and has spent time in Israel, his name attached to the commission’s report gave it an air of credibility. His dual conclusions – that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians and that Hamas did not use human shields – were so thoroughly discredited that they destroyed Goldstone’s career, and even his prospects of elevation within the international community. Eventually even Goldstone had to acknowledge his mistake and indicate that there was no evidentiary support for his widely cited conclusions.

This time around it will not be easy for the commission to find an ambitious dupe like Goldstone, because potential commission members now understand that their conclusions, methodologies and biases will be scrutinized with care and exposed for all to read.

US Secretary of State John FN Kerry went to see the parents of US citizen and fallen lone soldier Max Steinberg HY”D (May God Avenge his blood). Kerry put his foot so deeply into his mouth as to make it crystal clear why our rabbis decreed that one who goes to console a mourner should not speak until spoken to.

According to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, “Kerry entered and exited the room swiftly, surrounded by men in black and refusing to take any questions from press.”

“How’s your day?” Kerry asked as he sat down. “How’s your day?” Evie [Steinberg’s mother] asked back. “My day’s going better than yours,” he said.

In the meantime, the Steinberg’s are overwhelmed with the support that they have received here in Israel.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva at Jerusalem’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, where the family are observing the seven-day shiva mourning period, Max’s mother expressed gratitude for “all the love” the family had received from complete strangers.

“I cannot believe that all of these people are here for our son, and all the people that are here are giving us strength to get through this horrible time for our family,” she said.

She recalled how her son had been inspired to join the IDF after visiting the grave of another fallen lone soldier from America: Michael Levin, who died fighting with the IDF’s Paratrooper Brigade during the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Max’s father told how the Israeli people had “done everything they can to help us live through this very trying time.”

Addressing the family’s decision to bury Max in Israel – and not in LA as originally planned – he said they felt their decision had been validated after visiting Israel.

“…Once we got here and once we’ve been embraced by so many wonderful people.. and the beauty of the country and what it all stands for, there is no other decision.”

Some 30,000 people showed up at Steinberg’s funeral on Wednesday night.