RUTHFULLY YOURS

The naked self-interest of the government-worker class

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there’s no evidence that it did. That’s good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn’t target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

In 1939, Bruno Rizzi, a largely forgotten Communist intellectual, wrote a hugely controversial book, The Bureaucratization of the World. Rizzi argued that the Soviet Union wasn’t Communist. Rather, it represented a new kind of system, what Rizzi called “bureaucratic collectivism.” What the Soviets had done was get rid of the capitalist and aristocratic ruling classes and replace them with a new, equally self-interested ruling class: bureaucrats.

The book wasn’t widely read, but it did reach Bolshevik theoretician Leon Trotsky, who attacked it passionately. Trotsky’s response, in turn, inspired James Burnham, who used many of Rizzi’s ideas in his own 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, in which Burnham argued that something similar was happening in the West. A new class of bureaucrats, educators, technicians, regulators, social workers, and corporate directors who worked in tandem with government were reengineering society for their own benefit. The Managerial Revolution was a major influence on George Orwell’s 1984.

Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life 1984. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

The evidence is everywhere. Every day it seems there’s another story about teachers’ unions using their stranglehold on public schools to reward themselves at the expense of children. School-choice programs and even public charter schools are under vicious attack, not because they are bad at educating children but because they’re good at it. Specifically, they are good at it because they don’t have to abide by rules aimed at protecting government workers at the expense of students.

The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled down to the fact that VA employees are the agency’s most important constituency. The Phoenix VA health-care system created secret waiting lists where patients languished and even died, while the administrator paid out almost $10 million in bonuses to VA employees over the last three years.

The New York Times has distinguished itself as one of the most anti-Israel papers of today. Its writers habitually skew events to fit a particular narrative, one that is misleading and often, devoid of any truth. But among its cadre of writers, there stands one who is without a doubt heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of both his anti-Israel invective and propensity to engage in outright mendacity and that dubious distinction goes to Robert Mackey.

To say that Mackey’s coverage of Israel is reprehensible simply doesn’t do justice to the word. Consider his latest article, Israelis Start #BringBackOurBoys Campaign. An outpouring of sympathy for three Israeli youths kidnapped by Arab terrorists while hitchhiking prompted those supportive of Israel to take to social media in an effort to bring attention to their dire plight.

Here’s Mackey’s spin; “A group of Israelis trained to promote their country online started a #BringBackOurBoys campaign last week after three teenagers disappeared on their way home from religious schools in the occupied West Bank.” First, how does Mackey know for certain that Israelis created the site? The kidnapping produced a wave of both outrage and support throughout the international community, from Brazil to the United States. The Facebook page that Mackey refers to could have therefore been created in any number of countries and by any number of people of varied nationalities.

Second, assuming that the page was created by Israelis, how does Mackey know that those who created the page were “trained to promote their country online”? Mackey embeds that part of the sentence with a link to an article that talks about Haifa University offering an elective to students on ways to combat international deligitimization efforts by anti-Israel activists. But Mackey has no way of knowing that the creators of the page took such a course or even attended Haifa University for that matter and the leap is therefore beyond irrational. Indeed, Israelis are among the most prolific users of social media and are also among the most tech savvy so it’s not a stretch to imagine that some kid or a group of kids, devoid of any formal “training” commenced the campaign.

Here Mackey’s malevolence truly comes to the fore. He creates a moral inversion of sorts by linking grassroots Israeli efforts to free the kidnapped youths to automaton-like agents of government propaganda. This certainly is not the first time that Mackey has engaged in this sort of insidious yellow journalism.

My new book Insecurity is a comedy about political correctness run amok in the government and the military. But, as recent events show, there is a decidedly unfunny side to the world that political correctness is helping to create.

Up until recently, the colloquialism “heads will roll” referred to a threat to fire employees. Nowadays, however, that phrase is more likely to evoke its original literal meaning—as in the beheadings that have become a common feature of the daily news cycle. The streets of Mosul in Iraq are reportedly lined with the severed heads of police and soldiers—victims of the ISIS jihadists. A photo circulating on the web shows one of the recently released Taliban leaders in the days before his capture posing with his trophy collection of five lopped-off heads. Those who thought that decapitation went out with the French Revolution have come in for a rude awakening.

It’s disturbing to realize that such things can happen in this day and age, but we in America tend to console ourselves with the reassuring thought that, thank God, it can’t happen here. Or can it? Why shouldn’t it happen here? Or, to put it another way, “Who’s going to stop ‘em?”

The most obvious answer to that question—the one that will jump most readily to mind—is the Army. And certainly, the U.S. Army is more than a match for any invading force of Middle Eastern jihadists. But, although our army can repel armed jihad, it’s not very well-equipped to resist the other kind—namely, stealth jihad. And if the conquest of America ever comes—as Islamists say it will—it will come about through stealth jihad.

What is stealth jihad? It’s the incremental spread of Islamic law in a society by means of activism, propaganda and lawfare, and by the gradual co-option of schools, courts, and media. It’s the long march through the institutions that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended to European communists. Leftists have already co-opted many of society’s institutions. What’s to prevent jihadists from doing the same?

Stealth jihad is much more difficult to detect and resist than the armed variety. It’s not the type of aggression the Army is trained to deal with. And, in fact, the Army has proven itself on several occasions to be an enabler of stealth jihad. Take the case of Major Stephen Coughlin. He was the Army’s top expert on Islamic law until he made the mistake of pointing out that Islamic law obliges Muslims to wage jihad. The Army didn’t cotton on to that idea and Coughlin was dismissed from his Pentagon job as an intelligence contractor. The official attitude was nicely captured by an admiral who, upon hearing Coughlin’s assessment, replied that he would first “have to check with my imam on that.”

How can a false cult fool so many people all of the time? They would scoff at a Senate hearing on creationism but go along with this claptrap….rsk
WASHINGTON – Four former Environmental Protection Agency administrators – all veterans of Republican administrations – are urging lawmakers to take action on global climate change, which one warned carries an “enormous consequence for our future.”

“We all know, after all, that the earth’s climate is changing,” former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under President George W. Bush, told the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety. “We also know that human activity, although not solely responsible, as we should freely acknowledge, is both contributing to that change and increasing the risk that we will push the environment beyond the point upon which we can repair it.”

Those contributing to the problem, Whitman said, have “an obligation to contribute to its solution.”

Whitman was joined by William Ruckelshaus, the agency’s first administrator during the administration of President Richard Nixon; William K. Reilly, who served under President George H.W. Bush; and Lee Thomas, who held the post under President Ronald Reagan. All agreed that while a legitimate scientific debate exists over the pace and effects of climate change, there is no question that the earth is warming and that the human race is contributing to the change.

“The models of the world’s leading scientists predict rising seas, drought, floods, wildfires and more severe and frequent storms,” Rckelshaus said. “We are seeing impacts already.”

Ruckelshaus told the panel that the world’s oceans absorb 25 to 30 percent of produced carbon – an element thought to contribute to global climate change.

“The culprit is the same carbon that originated from fossil fuels that is contributing to planetary warming,” Ruckelshaus said.

If the U.S. fails to take action, Ruckelshaus noted, “nothing much will happen in the rest of the world.”

Watching the undoing, in a week, of victories that US forces won in Iraq at great cost over many years, Americans are asking themselves what, if anything, should be done.

What can prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – the al-Qaida offshoot that President Barack Obama derided just months ago as a bunch of amateurs – from taking over Iraq? And what is at stake for America – other than national pride – if it does? Muddying the waters is the fact that the main actor that seems interested in fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq is Iran. Following ISIS’s takeover of Mosul and Tikrit last week, the Iranian regime deployed elite troops in Iraq from the Quds Force, its foreign operations division.

The Obama administration, along with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, views Iran’s deployment of forces in Iraq as an opportunity for the US. The US, they argue should work with Iran to defeat ISIS.

The idea is that since the US and Iran both oppose al-Qaida, Iranian gains against it will redound to the US’s benefit.

There are two basic, fundamental problems with this idea.

First, there is a mountain of evidence that Iran has no beef with al-Qaida and is happy to work with it.

According to the 9/11 Commission’s report, between eight and 10 of the September 11 hijackers traveled through Iran before going to the US. And this was apparently no coincidence.

According to the report, Iran had been providing military training and logistical support for al-Qaida since at least the early 1990s.

After the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, al-Qaida’s leadership scattered. Many senior commanders – including bin Laden’s son Said, al-Qaida’s chief strategist Saif al-Adel and Suleiman Abu Ghaith – decamped to Iran, where they set up a command center.

“This was the moment,” Barack Obama had told the cheering audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. “When we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war.”

St. Paul has an Ocean Street. It has an Ocean Spa and Salon. It even has an Oceanaire Seafood Room. It does not however have an ocean. But with ObamaCare an unpopular subsidized failure, the few new jobs around being confined to a local McDonald’s and Al Qaeda taking over Iraq; Obama has nothing left to do but to go back to his old promise of defeating the rise of the ocean.

With Al Qaeda pressing in on Baghdad, Obama ruled out air strikes. He did however order the Department of Defense to assign a senior official to the vital task of fighting mislabeled seafood. While the Iraqi government was begging for air support, Obama instead issued an order in the name of the authority vested in him “by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America” to “ensure that seafood sold in the United States is legally and sustainably caught.”

The United States Constitution does not have much to say about sustainable seafood. The Founders liked their flounder and they disliked kings and emperors telling them where to fish.

King George III responded to Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty or give me death” with the Fisheries Bill which banned the fishermen of New England from the North Atlantic. A letter sent to a sea captain denounced it as, “A Bill so replete with inhumanity and cruelty… an everlasting stain on the annals of our pious Sovereign.”

But not even King George III would have contemplated creating a “national monument” consisting of 782,000 square miles of water. And despite being a monarch, he did not unilaterally issue a ban, rather parliament did. Even during the American Revolution, King George III was a more lawful and democratic monarch than Obama’s unilateral reign of royal executive orders.

Three percent of American tuna from the western and central Pacific comes from the waters of the latest national monument to Obama’s ideology. That means rising tuna prices which will hit working Americans, who already have trouble affording basic staples, even harder in the wallet.

After Eric Cantor’s defeat by newcomer Dave Brat, the New York Times ran a dozen articles and blog posts about the election. This flood of words tried to conceal the primary concern of voters in Cantor’s district: amnesty for illegal immigrants. One story did address amnesty and the election, but Times reporters mused at far greater length about anything and everything else.

Such papering-over is to be expected of the Times, which does not wish to draw attention to the fact that most American citizens disagree with open-borders politics. Amnesty’s other cheerleaders also prioritize suppressing the public’s real views on legal and illegal immigration: this motley crew includes the Chamber of Commerce, La Raza, Grover Norquist, Barack Obama, the RNC, the DNC, and even powerful elements within the American Conservative Union.

The Tea Party stands virtually alone in loudly opposing amnesty, and for doing so they are targeted with slurs like “nativist” and “racist.” While their views represent those of many, if not most Americans, the toxic label “racist” intimidates their potential allies from speaking out. This is why election results like the defeat of Cantor come as a surprise to the political establishment. It is also why silencing the Tea Party on immigration is a key ambition of pro-amnesty forces.

Unfortunately, it is not the Chamber of Commerce or even RINOs that threaten to undermine the Tea Party’s courageous stance on immigration. That danger lies closer to home, in national libertarian groups. In particular, Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks have been misleading the grassroots on amnesty. With a vote on immigration a strong possibility in coming weeks, as Erick Erickson warns in RedState, it is time to confront this deception, however unpleasant the confrontation may prove to be.

The official line offered by AFP and Freedomworks is that they are “sitting out” the immigration debate. But there is no such thing as sitting out such a crucial issue. Worse, they aren’t really sitting it out. Behind the scenes and through other organizations, the primary donors to AFP and the primary thinkers at Freedomworks actually advocate for increased immigration and amnesty. When they say they are “sitting immigration out,” they are being dishonest.

The US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works held a hearing today on “climate change”. A lot of it was business as usual, starting with the opening statement from Senator Barbara Boxer:

We should all know we must take action to reduce harmful carbon pollution, which 97% of scientists agree is leading to dangerous climate change that threatens our families.

Ah, the old 97 per cent consensus. To illustrate the point, the Democrats had invited as their witnesses four former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, who all happen to be Republicans and yet who all support the “consensus”. They were the Honorable Christine Todd Whitman, the Honorable William K Reilly, the Honorable William D Ruckelshaus, and the Honorable Lee M Thomas – a couple of years in the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy apparently sufficing to earn one a prenominal honorific for life.

Still, in the end they turned out to be pretty Honorable. Click the video below, and note the moment 1 minute and 20 seconds in, when Senator Jeff Sessions says:
The President on November 14th 2012 said, ‘The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted, even ten years ago.’ And then on May 29th last year he also said – quote – ‘We also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago.’ Close quote.

So I would ask each of our former Administrators if any of you agree that that’s an accurate statement on the climate. So if you do, raise your hand.

Do stick with the video to see how many of the EPA honchos agreed with the President.

Who was President Obama rescuing: Bowe Bergdahl or the Taliban terrorists themselves?

The question arises out of the mind-boggling defense of the Bergdahl deal proferred on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe’ by Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, who argued that by dint of the deal, “the President managed to get five guys out of Guantanamo, which is a goal.” Well, at least President Obama didn’t have to send Navy Seals in helicopters over the Gitmo fence to rescue the Taliban. He achieved his goal with a mere stroke of his mighty pen.

Mika Brzezinski had been expressing real skepticism about the deal, but supportively responded to Goldberg’s inanity, saying: “maybe this is — and the hopeful part of me thinks this is at least the beginning of trying to figure out what to do with these [Guatanamo] people.”

Transcript:

EUGENE ROBINSON: To one of your questions: why now? There’s an obvious difference in Afghanistan now. We’re in the end game in Afghanistan now. We were not three years ago. We were in the surge and now we know when we’re leaving and how we’re leaving.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There was a strong impulse in the White House, we’re trying to close off and cauterize some wounds here. The President managed to get five guys out of Guantanamo, which of course is a goal. And getting this guy out before American troops are gone from Afghanistan is an important goal obviously.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: We’re never going to know exactly what the circumstances around these five are. I would like to believe that —

Mr. GOLDBERG: We could take a guess.

Ms. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Actually, we probably could. I’d like to believe that there are few options in terms of closing Gitmo, and this is a president who wanted to, okay, who is not for the Guantanamo Bay concept and thinks that it tears away at the fabric of what we stand for. Maybe this is — and the hopeful part of me thinks this is at least the beginning of trying to figure out what to do with these people.

So which IRS divisions are still functional, apart from those responsible for collecting tax dollars and targeting conservative groups? The IT department is supposedly to blame for more than two years of missing emails, and the congressional relations team seems to entertain delusions of competence, even as it misleads a sympathetic Senate committee. The list of, er, coincidences lengthens.

On Monday IRS Commissioner John Koskinen met with Finance Chairman Ron Wyden and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch to explain the apparent hard-drive meltdowns that erased the communications to the rest of the executive branch from Lois Lerner and six IRS colleagues. The bipartisan duo learned that the IRS discovered the gap late in February, though by then the investigation had been underway for nearly a year.

In early April the IRS relayed the information to the Treasury, and the Treasury informed the White House the same month. But for some reason Congress and the public were left out of this information daisy chain until last Friday. The IRS has no explanation for the two-month blackout period.

At the Monday meeting with Senate Finance, Mr. Koskinen also neglected to mention the detail of the six other IRS employees whose computers also crashed at the same time as Ms. Lerner’s, though he must have known. IRS staff didn’t tell Senate staff in a meeting the same day either. Mr. Hatch revealed in a letter Thursday that he found out about this in a press release from the HouseWays and Means Committee.

This turn of events is all the more remarkable because Messrs. Wyden and Hatch were about to close a Senate investigation that involved 700,000 pages of documents and 30 interviews. They had agreed on consensus findings of fact that were being drafted, but Mr. Hatch asked for Mr. Koskinen to formally attest that all relevant communications had been produced to Congress. Forcing the IRS chief to go on legal record may help explain why the email gap was finally disclosed after two months, instead of even later or never.

Mr. Koskinen’s lack of candor is either evidence of ineptitude or deliberate abuse, and the Senate committee has reopened its probe. To recover the emails, Congress will need to expand its inquiry beyond the IRS proper to the Treasury, Justice Department and even the White House.