RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4795/we_re_all_ashamed_of_obama_the_dunce_on_ukraine

Recent events in the Ukraine are just another reminder that Barack Obama’s naive and unrealistic view of world affairs is completely divorced from reality and wholly incompatible with any semblance of American global leadership.

So, let’s pause for a moment to process this. There are plenty of angles to consider, and we just want to be very careful and make sure that we’ve considered all aspects of what’s transpiring.

On Syria, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere, US foreign policy is more misguided than ever. Red lines don’t’ matter.

Power politics is a thing of the past. Can’t we all just get along?

If there was ever any doubt, it now seems clear that Obama truly believes he’s the smartest, most charismatic man in the world. Hence, his charisma and brains obviate the need for the United States to even have a foreign policy.

Leading from the front was never an option for the Obama administration, but – post-Libya — it doesn’t even look like Obama’s capable of leading from behind.

Teaser: Which multi-billion dollar industry just cannot afford to boycott Israel? Paradox: this industry calls for boycotts, but its life depends on it not doing so itself. Getting warmer?

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4788/guess_which_industry_just_can_t_afford_to_boycott_israel

Plans to isolate Israel through boycotting may flounder or prosper. Call that a truism. Whether boycott prospers depends on one particular industry not joining the boycott. Call that a paradox. The more wholeheartedly this non-boycotting industry operates in Israel, and the more profitably, the better the boycott movement thrives.

Likely or not, call that a proposition. Could it be a valid one?

What possible business could promote and facilitate Israel – boycotting on the one hand while flouting the boycott on the other? The human rights business could.

As to it being a business, only look at the sustainability factors in favour of the civil society organization (or NGO) players: mountains of cheap capital on demand; global reach, well-connected stakeholders, media channels beating a path to their door, and a traded commodity for which the world has a gluttonous hunger. If those are not conditions in favour of big business what other conditions are there?

A club of Big Five NGOs tops the industry pyramid. The names are household: Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Christian Aid; Oxfam; Save the Children Fund. Nominally they, along with second-tier NGO entities, are autonomous, not-for-profit and apolitical. In real life they are none of those things.

There are not hundreds but thousands of second-tier entities, medium to small, a bewildering number of them operating in tiny Israel and the West Bank. They compete fiercely to supply human rights product, sometimes to the big five, sometimes to the UN and satellite Human Rights Council, or direct to people and entities that can turn Israeli ‘crimes against humanity’ to good account. They also compete for publicity and investor funding.

The base of the pyramid is made up of sources that put up money to keep it all together. They are billionaire private investors, Euro zone countries that practically fling money at NGOs; ecumenical coffers, flush Arab potentates and proverbial Joe public.

Even so, the structure would topple but for an independent clearing house – the UN and satellite agency, the Human Rights Council. Much like a farm co-operative they act as a buyer of last resort, but even more, as a marketer of human rights violations. And upon this clearing house, and upon the whole industry, jobs depend for tens of thousands.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secretary-cohen-and-general-jones-on-trans-atlantic-turbulence-a-957336-druck.html

Revelations about NSA spying and an unequal sharing of military burdens has cast a recent shadow over the trans-Atlantic relationship. But NATO remains just as important as ever. It is time for all alliance members to recognize that fact.

During the course of more than three decades, in our public service and private capacities, we have regularly attended the Munich Security Conference, formerly known as Wehrkunde.

The Conference initially consisted of a small group of military experts from the United States, Canada and Western Europe who discussed issues involving the threat posed by the former Soviet Union. Today, the Conference includes representatives from the business, diplomatic and military communities from all of Europe, Russia and Asia who examine the new threats posed by terrorists, religious extremists, nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare and organized crime.

Although the US delegation to the Conference included 15 members of Congress and a joint appearance by Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel we detected the “brooding omnipresence” of a discontent for the United States that contained a whiff of anti-Americanism.

http://www.steynonline.com/6141/sock-appeal

I spent Monday in a somewhat cramped courtroom in Toronto, at the defamation trial of my old comrade in the battle against the “human rights” commissions, Ezra Levant. The National Post’s Joseph Brean reports:

A libel trial begins this morning in Toronto nearly six years after it was launched in the heat of Canada’s first online culture war.

Pitting a Regina lawyer against a nationally known television personality who describes himself as “one of Canada’s premier advocates of free expression,” Khurrum Awan v. Ezra Levant is one of several defamation suits that arose from the fight over hate speech bans in human rights law. But as one of the last to come to trial, it marks a kind of bookend on Canada’s noisy hate debate.

Spectators, including columnist Mark Steyn and famed hate case lawyer Barbara Kulaszka, packed the little courtroom on Toronto’s University Avenue. Witnesses are expected to include the participants, National Post reporter Brian Hutchinson, and prominent lawyer Julian Porter, who used to act for Maclean’s magazine.

Yes, it’s like a little 2008 time-warp. Here’s Joseph Brean’s follow-up story:

http://www.steynonline.com/6151/where-the-action-is

This column appears in the March 10th issue of National Review, but is especially timely in the week of all the pitching and wooing of CPAC:

People keep asking me whom I favor for the 2016 Republican nomination. I politely demur — and not just because it’s almost three years till Election Day, and at this stage in the 2008 cycle I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Barack Obama. As a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than 37 people, I don’t have to seek out presidential candidates; they’re there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar Alexander, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, Alan Keyes…

Would it have made any difference to the country had any of these fine upstanding fellows prevailed? Or would we be pretty much where we are anyway? Aside from a trade agreement here, a federal regulation there, I’d plump for the latter. You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that’s the position the Republican party is in. After the last election, I said that the billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign on robocalls and TV ads and whatnot had been entirely wasted, and the Electoral College breakdown would have been pretty much the same if they’d just tossed the dough into the Potomac and let it float out to sea. But imagine the use all that money and time could have been put to out there in the wider world. Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November — and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference. Culture trumps politics — which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain (including in the pages of this magazine) why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why 30 million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are “natural allies” of the Republican party.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/07/desmond-tutu-climate-expert/?print=1

Noxious gasbag.

South Africa’s peace icon Desmond Tutu on Friday urged the United States to reject Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline, saying the “carbon bomb” would upend the US role fighting climate change.

“The verdict on whether to approve or reject the Keystone XL pipeline could, in just one stroke, confirm or condemn America’s prospects for climate leadership,” said the letter, released by the advocacy group Avaaz.

“This is a US policy decision that will have truly global significance. Keystone has been called the ‘fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet,’” said the letter, timed for the final day of a public comment period on the pipeline.

In a time of turmoil all over the globe, a clergyman most noted for winning the Nobel Peace prize is babbling about the world’s greatest superpower needing to worry about “climate leadership.”

Whatever that is.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372793/print

Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.

He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness.

Really? Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia conquered it 20 years before the U.S. acquired Louisiana. Lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot.

Now Russia looms over the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin can take that anytime he wants — if he wants. He has already destabilized the nationalist government in Kiev. Ukraine is now truncated and on the life support of U.S. and European money (much of which — cash for gas — will end up in Putin’s treasury anyway).

Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372901/print

Here is a selection of recent headlines: “Jon Stewart Destroys Megyn Kelly,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News’ ‘Spite-Driven Anger Machine,’” “Jon Stewart Destroys What’s Left of Peggy Noonan’s Credibility,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News Over Syria Coverage,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Glenn Beck’s Utopia,” “Jon Stewart Destroys Bill O’Reilly” — there are about 520,000 more — and, not to be missed, “Jon Stewart Destroys Chicago-Style Pizza.”

The sound of terrors is in his ears at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central, and in prosperity the destroyer cometh upon him.

Mr. Stewart is the host of a fake news show, the genesis of which probably was a conversation that went approximately like this: Brother-in-Law: “There’s nothing funny on Saturday Night Live except the ‘Weekend Update.’ They should really just do that for the whole show.” Jon Stewart: “Hey . . . !” Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name. His shtick is a fundamentally cowardly one, playing the sanctimonious vox populi when it suits him, and then beating retreat into “Hey, I’m just a comedian!” when he faces a serious challenge. It is the sort of thing that you can see appealing to bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds.

His audience is not made up of bright, politically engaged 17-year-olds. But Mr. Stewart has pulled off a pretty neat trick: He has, as the half-million or so headlines mentioned above indicate, made fake news into real news, and it is not an accident that the verb “destroys” so often follows his name. Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz) and a career-boosting stint on MTV, where he was second only to Beavis and Butt-Head in the ratings. He subsequently may have matched Beavis and Butt-Head’s popularity, but he has never risen to comparable heights of social insight.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/03/democrats_unleash_the_irs_tyrant.html

Lois Lerner did not flinch from using the IRS to persecute conservative citizens groups and corrupt the 2012 election. Once again she has taken the Fifth rather than come clean to Congress about what the IRS did to squelch the Tea Party and others, and who ordered it. President Obama brazenly lies to Bill O’Reilly’s face and says there’s not a smidgeon of scandal. This is an unrepentant crew.

Obama is channeling Clinton’s famous hair-splitting on whether oral sex is sex. It all depends how you define scandal. Since Democrats believe they have the right to use the IRS to persecute political opponents, perhaps in Obama’s eyes, there is no scandal.

Democrats are embracing their inner tyrant. Voters tell pollsters they are ready to hand the Senate to Republicans in 2014 so we can repeal Obamacare. Not to worry, Democrats have an answer, and it is not to respect their constituents and repeal the monstrosity.

The Democrat answer to the voter’s revolt is the IRS. From now on, the IRS will openly suppress the conservative vote.

The White House is working to make permanent the IRS targeting of opposition groups before the 2014 election. According to Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, “Treasury appears to have reverse-engineered the carefully tailored rule—combing through the list of previously targeted tea party groups, compiling a list of their main activities and then restricting those functions.”

Texas’s Ted Cruz offered an amendment to prohibit IRS employees from deliberately targeting individuals or groups based on political views. It was unanimously rejected by every member of the Democratic majority.

http://carolineglick.com/surviving-obama/ Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg minced few words in discussing the interview that US President Barack Obama gave him on the eve of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest visit to Washington.   Speaking with journalist Charlie Rose, Goldberg equated Obama’s threat to stop supporting Israel in international forums to the talk of a mafia don. […]