RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://washingtonexaminer.com/a-contrary-view-on-bob-gatess-duty-as-he-saw-it/article/2542414

By now, a lot of journalists have mined all the “money quotes” from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s memoir, Duty.

Even before the book came out, we learned that Gates is contemptuous of Congress, believes that Vice President Joe Biden has been wrong on pretty much everything in foreign policy for four decades, that Hillary Clinton is a politically-motivated poseur, and that he believes his “minimalist goals” on Iraq were realized.

These revelations have to be considered in the context of two facts: First, Gates was the first defense secretary ever held over from one administration to another despite the glaring differences in policies, ideologies and personalities; and second, that by virtue of the fact that his name isn’t Donald Rumsfeld, he apparently believed he’d be treated with greater respect and dignity than was his predecessor.

Kerry’s Oblivious “Peace” Efforts In Kuwait, after 10 failed trips to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinian authority, Secretary of State John Kerry proudly declared “Everywhere I go, even here today, everybody I talk to expresses gratitude to the efforts the United States is making … to try to make peace between Palestinians and […]

http://spectator.org/print/57466

SIFTING THROUGH THE HOGWASH

You might think that in the sixth year of his presidency, Barack Obama would no longer be blaming George Bush for everything that is wrong in the world. And you’d be wrong, as he proved in another tiresome speech this morning.

For about fifty minutes, Obama droned on, telling us how he would use his administrative powers (and possibly work with Congress) to “reform” the intelligence gathering activities of the NSA and, presumably, the rest of the intelligence community. He began by lecturing us (for those who didn’t pay attention in fourth grade or see the Disney movie about “Johnny Tremain,” Paul Revere and the “Sons of Liberty”) about the history of American intelligence gathering. Most important to him, Obama told us that the “worst abuses” occurred before he became president.

As a senator, he reminded us, he opposed “warrantless wiretapping,” and told us that the Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” which, he said, contradicted our values. (The EITs, for those who forget too quickly, were outrages such as slaps to the face, and which — according to George Tenet’s memoir — produced more valuable intelligence than all the rest of the intelligence community’s efforts combined.) And he reminded us that he might not be president but for the sacrifices of those such as Martin Luther King who were spied on by their government.

So how does Obama want to correct the NSA’s abuses of its authority — either real or imagined in the media frenzy surrounding the Snowden leaks — to satisfy the world? Well, he really doesn’t know.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com  http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS   It’s down to the wire.  (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Trans-Catheter Aortic-Valve Implantation (TAVI) procedures are saving thousands of lives but are extremely difficult to perform.  The Acwire from Israel’s MediValve allows cardiologists to implant these heart valves at exactly the right position.  Acwire has just received European CE mark approval. […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368563/israel-double-standard-victor-davis-hanson An obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association not long ago voted to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. Given academia’s past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/01/beyond_bridgegate_ignoring_the_elephant_in_the_room.html The political flap over Chris Christie’s role in “Bridgegate” has thrown a spotlight once again on the rough-hewn, plain-speaking New Jersey governor.  But the drama of the current brouhaha has drawn attention away from the governor’s more serious, ongoing missteps — namely, his cultivation of relationships with those associated with known terrorist groups.  Remarkably, New Jersey’s […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The study of any philosophy is doomed eventually to the solipsism of the idea as the real world falls away and is replaced by the construct of the world. When Buckley favored being governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the faculty at Harvard, he was on solid ground. […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368796/print

Prominent indicators confirm that the U.S. is the chief facilitator of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

According to the recently released 2014 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, Syria is the third worst nation in the world in which to be Christian, Iraq is fourth, Afghanistan fifth, and Libya 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation, “extreme persecution” (other designations are “severe,” “moderate,” and “sparse” persecution).

Aside from being so closely and harshly ranked, these four nations have something else in common: heavy U.S. involvement. Three — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — were “liberated” thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring “freedom fighters” against the regime, many of whom would be better labeled “terrorists.”

The Syrian situation alone indicts U.S. foreign policy. According to Reuters:

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. “This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm,” said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368813/print

Why didn’t the president give this speech seven months ago when it would have counted?

It is very hard to take President Obama seriously. At Friday’s big surveillance speech, after five years of Big Government–orchestrated Constitution shredding, he looked the American people in the eye and explained that, as monitoring technology has evolved over the centuries, our nation has always “benefitted from both our Constitution and traditions of limited government.” While your head was still spinning, another whopper: After five years of whimsically “waiving,” ignoring, and unilaterally rewriting congressional statutes, he bleated that “our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.”

Of course, from the man who repeatedly vowed that you could keep your health-insurance plan, all the while scheming to eliminate your health-insurance plan, we’ve come to expect this disconnect between rhetoric and reality. What makes President Obama so hard to take seriously is not just the lying. It is that he does not take his job seriously. Consider the great “metadata” controversy, the focal point of yesterday’s speech.

It has been seven months since Edward Snowden’s first felonious leaks — seven months of firestorm over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-record information on virtually all Americans. During that time the program has been hysterically slandered by critics on the left and right — the libels aided and abetted by legislators who’ve known for years exactly what the NSA was doing and yet feigned shock over Snowden’s “revelations.” (I use the mock quotes in a nod to Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., Upper West Side), who conceded last June that, when it came to the NSA’s data collection, Snowden revealed nothing that hadn’t been well known and hotly debated for seven years.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368805/hillary-hyped-jonah-goldberg

Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including those of you who have merely stumbled onto this “news”letter via the filthy Internet rather than receiving it via the space-age pneumatic technology it was intended for),

Say you work for a company that depends on sales (“Um, are there other kinds of businesses?” — The Couch).

Imagine you have a saleswoman who everyone says is the best — THE BEST!! (ideally said in a Kenny Banya voice). Whenever you point out that her sales numbers stink, everyone calls you “sexist” or insists that you just “don’t get it.”

You respond, “What has she done?”

The universal answer is, “She clocked more miles on sales calls than anybody in company history! She’s driven a million miles! One. Million. Miles!”

You ask: “Yeah, but has she, you know, sold anything?”

“Sexist! You don’t get it!”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about Hillary Clinton. When you ask her diehard supporters what she did as secretary of state they start with, “She travelled a million miles! More than any secretary of state.”

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”