RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-fruit-of-obamas-abandonment-of-iraq/print/

MUCH AS I LIKE BRUCE THORNTON AND DISLIKE OBAMA THE FAILURE IN IRAQ SHOULD ALSO BE PINNED ON PRESIDENT BUSH AND HIS “MISSION UNACCOMPLISHED”- FIGHTING A LIMITED WAR WITH RULES OF ENGAGEMENT THAT WERE SUPER-SENSITIVE TO LOCAL BARBARIAN MORES WHICH COST AMERICAN LIVES WAS A FAILED STRATEGY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING….RSK

Anbar province, the region of Iraq that 1,300 American soldiers died pacifying, is at risk of being taken over by al Qaeda jihadists and their affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Fighting between Iraqi government forces and the jihadists is currently going on in Ramadi and Fallujah, the latter city the site in 2004 of the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. If the Iraqi government fails to retake the city and push back against the jihadist “al Qaedastan” fiefdom now forming in eastern Iraq and western Syria, the American hard-fought victory in Fallujah will be the emblem of how once again an incompetent administration snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, with repercussions for the whole region.

The debacle in Iraq, of course, has many causes. The dysfunctions of tribal cultures and Islam’s theology of violence––papered over by a national identity imposed from without and indifferent to the religious, regional, ethnic, and tribal fault lines of the region––ensured that absent a ruthless strongman to keep order, violence would explode between sectarian and tribal rivals. For the same reasons, the misguided American attempt to create liberal democracy in a country and culture with few of the preconditions for it was doomed to fail, and as a result sour the American people on any more involvement in a region of indiscriminate violence and ingratitude towards those who had liberated the Iraqi people from a psychopath like Hussein.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-supreme-court-is-undermining-science-and-society?f=puball The Supreme Court has taken up another case based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign of lies that carbon dioxide is the cause of “climate change” and claims about the quality of air in the United States. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists. At this point in the present era, the Court […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-epic-expression-of-failed-coin-strategy-fallujah-falls-to-al-qaida-factions

For the better part of five years, I have been decrying the unconscionable use of the historically failed strategy of Counter Insurgency (COIN) in the midst of an ideological monolithic culture; principally of Islam.

In the past few days and just two years after the final elements of US forces withdrew from Iraq, stories are emerging, bringing to completion the seemingly prophetic message I and others warned of two years ago; that Al Anbar has fallen back into Al Qaida hands with a self-neutered Iraq government seemingly powerless to stop it. I also made the case, then, that Al Anbar was not won by General Petraeus’ conjuring up the spirit of COIN specifically, but by the infusion of some 30,000 American uniforms into the region.

This process is more akin to the scientific theory of displacement than battlefield strategy. If you fill a region with men bearing one set of Colors, the unit marching under a different Banner, will be forced to displace – and they did. The effort to liberate Fallujah, twice, yielded a temporary reprieve for the non-combatants living there which now seems to have been reversed with Al Qaida and other like-minded cells and tribal components, retaking that city and Ramadi.

What is so damnably frustrating about this is that too many of us to list, foretold of this, years ago. And if there were any left in this country who still held onto the belief that either our civilian leadership or the left-listing General Grade Officers which populate the upper echelon of our Military structure were somehow visionaries and intellectuals, this latest manifestation of a failure of foresight should hopefully drive a spike through the heart of that lingering belief.

Not once – but twice, Marines, Sailors and Soldiers were asked to lay down their lives, “liberating” Al Anbar and most specifically, Fallujah; the second time being tightly restrained by the rigid ROE (Rules of Engagement) borne of the incomprehensibly idiotic paradigm of COIN! And now, two years later, that effort and all that blood, proves to have been for naught!

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/01/06/the-hypocrisy-of-the-western-christian-response-to-muslim-persecution-of-christians/

Editor’s Note: This is Part IV of an ongoing series by Robert Spencer highlighting human rights hypocrisy and fraudulent peace activists. For Part I, see “The Hypocrisy of the ‘Islamophobia’ Scam,” for Part II, see “The Hypocrisy of the Fatwa Against Terrorism,” and for Part III see last week’s “The Hypocrisy of the Feminist Response to Islam’s Oppression of Women.”

Pope Francis may get letters this year from kings and presidents and grand muftis, but it is highly unlikely that he will receive a letter nearly as important as the one he got in December from an impoverished and imprisoned woman in Pakistan.

This pontiff has famously made it a hallmark of his pontificate to show especial care for the downtrodden and outcast, and so he may yet answer Asia Bibi and speak out on her behalf, but there are good reasons to bet against that happening.

It all started for Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Catholic wife and mother, on June 14, 2009 – or more precisely, it all ended for her on that day. She recounted in August 2013:

I, Asia Bibi, have been sentenced to death because I was thirsty. I’m a prisoner because I used the same cup as those Muslim women, because water served by a Christian woman was regarded as unclean by my stupid fellow fruit-pickers.

Picking fruit with a group of Muslim women, Bibi was ordered to fetch water for them – and drank a bit of it herself in the stifling heat. A Muslim woman rebuked her for doing so, saying to the other women: “Listen, all of you, this Christian has dirtied the water in the well by drinking from our cup and dipping it back several times. Now the water is unclean and we can’t drink it! Because of her!”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-palestinians-and-terrorism-in-europe-redux/?print=1

When a safe that allegedly had not been opened in thirty years blew up in the face of Jamal al Jamal, the Palestinian Authority ambassador to the Czech Republic, along with the blast came a reminder about the role of the Palestinians in Europe’s nihilistic terrorism when the safe supposedly was last closed.

Some thirty years ago, nihilistic violence spread across Europe as so-called “fighting communists” sought to revive the original spirit of the young Marx — the Marx of the 1830s manuscripts and the Communist Manifesto. To the fighting Communists, the spirit of the young Marx had been extinguished by bourgeois Communists that were willing to compromise principle for access to the corridors of power.

Across Western Europe, nihilistic violence spread from country to country. Names like France’s Direct Action, the Italian Red Brigades, Germany’s Baader Meinhof Gang [1] (also known as the “Red Army Faction”), and, to a lesser extent, Britain’s Angry Brigade [2] became associated with seemingly indulgent violence that ironically Marx himself would have condemned as acts of egoism without a revolutionary base or purpose.

But within this seemingly purposeless violence, the Soviets saw opportunity. Their Simferopol military academy [3] in the Crimea was heavily invested in training third-world terrorists, especially the Palestinians. For fear of a confrontation with the West, the Soviets could not directly sponsor the European nihilists; they were, however, quite capable of engaging their surrogates [3] in the effort.

The Palestine Liberation Organization had maintained a crude plausible denial for its terrorism. It used fictitious action groups to shoot up airports, seize hostages, and conduct assassinations — often, like Saturn, devouring its own children in the latter process. Of these action groups, the most notorious was Black September [4].

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/will_israel_risk_giving_up_control_of_the_jordan_valley.html

Why just the Jordan Valley? The entire West Bank is comprised of 2100 square miles…..This is not a board game …Without the entire “West Bank”Israel is indefensible…period….rsk

One of the main issues of dispute in current peace negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is whether a newly created Palestinian state will have an army that can defend its borders. Abbas is demanding a militarized Palestinian state, void of Jews, and with no IDF presence on any of its borders.

The demand of a militarized Palestinian state is in direct opposition to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his speech at Bar Ilan University in June 2009:

“The territory under Palestinian control must be demilitarized with ironclad security provisions for Israel. Without these two conditions, there is a real danger that an armed Palestinian state would emerge that would become another terrorist base against the Jewish state, such as the one in Gaza. We don’t want Kassam rockets on Petach Tikva, Grad rockets on Tel Aviv, or missiles on Ben-Gurion airport. We want peace. In order to achieve peace, we must ensure that Palestinians will not be able to import missiles into their territory, to field an army, to close their airspace to us, or to make pacts with the likes of Hezb’allah and Iran. On this point as well, there is wide consensus within Israel. It is impossible to expect us to agree in advance to the principle of a Palestinian state without assurances that this state will be demilitarized. On a matter so critical to the existence of Israel, we must first have our security needs addressed.”

It is not constitutionally proper or practical for a legislator to sue the president over a public-policy dispute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367823/ron-johnsons-frivolous-obamacare-lawsuit-andrew-c-mccarthy

Back in October, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin slammed his fellow Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas for what he portrayed as Cruz’s flawed strategy of attempting to defund Obamacare. But it soon became painfully apparent that Johnson had no strategy of his own to mount any meaningful opposition to the law. He had no answers, and barely a coherent thought, when grilled on the matter by Mark Levin. Now, as reported Monday in Alec Torres’s post and outlined in the senator’s own Wall Street Journal op-ed, Johnson has decided that filing a lawsuit is the way to go. . . . thereby demonstrating that he still has no serious strategy — other than to engage in the very sort of grandstanding the Republican establishment accused Cruz of.

Johnson says he will file a complaint in Wisconsin federal court. The point, apparently, is to try to have a judge affirm that it is illegal for President Obama to exempt members of Congress and their staffs from the full financial burden of purchasing insurance through an Obamacare “exchange.”

The senator is right when he says the risibly entitled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) does not permit this — just as it does not permit various other exemptions, waivers, and actions our would-be emperor-in-chief deems himself empowered to order.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367829/fifty-year-war-editors

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been spent, and the number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964, while the poverty rate has held steady at just under one in five. That contrasts unpleasantly with the trend before President Johnson declared his war: The poverty rate had been dropping since the end of World War II. That progress came to a halt as President Johnson’s expensive and expansive vision began to be implemented in earnest, which coincided with the tapering of the postwar boom. By the 1970s, the poverty rate was headed upward. It declined a bit during the Reagan years, crested and receded again in the 1990s, and resumed its melancholy ascent around the turn of the century.

To understand the failure of the war on poverty requires understanding its structure, which itself is bound up in the idiosyncrasies of Lyndon Johnson’s politics. President Johnson played many parts in his political career: Southern ballast to John Kennedy’s buoyant Yankee idealism; an enemy of civil-rights reform and anti-lynching laws who reversed himself in 1964; a sometimes reluctant but in the end unshakeable Cold Warrior. But at heart President Johnson was a New Deal man, and his Great Society, of which the war on poverty was a critical component, was his attempt to resuscitate the spirit and the political success of Franklin Roosevelt’s program.

It was the New Deal that made Johnson’s Texas a fiercely Democratic state, as the older residents of New Deal, Texas, no doubt remember. Johnson’s House district was energetically anti-Communist, not especially segregationist, but above all wild about the New Deal. Johnson ran for the House as a New Dealer, and it was his association with FDR’s domestic agenda (and, according to biographer Robert Caro, a few thousand fraudulent ballots) that made him a senator and a force.

For all its shortcomings, and they were many, the New Deal was enacted in response to a genuine economic crisis—the Great Depression. The Great Society was launched under very different circumstances: Between the end of World War II and President Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, the real economic output of the United States had doubled. The postwar boom was not destined to last forever, because the war-ravaged nations of Europe and Asia inevitably would reemerge as global economic competitors, but in the early 1960s the United States enjoyed a position of unprecedented economic advantage. The real challenge of the Johnson years, tragically overlooked, was figuring out how to build upon that position and consolidate those gains. Unfortunately, what got consolidated was political power, as Johnson and his progressive allies did what progressives always do: transfer wealth, power, and responsibility from the private sector to the public sector, where they can be put under the political discipline of men such as Johnson and his allies.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303433304579304791043726948?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3

Son of Ron should give up his presidential ambitions….he has never governed…..and the GOP must avoid another of those debate marathons with incompetent wannabes like Santorum, Bachmann and now Rand Paul…..rsk

Rand Paul has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, but he has some work to do if he wants to be credible as a potential Commander in Chief. Consider his apologia for fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, the Kentucky Senator repeated his calls for leniency for Mr. Snowden, who has been indicted on three charges of theft and espionage and has sought and received asylum in Russia.

“I don’t think Edward Snowden deserves the death penalty or life in prison. I think that’s inappropriate. And I think that’s why he fled, because that’s what he faced,” said Mr. Paul. “Do I think that it’s OK to leak secrets and give up national secrets and things that could endanger lives? I don’t think that’s OK, either. But I think the courts are now saying that what he revealed was something the government was doing was illegal. So I think, personally, he probably would come home for some penalty of a few years in prison.”

Mr. Paul is exaggerating that “death penalty” bit, and he fails to mention that lower courts are divided on the legality of collecting metadata. But the key point is that he is in essence asking the government to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain, from his redoubt in Moscow and in advance of any trial.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304325004579296781320668314?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Why do Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Branson lecture us about carbon consumption while plotting trips to space?

If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space aboard the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship sometime this year, opening up a new era of civilian space travel. This development might only be remarkable as the fulfillment of a dream long predicted by futurists and technophiles, were it not for the fact that Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio are prominent environmentalist celebrities who have warned of a coming ecological catastrophe if we fail to address our carbon problem.

Mr. Branson’s commitment to fighting climate change is praiseworthy: Over the years, he has consistently advocated for a broad mix of clean energy sources, including nuclear. He is founder and chief benefactor of the Carbon War Room, an outfit that has long advocated for carbon pricing and energy efficiency measures to help alleviate global warming. Mr. DiCaprio is on the board of trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council and has decried overconsumption. “We are the number one leading consumers, the biggest producers of waste around the world,” the actor said in 2008.

Private space travel doesn’t seem to mesh with living green, and Mr. Branson surely anticipated that his project would raise environmentalists’ eyebrows. Perhaps that’s why he announced this past May: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London.”