RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272472/lara-kollab-and-disease-jew-hate-ari-lieberman

In medical terms, Lara Kollab’s career is dead on arrival or flat-lined. The prestigious Cleveland Clinic, where she was employed as a supervised resident, rightly fired her after only two months. Ohio’s Osteopathic Association informed me via Twitter that her medical training certificate is invalid because it was contingent upon her working in an accredited program. Because she was fired from the Cleveland Clinic, she is no longer in an accredited program. Moreover, because of the way medical residencies are scheduled, the earliest time that she can re-apply into another residency program is July 2020. Even then, it is doubtful that any hospital will accept her, except for perhaps Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which also conveniently serves as a Hamas Headquarters in times of war with Israel.

For those of you who were in hibernation this past week, Kollab, whose parents are Palestinian and Muslim, posted numerous anti-Semitic comments on her social media platforms. She routinely referred to Jews as “dogs,” trivialized the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, claimed that “Zionists” controlled the media and “Israel runs America,” and repeatedly expressed a desire to inflict harm on Jews. But the one comment that put the nail in the coffin for Kollab was the tweet where she expressed her desire to provide her Jewish patients with the wrong medication, effectively poisoning them. Not exactly the sort of sentiment that’s consistent with the Hippocratic Oath and precisely the sort of sentiment you’d expect from the likes of Doctor Mengele.

On Friday, Kollab issued an apology of sorts through her lawyer. This represents the first step in Kollab’s attempt to salvage what’s left her tattered career and reputation. But the apology was equivocal and laced with deception and deflection. She claimed that the offensive, anti-Semitic posts were made years before she was accepted into medical school. That is false. The vile comments, which included deep-seated hatred of Israel and support for terrorism continued up until 2017 and constituted one steady and continuous stream of anti-Semitic invective. Her views remained constant and unchanged even after her acceptance to Touro.

One of the mysteries of the Kollab case is why she would choose Touro of all places. Touro accepts all students from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities but when it was established in 1970, its focus was on higher education for the Jewish community. Over the years, the college became recognized for its high educational standards and consequently attracted a broader and more diverse student body.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/06/an-epidemic-of-

Imagine the following: The IRS sends you, John Q. Citizen, a letter alleging you have not complied with U.S. tax law. In the next paragraph, the tax agency then informs you that it needs a series of personal and business documents. Indeed, it will be sending agents out to discuss your dilemma and collect the necessary records.

But when the IRS agents arrive, you explain to them that you cannot find about 50 percent of the documents requested, and have no idea whether they even exist. You sigh that both hard copies of pertinent information have unfortunately disappeared and hard drives were mysteriously lost.

You nonchalantly add that you smashed your phone, tablet, and computer with a hammer. You volunteer that, of those documents you do have, you had to cut out, blacken or render unreadable about 30 percent of the contents. After all, you have judged that the redacted material either pertains to superfluous and personal matters such as weddings and yoga, or is of such a sensitive nature that its release would endanger your company or business or perhaps even the country at large.

You also keep silent that you have a number of pertinent documents locked up in a safe hidden in your attic unknown to the IRS. Let them find it, you muse. And when the agents question your unilateral decisions over hours of interrogatories, you remark to them on 245 occasions that you have no memory of your acts—or you simply do not have an answer for them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/the-character

A few days ago, American Greatness published some thoughts of mine about Jonah Goldberg’s contention that “President Trump is not a man of good character” and that, consequently, his administration “will end poorly.”

“Character,” Jonah says, “is destiny.” Trump’s character is bad. Therefore his destiny is grim.

While acknowledging that the president is an imperfect man (but at whom can that criticism not be leveled?), I also defended Trump’s character. Quoting Cardinal Newman, I noted that character was a multifaceted attribute. A man, said Newman, “may be great in one aspect of his character, and little-minded in another. . . . A good man may make a bad king; profligates have been great statesmen, or magnanimous political leaders.” I believe President Trump has been astonishingly successful during his first two years. I believe further that his success is a testament to the strength of his character.

Jonah disagrees with me absolutely about Trump’s character and, in a more qualified way, about my assessment of Trump’s successes. I am pleased that his explanation of those disagreements provides me an opportunity to expand on and clarify a couple of points.

To start with a clarification. Jonah says that in my earlier column I seemed determined “to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character, while never actually denying it. The goal seems to be less to rebut my argument than to confuse the issue.”

I apologize for my lack of clarity. Let me rectify that by stating baldly I do believe Donald Trump is, in the ways that matter for a president, a man of good character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uz19w7tf1U

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/02/trump-

Just as the Republican Party is purging itself of hackneyed lawmakers, bitter neoconservative commentators, and insatiable interventionists, along comes Mitt Romney to remind us of what we definitely are not missing.

In a late New Year’s Day sermon published in the Washington Post, the incoming senator expressed his disappointment in the president and, by extension, in all of us. It was filled with the sort of juvenile platitudes that at one time mollified Republican voters, but now either amuse or enrage them. “A president should unite us and inspire us to follow ‘our better angels.’ A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse,” the twice-losing presidential candidate warned. “To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment.”

Romney then proceeded—oddly—to lament Trump’s unpopularity in the world (sorry to disappoint you, Sweden!) and called for a unified Europe. We must defend the press and labor unions, Romney insisted, despite their failings. And he essentially called Trump a racist, sexist, immigrant-hater.

Real original.

The reaction on the Right to Romney’s missive was fast and furious. His niece, head of the Republican National Committee, sided with Trump, calling the opinion piece written by her wayward kin “disappointing and unproductive.” Trump again teased the man he once teased with the prospect of a cabinet position: “Would much prefer that Mitt focus on Border Security and so many other things where he can be helpful. I won big, and he didn’t. He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!” Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mitt-romneys-naive-incoherence/

Mitt Romney is a fine and decent person, whom I voted for without regret, then or now, and who strangely just published a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post about President Trump days before assuming office as Utah’s newly elected junior senator. But why in the world would he reserve his invective for January, rather than in October, when it surely would have had greater force?

As far as Romney’s calls for Trump to be less ad hominem in his retaliatory remarks, he may be right, both in terms of presidential behavior and political wisdom (given that Trump needs to capture 5-8 percent additional support from suburbanites and minorities). And he is correct to draw attention to reckless federal spending and this apparent bipartisan custom of borrowing a near trillion dollars a year. Let us hope that Romney’s proven financial sobriety will help galvanize the congress to prune reckless deficits.

But that said, I fear that much of Romney’s invective is utterly incoherent. The departures of many top-cabinet officials in some cases were regrettable, in some understandable, but most were likely because Trump ran on an agenda neither traditionally Republican nor Democratic. Trump was the first president without either political or military experience. So there always was also going to be difficulty (and paradoxes) in matching his outsider policies with experienced insider administrators. We should, however, remember that the tenures of Department of Defense secretaries (four in the respective Obama and Truman administrations) and White House chiefs of staff (four respectively for Reagan and Clinton, five for Obama) are historically not always particularly long.

Romney is, euphemistically, accurate in stating that he opposed Trump (“Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination”). And he explains, admirably so, that he hoped that “his [Trump’s] campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not.” And Romney was further disappointed that “on balance, his [Trump’s] conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.”

But, ironically, all such long-standing repulsion at Trump’s behavior (even if it did crest in December as Romney alleges) raises the question, again, why would Romney have accepted Trump’s endorsement for his senate run in 2018, especially given the fact that he probably did not need it to be elected in Utah?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/01/nationalism-is-americas

When it comes to sports, Americans look with admiration on the comeback player of the year. We can’t resist the rediscovery of excellence in a tried and true athlete. And so it was this last year with the rediscovery of an old and excellent concept. The comeback concept of the year has been nationalism (along with its nephew, tariffs). My pick is reinforced by the December 31 column of the otherwise reliable liberal E.J. Dionne, who makes apologies on behalf of nationalism.

Dionne allows that “it’s common,” among liberal elites, “to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves” (emphasis added).

Dionne’s column repeats the concessions of many an establishment pundit of a point to Trump and his supporters. But this is more than a point they concede—in fact, they surrender the whole match.

Now, with a President Trump, Dionne and his crew admit what the run-down towns of flyover middle America have known for decades: “Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism”—having been mugged by the reality of Donald Trump and his ascendancy to president by winning the Midwest and its eastern extension, Pennsylvania—“but it took far too long for [us] economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening.”

Then comes Dionne’s New Year’s resolution: “[C]ritics of Trumpism need to recognize the ways in which globalism undercuts the rights and fortunes of large numbers of democratic citizens.” Trump was right on this key theme, the only one right in both parties.

Moreover, Dionne tries to play down his contrite confession that borders mean something: “there is nothing new (or necessarily indecent [what, this isn’t racism?]) about citizens saying that nations have a right to control their borders and to decide what levels of immigration they want to accept at any given time.”

Now we need Dionne to allow that Trump was right to upset the bipartisan consensus that got us into endless Middle East wars, while dodging the threat from the principal enemy in that region, Iran, and even subsidizing its support of terrorism. The prescient Walter Russell Mead is another commentator who sees how Trump has stirred the old order.

In fact the begrudged praise of nationalism and the nation-state is a way of avoiding Trump’s more winning phrase, “America First.” This has nothing to do with isolationism, imperialism, or fecklessness toward other nations. It is a reiteration of the policy advocated by George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln.

Throughout his political career Lincoln emphasized preservation of the Union, most of all during the Civil War—whether it was slave or free. For slavery, to name the most pressing issue, could not be abolished unless the country were one—for we are a country that “demands union, and abhors separation.”

More well-known is the Gettysburg Address, which begins and ends with the reality of the nation born anew: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . . this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-may-be-the-true-liberal-11546298494

President Trump’s support for criminal-justice reform surprised many on the left who pigeonholed him as an illiberal populist. Had they paid closer attention to Mr. Trump’s message, however, they’d have recognized that much of it is squarely within the American liberal tradition. With more self-awareness they’d have seen that their own abandonment of liberalism explains much of Mr. Trump’s support.

The First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed last month, reduces the three-strikes penalty for drug felonies and retroactively limits the sentencing disparities for crack cocaine that disproportionately burdened African-Americans. That will reduce prison terms for about 2,000 current federal inmates.

Contrary to the depiction of Mr. Trump as racist, the act is wholly consistent with the way he campaigned in 2016. He invited minorities to vote for him because Democrats had left them behind: “What have you got to lose?” His pride in lower minority unemployment is obviously heartfelt.

In his economic policies too, Mr. Trump was anything but a flint-eyed conservative. He made it clear he wasn’t about to gut the welfare system. He wanted trade deals that would generally benefit Americans, and a border wall to preserve American jobs. In all this, he’s occupied the sweet spot in American politics, combining social conservatism with middle-of-the-road economic policies.

The media hasn’t paid much attention. Instead, it’s fixated on Steve Bannon and right-wing populism. Mr. Bannon makes common cause with European rightists and the brutish Yellow Vest protesters who destroyed a portion of François Rude’s “La Marseillaise” at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Bannonites seem to have forgotten Edmund Burke’s lesson that while the English and Americans do revolutions well, the same can’t be said of the French.

U.S. conservatives aren’t like the European right, and there’s a reason. Constitutional liberties are the center of American nationhood and identity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272412/new-years-resolutions-we-should-be-making-bruce-thornton

Since Election Day 2016, one story has dominated our attention––the person and rhetoric of Donald Trump. No amount of achievements by Trump and the Republican Congress at home or abroad can distract the bipartisan NeverTrump chorus from shrieking over tabloid trivia ranging from mysterious nudie selfies, to the president’s fifty-year-old draft deferments.

Expect 2019 to be even more all Trump, all the time. For Democrats, Trump has become their Moby Dick, the hated monster they’ll destroy themselves to kill. For the media, Trump has been a ratings gold-mine. As now disgraced CBS honcho Les Moonves said two years ago, Trump is “damn good for CBS.” This year promises to be no different. The progressive media will likely keep its long-running series, “The Mueller Show,” and the start this year of the 2020 presidential primary season will see “The Primary Follies” improve its ratings with numerous Dem guest-stars for the intergenerational war between the rich, old white establishment, and the “woke” young guns “of color.” And don’t forget the long-running show “Family Feud,” featuring pouting NeverTrump Republicans with their snarky patter and virtue-signaling verbal tics.

All very entertaining, no doubt. But while we gorge on this high-carb junk TV fare, serious issues confront the Republic. We need to make a collective New Year’s resolution to pull the plug, and focus on these looming challenges.

On the foreign policy front, our continued clinging to the old narrative of moralizing internationalism needs to end. The idea that, as Woodrow Wilson expressed this faith in 1917, “National purposes have fallen more and more into the background; and the common purpose of enlightened mankind has taken their place,” began to be exposed as a pipe-dream long before Trump came on the scene. The populist and nationalist revolts across the West have shown that the bulk of ordinary citizens are tired of pampered, patronizing global elites presuming to know what’s best for them, and demanding ever more power in order to effect the improving changes they claim will usher in utopia.

That dream of world governance, moreover, is contrary to the conditions of most peoples’ existence. A critical mass of citizens still finds their identities in the particular traditions, histories, faiths, mores, landscapes, customs, cultures, and languages among which they live. Their revolt is against an imperial cosmopolitanism which demonizes that rich diversity as retrograde and bigoted, a troublesome poltergeist from our benighted past. But there is no “common purpose of enlightened mankind,” for there are no “citizens of the world” or “global community,” apart from the tiny elite of credentialed and privileged managers of the “new world order.” Ordinary people are loath to cede their national identities, freedom, and sovereignty to such haughty, self-selected overseers.