RUTHFULLY YOURS

My formal education effectively ended in the eighth grade. I attended a Catholic parochial school for eight years. I do retain memories of that experience, some of them not so fondly but now recalled with humor. One is of a nun aptly named Sister Barbarossa, of the order of St. Joseph, a six-foot-plus ogre tough enough to beat up the school’s football players, and with a permanently red face that reflected a high blood pressure problem, congenital anger, or constant inebriation. She would persecute the disobedient and dream up unusual punishments. She often whacked my knuckles with a wooden ruler for doodling instead of studying, and many times made me sit in the leg space beneath her desk and kicked me with her brogans.

Another nun, Sister Angela, one day decided to introduce the notion of “government” to our seventh grade class. We would elect a class “president” by secret ballot. I thought so little of the idea – I couldn’t imagine what benefit there was in having a pretend “president” – that on my ballot I entered the name of a classmate who was as dumb as a doorknob (I don’t think he could even read) and given to epileptic fits and whom we’d been instructed to be kind to. When he had a seizure, he would foam at the mouth and it would take six of us to hold him down because he would acquire the strength of two Sister Barbarossas.

In any event, Sister Angela grew red in the face when she read my ballot. “Who,” she demanded, “put Robert’s name on this ballot???” The class gasped as one. Robert, who as a rule sat like a vegetable at his desk, seemed to smile. But, then, he always seemed to be smiling.

Without a tinge of guilt, I raised my hand. Sister Angela chewed me out, and subsequently informed my parents of my act of cruelty. My parents chewed me out, and sent me to my room without dinner. (Steadfast Catholics, in a later year they burned my small library after I declared my atheism, but that’s another story.)

We have a Department of Justice, not a Department of Social Justice. That is an essential distinction. It is brought into sharp relief by politicized demands that George Zimmerman, having just been acquitted of murder by the state of Florida, be subjected to a second prosecution — a federal civil rights indictment — over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

The Justice Department has earned the trust of the United States courts precisely because it resists the politicization of law enforcement. Its tradition is to ensure the equal protection of law for every American, to evaluate cases strictly on the basis of facts and law, and to recognize its obligations not only to the community but also to criminal suspects.

Yet, though Attorney General Eric Holder never tires of reminding us about the due process owed even to foreign terrorists who’ve confessed to mass murder, the principle does not seem to apply to Zimmerman, an American now acquitted of murder.

Even if the Justice Department never files criminal charges against Zimmerman — which is likely given the implausibility of obtaining a conviction — it is extremely inappropriate for law enforcement officials, particularly the U.S. attorney general, to engage in a running extrajudicial commentary that taints the jury pool and ratchets up the investigative anxiety for a citizen who is presumed innocent and has been acquitted. Law enforcement officials speak in court — with public charges, if prosecutors have the evidence to back them up.

The justice system is not a morality play. It is not designed to right every wrong, nor has it the capacity to remediate tragedy, such as the indescribable pain the Martin family endures after the loss of their 17-year-old son. In the face of such tragedy, the human instinct to demand some kind of “justice” — social, poetic or cosmic — is something we all feel. But that is not the justice our legal system exists to dispense.

It turns out the “rogue agents” at the Internal Revenue Service field office in Cincinnati weren’t quite so rogue after all. Democrats had hoped some low-level minion at the agency would serve as the fall guy in the expanding snooping scandal. On Thursday, the fingers were pointed squarely at high-level offices in the IRS headquarters in Washington.

The IRS agents in the Cincinnati field office who handled the 501(c)3 applications of Tea Party groups were acting under orders from above. One of them, Elizabeth Hofacre, said she took her orders from Carter Hull, a tax law specialist based in Washington.

Mr. Hull in turn says he did the bidding of Lois Lerner, the top-level agent who asserted her Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying about what she did. Mr. Hull explained that conservative groups’ applications were stalled because he had to send them to the chief counsel’s office, where they languished.

President Obama appointed William J. Wilkins as the IRS chief counsel in 2009. He had been a top Democratic Senate committee staffer, so it’s not surprising he took his time “reviewing” the applications from conservatives. None were approved. Applications by about a dozen liberal groups got extra scrutiny but were approved.

This scandal goes far beyond sitting on paperwork. As Ben Wolfgang and Dave Boyer reported in The Washington Times, Christine O’Donnell, the 2010 Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, has identified herself as one of four political figures whose tax files were improperly accessed. This became a big issue during her campaign.

Yes, there’s a war on women in America. But it’s not the phony “war” that tampon-hurling feminists are always shrieking about — as they did last week in Texas to protest tougher regulations on dangerous late-term-abortion clinics. No, I’m talking about a real war on women waged by Saudi royals and elites who’ve imported human trafficking and abuse of domestic workers onto U.S. soil.

Meet Meshael Alayban of Saudi Arabia, wife of Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. She apparently thought we Americans would look the other way at human trafficking and abuse of domestic workers — you know, the way they do in her misogyny-infested home country. The wealthy Meshael Alayban thought wrong.
Last week, Orange County, Calif., prosecutors charged Alayban (who lists her occupation as “princess” on her tourist visa) with felony human trafficking. Enslavement. A Kenyan maid escaped from Alayban’s compound earlier this month after allegedly being held against her will. She told police Alayban confiscated her passport, refused to abide by an employment contract, and forbade the worker from returning to her home country — where she has an ailing seven-year-old daughter.

When law-enforcement officials entered Alayban’s mansion, they found four other domestic workers from the Philippines who also have indicated a desire to be freed from Saudi bondage. The servants tended to the round-the-clock needs and whims of the princess, her husband, their three young children, a grandmother, and three other extended-family members. Last week, Alayban posted $5 million bail (paid for by the Saudi consulate) and was whisked back to her estate by a phalanx of bodyguards. She must wear a GPS tracking device and will be arraigned at the end of the month. Her high-priced lawyers dismiss the incident as an insignificant “wage dispute.”

If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1 percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.

Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.
Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join.

The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership?

“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.

The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn’t have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn’t own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. In our overly therapeutic culture, we talk a lot about “enabling” pathologies, self-destructive behavior, etc. Well, Sharpton is a pathology enabled by the very system he loathes.

In a healthy society, Sharpton might be on parole now — not the must-get guest for Meet the Press and Today on issues of racial justice. He was a ringleader in perpetuating the evil Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he and two corrupt lawyers (now disbarred) falsely accused assistant district attorney Steven Pagones and others of gang-raping a 15-year-old girl in a racist attack (Brawley claimed that she’d been smeared with feces and had had racist epithets written on her body). No person of any ideological stripe could doubt it was a fraud — except, that is, for the unrepentant Sharpton, who recently insisted “something happened.”

One of the distinct advantages the political left enjoys over the conservative movement is the affective property that Muslims call asabiyeh: unity, togetherness, group feeling. Of course, there are differences of opinion, degrees of dissension as to theory and practice, ideological ruptures here and there regarding tactics and strategy, but on the whole the left is comparatively of a piece.

Conservatives, on the contrary, are far more divided among themselves. As I pointed out a while back, in an article for PJ Media titled Fractures on the Right [1], the conservative predisposition is fissured with disagreements respecting the definition of the “enemy” and how most effectively to deal with him. These breaches and discontinuities run deep, especially when it comes to the putative relation between Islam and “Islamism,” radical and moderate Muslims, history and the present. Slack-thewed conservatives insist that Islam has been hijacked by the Islamists and that so-called “moderate Muslims” must be “friended” in order not to drive them into the camp of the jihadists. Insightful conservative thinkers understand that Islam, rooted in a vast theological, political, jurisprudential and philosophical literature, and boasting a 1400 year history of rapine and conquest, is consistently represented by these same extremists who are said to have hijacked the faith.

It seems me that the fault in the conservative orientation resides not so much in the intellect per se as in the will, a volitional exhaustion, a weakening of purpose expressed as a gradual turn toward the liberal perspective. Intellect is then mobilized to justify the backsliding tendencies of the will, as if in a rerun of the historical debate between two great Medieval theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Aquinas argued that intellect determines truth and the will carries out the appropriate actions. Scotus held otherwise; the will bloweth where it listeth, and the intellect assembles the arguments to support its appetitive pursuits.

Plumbing the depths of racial metaphor

Well, sure. I can see the connection, can’t you? Opposing civil rights legislation was racist (it sometimes wasn’t but why stop her, she’s on a roll?). Opposing a black president’s singular achievement is…well, gotta be some explanation for opposing a law that’s ruining the economy, wreaking havoc with health care, is ruinously expensive, and could possibly blow up the insurance industry.

Gotta be racism. Gotta be.

CNS:

Addressing the annual NAACP convention in Orlando, Fla., Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that opponents of Obamacare are the same kind of people who opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Her comments on Tuesday came one day before the Republican-led House votes to delay key provisions of the law.

“The Affordable Care Act is the most powerful law for reducing health disparities since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the same year the Voting Rights Act was also enacted,” Sebelius said. “That significance hits especially close to home. My father was a congressman from Cincinnati who voted for each of those critical civil rights laws, and who represented a district near where the late Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth lived and preached.

“The same arguments against change, the same fear and misinformation that opponents used then are the same ones opponents are spreading now. ‘This won’t work,’ ‘Slow down,’ ‘Let’s wait,’ they say.

“But history shows that upholding our founding principles demands continuous work toward a more perfect union…And it requires the kind of work that the NAACP has done for more than a century to move us forward.

“You showed it in the fight against lynching and the fight for desegregation. You showed it by ensuring inalienable rights are secured in the courtroom and at the ballot box. And you showed it by supporting a health law 100 years in the making.

Many neighborhoods in Los Angeles are neither majority black nor whites, but mostly Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, with both blacks and whites are becoming less and less visible. Many mainstream supermarkets are going out of business only to be replaced by ethnic supermarkets with Arabic or Hispanic music blasting while one shops, catering to the growing immigrant population. But in the mind of the US media, America is still racially divided between whites and blacks and is stuck on racial issues that were prevalent decades ago.

A large number of first generation immigrants in America don’t view themselves as black or white, and even those who do cannot help but be puzzled with how deep the issue of race is ingrained in the psyche of America. Because of the importance of race politics in the US, immigrants quickly learn to either ignore the issue altogether and concentrate on achieving the success they came here for, or join one camp or another if they are emotionally or financially benefiting from racial issues. Many Arab Americans have tried to claim that they are a minority in order to get an advantage in hiring or college acceptance, without success, but demonstrating how the politics of race corrupt.

New immigrant families who did the impossible to come to America, are told soon after arriving that they are oppressed and should demand privileges and compensation for past injustice (which we have only experienced in the countries we fled from). But why not take the free stuff when offered? Immigrants would be stupid to reject the advantages proffered.

As a first generation immigrant, I perceive that constant racial consciousness and tension are extremely destructive to blacks, whites and others. I personally feel embarrassed and sad when I see grown men and women constantly complain about race and make a living promoting racial divide and anger. Many blacks and whites in America seem to be stuck on a phase in American history that they cannot seem to outgrow, preventing them from seeing the reality of change in American demographics.

The lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur War are relevant to today’s threats.

If finally compelled to do so, Israel is able to destroy the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, even if at breathtaking risk. Whether or not Israel succeeds on that front, it faces yet another existential military problem, less immediate and on a different register, in regard to which it has made the wrong choice.

Though history may never repeat itself exactly, it does have affection for certain themes. One of these is that of a nation suicidally disarming because it rests upon the laurels of the past, or believes in the satisfying delusion that by intellectual formulation it can safely predict the future intentions and capabilities of rivals and enemies.

Prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel was so intoxicated by its brilliant victories in 1967 that (substituting excessive confidence for military prudence) it was very nearly destroyed. After shattering Israel’s defenses, the Egyptian army halted only because of Israel’s nuclear deterrent, after which the tide of war turned only because of an extraordinary American resupply effort authorized by President Nixon, something that would hardly have been a certainty with a President Obama.

Because Israel is understandably tired of war and wants to tend its vineyards, and because its military, like America’s, has come down with a potentially fatal case of think-tankitis, the government believes that, as recently expressed by Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, “Wars of military versus military—in the format we last met 40 years ago in the Yom Kippur War—are becoming less and less relevant.” Accordingly, Israel plans to cut its already diminished defense budget by more than one dollar in 20; release a large proportion of career officers; and reduce further the numbers of its planes, tanks and warships. The military will be shaped to fight Hamas, Hezbollah, and intifadas rather than the armies of Egypt, Syria, and whoever might join them.

Free Alexei Navalny
The Putin machine puts the charismatic Russian opposition leader in jail.

The conviction and five-year prison sentence given on Thursday to Alexei Navalny makes Russia’s opposition leader a political prisoner and dissident. As any number of history’s disgraced dictators could tell Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin, jailing your opponents can bring unforeseen consequences. Think Mandela, Walesa, Havel and, at a not-so-distant time in Russia, Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky.

As the Putin regime bears down on the democracy movement, such comparisons might seem fanciful. Mr. Navalny, who came to prominence as an anti-corruption activist, had no chance against the Russian state. He offended President Putin by labeling his ruling clique “the party of crooks and thieves,” a nickname that stuck, and by leading large protests starting in late 2011.

The Kremlin then revived a local investigation into the alleged theft in 2009 of about $500,000 in timber from the Kirov district, which had been dismissed for lack of evidence. Mr. Navalny briefly worked in the northeastern city as an adviser to a then reform-minded local governor. During the trial, the defense wasn’t allowed to cross-examine the prosecution’s witnesses or call its own. Nearly all cases in Russia end in convictions, certainly all political cases.