RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forget all the media hype about Hillary’s health woes. I have made the diagnosis. Irrefutable and incurable.

She suffers from Munchausen Syndrome.

Munchausen syndrome, named for Baron von Munchausen, an 18th century German officer who was known for embellishing the stories of his life and experiences, is the most severe type of factitious disorder. While the habitual lying is usually related to phantom physical ailments, there are many cases where the prevarication spills over into falsehoods about all aspects of a person’s life.

Diagnosing Munchausen syndrome is very difficult because of the dishonesty that is involved. Doctors must rule out any possible physical and mental illnesses before a diagnosis of Munchausen syndrome can be considered.

Dr. Ruth, by appointment only.

Call it judgment day. It looks like the Obama administration may yet face some kind of reckoning — in Congress, at least — over its payoff of a long-simmering claim to the Iranian regime.

That’s because to do so, the administration tapped a little-known account at the Treasury Department called the Judgment Fund. It is a special account used to pay out claims against the US government.

The details of how the administration did this, however, are being treated like a state secret. The State Department spokesman has clammed up tighter than a conch in a mudslide.

The topic erupted at the State Department’s daily briefing on Tuesday and Wednesday. That was after Claudia Rosett reported in the New York Sun that the administration made 13 transfers of $99,999,999.99 each.

Those payments add up to 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion. They were made Jan. 19, two days after President Obama announced he’d cut a deal with the mullahs for $1.7 billion to avoid an adverse judgment at a court in The Hague.

We know, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that $400 million of that was made in foreign currency, loaded on wooden pallets and delivered in a special cargo plane and functioned as a ransom payment to the mullahs, who had been holding a group of Americans hostage.

The remaining $1.3 billion only started to come into focus when Rosett discovered the 13 transfers totaling $1.3 billion on a Treasury Department website related to the judgment fund.

She sees no other explanation than that the payments, which went from Treasury on behalf of the State Department, were to cover the Iran settlement.

Not so long ago, doubts about the ability of Jews to live and practice Judaism freely in the United States would have been dismissed as positively paranoid: relics of a bygone era when American Jews could be turned away from restaurants and country clubs, when restrictive covenants might prevent their purchase of real estate or prejudicial quotas limit their access to universities and corporate offices.

None of that has been the case for a half-century or more. And yet recent developments in American political culture have raised legitimate concerns on a variety of fronts. To put the matter in its starkest form: the return of anti-Semitism, by now a thoroughly documented phenomenon in Europe and elsewhere around the world, is making itself felt, in historically unfamiliar ways, in the land of the free.

Statistics tell part of the tale. In 2014, the latest period for which figures have been released by the FBI, Jews were the objects of fully 57 percent of hate crimes against American religious groups, far outstripping the figure for American Muslims (14 percent) and Catholics (6 percent). True, the total number of such incidents is still blessedly low; but what gives serious pause is the radical disproportion.

The rise and spread of anti-Israel agitation, particularly on the nation’s campuses, is the most common case. Such agitation, expressed in the form of defamatory graffiti, “Israel Apartheid” demonstrations, and the verbal or physical abuse of pro-Israel students, feeds into and is increasingly indistinguishable from outright anti-Semitism. Even the most zealously “progressive” young Jews are targeted as accomplices-by-definition with the alleged crimes of Zionism. As one student who has fallen afoul of his campus’s orthodoxies has lamented, “because I am Jewish, I cannot be an activist who supports Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ community. . . . [A]mong my peers, Jews are oppressors and murderers.” Such is the progressive doctrine of “intersectionality,” according to which all approved causes are interconnected and must be mutually supported, no exceptions and no tradeoffs allowed.

Richard Samuelson is associate professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino and a fellow of the Claremont Institute.http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/08/as-america-grows-less-religious-can-the-tocqueville-model-still-work/

How did we get here?Wilfred McClay reminds us that, of late, large-scale religious fights seem to be breaking out all around the world. So the question really is whether America will remain an exception—the place where, as he writes with a nod to Tocqueville, “religious belief and practice have generally flourished . . . because they are voluntary and have not had to rely on a religious establishment to protect them.”

Can that model still work as America grows less religious in the traditional sense? To put it slightly differently, can the separation of church and state, which historically worked wonders both for American democracy and for the flourishing of religion, function for an increasingly unchurched people whose secular (though religiously-held) passions are reliant on the active exercise of state power? How will those passions be checked and balanced? For, under one name or another, there will be religion; the question is what sort of religion, and how and by whom American law will be shaped to suit the adherents’ way of life.

Peter Berkowitz’s comments shed light on this issue. The rise of a newly activist understanding of government’s role in shaping society did not begin with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which is where I focused attention in my essay). It actually began in the late-19th and early-20th century with the rise of the Progressive movement. Progressives, Berkowitz writes, “sought to overcome constitutional limits on government by redefining the Constitution as a living organism embodying progressive morals and authorizing activist government by elite-educated, impartial technocrats.”

This description perfectly fits Woodrow Wilson, our first and so far our only president with a PhD, and also the first to advocate either replacing the Constitution or transforming it fundamentally through creative interpretation. In the 1920s there would be significant pushback against Wilson’s efforts. But ever since the 1930s Depression, when the next generation of progressives took over, there has been little successful containment, let alone rollback, of what the New Deal’s trust-busting lawyer Thurmond Arnold called the “religion of government.”

““The vice president will express outrage at seeing people in the military and others who had taken an oath to protect the Turkish Republic and its citizens engaging in an illegal coup attempt against a democratic government,” a senior administration official said. “And he’ll reaffirm the strength and resilience of the U.S.-Turkey alliance.”

The U.S. vice president arrives in Ankara at a critical moment for the two allies.

Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Turkey Wednesday, the first senior White House official to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since last month’s failed coup, as the U.S. tries to smooth over strained relations.

Mr. Biden’s visit to the Turkish capital comes at a critical moment for the two allies. He arrived seeking to blunt accusations from some Turkish officials that the U.S. helped facilitate the attempted coup, senior administration officials said.

At the same time the White House is concerned about Mr. Erdogan’s response to the failed coup, which has involved widespread arrests and purging of government employees. Mr. Biden doesn’t plan to raise those concerns publicly, a senior administration official said.

As a sign of strength between the two allies, the U.S. joined Turkey in a fresh offensive against Islamic State-held territory in neighboring Syria. Turkey blames the terror group for a deadly bomb attack against a wedding party last weekend that killed 54 people, mostly women and children, in a Turkish city close to Syria.

Tensions between the U.S. and Turkey have flared over the past month as Turkish officials have called on the U.S. to extradite a cleric living in the U.S. whom they say helped orchestrate the failed coup.

On a visit to Nigeria today, Secretary of State John Kerry declared there are “far too many” who join terrorist groups like Boko Haram “because they have trouble finding meaning or opportunity in their daily lives.”

“Because they are deeply frustrated and alienated — and because they hope groups like Boko Haram will somehow give them a sense of identity, or purpose, or power,” Kerry said after meeting with local religious leaders to discuss community building and countering violent extremism in Sokoto, Nigeria.

“We see this in every part of the world — whether we are talking about the Lake Chad Basin or the Sahel, or a village in the Middle East or a city in Western Europe, it’s the same. When people — and particularly young people — have no hope for the future and no faith in legitimate authority — when there are no outlets for people to express their concerns — then aggravation festers and those people become vulnerable to outside influence,” he added. “And no one knows that better than the violent extremist groups, which regularly use humiliation and marginalization and inequality and poverty and corruption as recruitment tools.”

Kerry stressed that “one of our central tasks — and almost every single religious leader I just heard in the other room talked about this task — has to be to remove the vulnerabilities in our own position.”

“To effectively counter violent extremism, we have to ensure that military action is coupled with a reinforced commitment to the values this region and all of Nigeria has a long legacy of supporting — values like integrity, good governance, education, compassion, security, and respect for human rights,” he said.

The Obama administration has been critical of Nigeria’s military campaign against Boko Haram, charging that human rights are being violated as they target suspected terrorists.

No book about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has won as much acclaim, and deservedly so, as Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” Its multi-talented author, a longtime writer for the New Yorker, even staged a one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” about his reporting experiences. Since publishing “The Looming Tower” in 2006, Mr. Wright has gone on to produce two other impressive books: one about Scientology, the other about the Camp David negotiations between Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Now he returns to the subject of terrorism but not, alas, with a truly new book. “The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State” is a collection of articles that appeared between 2002 and 2015 in the New Yorker—and that remain available online. In a prologue, he says he hopes the book can be “a primer on the evolution of the jihadist movement from its early years to the present, and the parallel actions of the West to attempt to contain it.”

Three of these articles were incorporated in somewhat altered form into “The Looming Tower.” These are “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” about Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of al Qaeda; “The Counterterrorist,” about John P. O’Neill, a legendary FBI counterterrorism agent who was obsessed with al Qaeda and died in the Twin Towers; and “The Agent,” about Ali Soufan, the Lebanese-American FBI agent who was one of the few U.S. terrorism investigators fluent in Arabic and who worked closely with O’Neill. Another, “The Kingdom of Silence,” about Mr. Wright’s experience mentoring young journalists at an English-language newspaper in Jeddah in 2004, informed the description of Saudi Arabia in “The Looming Tower.”So if you’re keeping count, “The Terror Years” makes their third appearance in print. The other chapters are slightly fresher and chronicle various aspects of the war on terrorism since 9/11. “The Terror Web” is about Spain’s response to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and led the country to pull its troops out of Iraq. “Captured on Film” describes the beleaguered state of the Syrian film industry during the relatively peaceful days of the Assad dictatorship before the outbreak of civil war in 2011. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary…..On Bashar Assad, the butcher of Syria…..While she was Sec. of State

Hillary Clinton’s uncredible statement on Syria By Glenn Kessler https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/hillary-clintons-uncredible-statement-on-syria/2011/04/01/AFWPEYaC_blog.htmlHillary Clinton is known for making provocative statements, but few have generated such a firestorm as her comment last week that the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, may be a reformer. She made her remarks after “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer noted that Assad’s late father had killed 25,000 people during an uprising against his regime. Clinton responded by noting that the son was now in power and he was a “different leader.”

“There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on “Face the Nation,” March 27, 2011

“I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”

–Clinton, two days later

Bill on the Charlie Rose Show “http://ejournalofpoliticalscience.org/taheri.html

And here is what Clinton had to say in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose:

“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”

So, while millions of Iranians, especially the young, look to the United States as a mode of progress and democracy, a former president of the US looks to the Islamic Republic as his ideological homeland.

But who are “the guys” Clinton identifies with?

There is, of course, President Muhammad Khatami who, speaking at a conference of provincial governors last week, called for the whole world to convert to Islam.

“Human beings understand different affairs within the global framework that they live in,” he said. “But when we say that Islam belongs to all times and places, it is implied that the very essence of Islam is such that despite changes (in time and place) it is always valid.”

There is also Khatami’s brother, Muhammad-Reza, the man who, in 1979, led the “students” who seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. There is Massumeh Ebtekar, a poor man’s pasionaria who was spokesperson for the hostage-holders in Tehran. There is also the late Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, known to Iranians as “Judge Blood”.

Not surprisingly, Clinton’s utterances have been seized upon by the state-controlled media in Tehran as a means of countering President George W. Bush’s claim that the Islamic Republic is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranians and threatens the stability of the region.

Clinton’s declaration of love for the mullas shows how ill informed even a US president could be.

Didn’t anyone tell Clinton, when he was in the White House, that elections in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the “Supreme Guide”, and that no one from opposition is allowed to stand? Did he not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that such terms as “progressive” and “liberal” are used by the mullas as synonyms for “apostate”, a charge that carries a death sentence?

More importantly, does he not know that while there is no democracy without elections there can be elections without democracy?

Clinton told his audience in Davos, as well as Charlie Rose, that during his presidency he had “formally apologized on behalf of the United States” for what he termed “American crimes against Iran.”

While President Barack Obama and his would-be successor Hillary Clinton try to convince the American people that everything is fine in regards to the U.S. position in the world and the security of the nation; foreign adversaries are celebrating what they see as the country’s decline. For example, an August 18 editorial in Global Times, the official media outlet of China’s ruling Communist Party, proclaimed “US suffers new setback in Middle East.” The column hailed its axis partner Russia for basing long-range bombers in Iran to attack targets in Syria in support of the regime of Bashar Assad. It is official Washington policy to remove Assad from power to end Syria’s civil war, but Russian and Iranian military intervention has thwarted the half-hearted, slow-motion effort of the Obama administration to aid the Sunni rebels. “More sadly for Washington” continues the Chinese editorial, “Iraq also consented to the passing-through of Russian military aircraft under some symbolic limits.” This is not surprising given that U.S. policy has allowed Baghdad to become a Shiite satrap of Iran. Though this error goes back to the Bush administration, Obama’s withdrawal of all American troops in 2011 allowed the Iraq regime to openly embrace Tehran.

The Chinese editorial ended with the statement, “The old pattern and order is gone in the Middle East, where the US has lost its leverage. From the perspective of the region, the US is declining. Moscow, however, has gained the upper hand.” This change in the balance of power has occurred entirely during the Obama administration, for part of which Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.

The same can be said about Iran’s stronger position in the region. In has gone beyond sending its terrorist army Hezbollah from Lebanon into Syria. Its own troops are now fighting there as well. It could afford to escalate its war effort because of the generous grant of funds from the U.S. as part of the nuclear agreement which slows (but does not end) Tehran’s strategic weapons program. In the long run, the Shiite theocracy still wants nuclear arms to safeguard its regional dominance. At the moment, however, it sorely needs resources to gain that dominance. It must win the war in Syria and overawe its Arab neighbors.

The ending of Western sanctions and the release of embargoed billions by the Obama Treasury gives Iran the means to advance its agenda, in Iraq as well as Syria. While the U.S. has struggled to recruit local troops, Iran has reportedly created a 100,000-man Shiite militia in Iraq which has largely replaced the regular army as the security force that protects Tehran’s hold on Baghdad. It is apparently easier to get men to fight for a “true faith” than for the soft tenets of Kantian liberalism.