RUTHFULLY YOURS

Passions ran high in Philadelphia after the British departed in June 1778, ending their months-long occupation. Bands of patriots tarred-and-feathered Tories who refused to sign “loyalty oaths.” A few months later, two elderly Quakers accused of treason were tried before Pennsylvania Chief Justice Thomas McKean. Though neither had taken up arms against the rebels, one was said to have encouraged giving the British information on rebel plans and helped guard city gates during the occupation. The other admitted that he had encouraged support for the crown, though he had also helped families of American prisoners gain access to them.

Their respective juries found both defendants guilty, and McKean sentenced the old men to death by hanging. Dozens of petitions for clemency were sent to Pennsylvania’s executive council, and just days before their scheduled executions McKean sought pardons for both. “It was vintage McKean,” says biographer David McKean in “Suspected of Independence.” Strongly committed to the rule of law “as the most effective check on ever-changing popular attitudes,” McKean believed that its application “needed to be guided by compassion.” In this case, the pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears.

Though the two Quakers were the only defendants in his court ever to be convicted of treason and put to death, McKean acquired a reputation, endorsed by some historians, as a “hanging judge.” David McKean (a direct descendant of his subject) says that the chief justice generally “showed leniency to the Loyalists after the British vacated Philadelphia.” Even before the British arrived, he set free 29 Quakers who had been detained as suspected Tory sympathizers.

McKean served 22 years as Pennsylvania’s chief justice, and in the republic’s early years, says the author, his court may have been “more powerful” than the nascent U.S. Supreme Court. Some years later, a multi-volume work about the body of law that McKean developed became “a touchstone for courts throughout the country,” including the Supreme Court. “Perhaps no one other than Chief Justice John Marshall did more than McKean to establish an independent judiciary,” Mr. McKean asserts.

The author of three previous books on American political history, David McKean was an official at the State Department until earlier this year, when he was confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. “I never really gave my ancestor a lot of thought,” he writes, until he began to notice fleeting references to him in histories of the period. Unfortunately, Thomas McKean did not keep a diary and was not a prolific letter writer, so events generally loom larger than his intimate perception of them in this brisk biography. CONTINUE AT SITE

When is a payment for hostages not a ransom? When the Obama Administration says so.

That’s how the State Department has tried to spin a $1.7 billion settlement the U.S. reached with Tehran in January, when the nuclear deal was finalized and Tehran released five American hostages, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The Administration insists the payment merely settled a separate dispute related to the aborted sale of military equipment to the Shah of Iran in 1979.

New reporting by the Journal’s Jay Solomon and Carol Lee blows apart this story. On the day the U.S. hostages came home from Iran, an unmarked cargo plane landed in Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport with cash amounting to $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies. U.S. law forbids direct dollar transactions with Iran, and the $400 million in cash wasn’t disclosed to Congress. Justice Department officials objected but were overruled.

One reason the Administration is keen to deny that the cash was ransom is because it had already paid a high price by freeing seven Iranians charged or convicted of U.S. crimes and dropping extradition requests for 14 others. But the Iranians weren’t satisfied.

As the Journal reports, “U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.” Cash is an excellent way to pay terrorists, fund Hezbollah in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, and buy dual-use, nuclear-related hardware—which Iran continues to do, according to reports from Germany’s intelligence services.

The Administration is pretending this money is being used for strictly kosher purposes. “The revenue that’s flowing to Iran is being used to support its currency, to provide moneys to the departments and agencies, build up its infrastructure,” CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Has he heard the word fungible?

The Iranians are less shy about their hostage taking. Iran’s negotiating team for the settlement payment “was largely staffed by members of its domestic spy service,” the Journal reports. Iranian defense officials told the press the cash was “a ransom payment.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Another example of Hillary Clinton’s chicanery…and one can only ask…where is the outrage? rsk

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arming Jihadists in Libya . . . and Syria Looking ahead to the next installment of e-mails from WikiLeaks By Andrew C. McCarthy

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

The Daily Wire and other outlets are reporting on Assange’s comments, published by Democracy Now. Clearly, we should not take Assange’s word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails “about Libya alone.” Let’s see if he has what he says he has. But it is worth setting the stage, because what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.

“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”

But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.

Nursing homes do not have a stellar reputation as places to convalesce or be taken care of. Private nursing homes, at least in the U.S., are largely dependent on government benefits accrued by patients, so they can hardly be called “private.” State-run homes are disasters in terms of the “quality” of care (minimal) and the character of their “skilled” staff. Wikipedia notes:

In most countries, there is a degree of government oversight and regulation over the nursing home industry. These regulatory bodies are usually tasked with ensuring patient safety for the residents and improving the standard of care. In the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ensures that every Medicare and Medicaid beneficiary receives seamless, high-quality health care, both within health care settings such as nursing homes, and among health care settings during care transitions.

To ensure that nursing homes meet the necessary legal standards, the authorities conduct inspections of all nursing home facilities. This process plays a critical role in ensuring basic levels of quality and safety by monitoring nursing home compliance with the national legal requirements. Surveyors will conduct on-site surveys of certified nursing homes on average every 12 months to assure basic levels of quality and safety for beneficiaries. The authority might also undertake various initiatives to improve the effectiveness of the annual nursing home surveys, as well as to improve the investigations prompted by complaints from consumers or family members about nursing homes.

Nursing homes offer the most extensive care a person can get outside a hospital. Nursing homes offer help with custodial care—like bathing, getting dressed, and eating—as well as skilled care given by a registered nurse and includes medical monitoring and treatments. Skilled care also includes services provided by specially trained professionals, such as physical, occupational, and respiratory therapists.

In November 1975 a film appeared that ought to have excoriated the whole notion of state-run or state-regulated nursing homes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same name, and partly on Dale Wasserman’s 1963 Broadway play, an adaptation of the novel.

Kirk Douglas appeared in the Broadway version of the story.

This is not a defense of Trump’s oafish response to the Khans….

I totally understand and empathize with the grief of parents who lose their children in war or sickness or violence. There is, however, something that rankles, when their grief is used for dirty politics. So it was when the mothers of young black men killed by police and the Khans were highlighted at the Democratic convention as shills for Hillary Clinton. Where were the mothers of innocent cops killed in Dallas? Where were the mothers of the soldiers of Fort Hood who died at the hands of an enlisted American Moslem soldier on a jihad? And where is Mr. Khan on the record speaking against jihad against Americans in San Bernardino or Orlando. His gratuitous offer of his copy of the constitution was theater. Who scripted him?

Robert Spencer makes the point exactly in his column listed below:

Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma ​His son died in service of the U.S. military; now his father is using his memory to advance a different cause. Robert Spencer

I recently came across a mewling article in one of Canada’s “progressive” mags, The Walrus, in which theatre critic Erika Thorkelson bemoans “the insidious sexism of the Canadian theatre world” and the comparative paucity of female actors and playwrights. Her theme is “gender imbalance” — the latest buzzword in the feminist war against men — which, of course, is owing to something like an exclusionary male commissariat intent on safeguarding its unjust privileges. That there may be other reasons for the supposed “imbalance” — lack of comparable interest, different distributions of talent — must not be mentioned since that would call her thesis into question. I certainly have not noticed any marked dearth of females on the theatrical, operatic, or cinematic scenes. And in the music world, come to think about it, females abound. No matter. The patriarchy strikes again.

At around the same time that I stumbled on this silly piece of special pleading and culturally ratified paranoia, I learned that the husband of a friend, a self-taught biblical scholar and an expert on the Gospel of John, is now serving time after having been accused by his disaffected stepdaughter of sexual assault, although the evidence is sketchy at best, the stepdaughter is psychologically disturbed, and his wife and his other children have testified on his behalf. The judge nevertheless found the daughter’s rather improbable story credible and the man was sentenced to a seven-year prison term. To compound the judicial felony committed against him, he was remanded to maximum security after his preference not to be housed with Muslims was discovered — he had good reason, having been stabbed by a Muslim for wearing a t-shirt stenciled with the legend “I Am an Infidel.” The fact that he was a believing Christian clearly did not help his case. In any event, this was another tainted victory for the feminist cause.

Like our literary community and our judiciary, our schools are equally engaged in promoting the feminist agenda to the disadvantage of deserving — indeed, of all — male students. A typical instance occurred at a high school in a neighboring town, as a friend whose son has just graduated and who attended the graduation ceremony informed me. My friend reports that approximately 90 per cent of the innumerable awards were distributed to female students for various obscure achievements such as offering encouragement to classmates, displaying enthusiasm for the subject, showing aptitude for commitment or evincing general improvement, in short, for enriching the parietal atmosphere by their very presence. Many of these awards came with the caveat “in the opinion of the teachers.” Two girls, the school was proud to announce on its Twitter feed, excelled in the technologies — “Times Are Changin’” reads the accompanying comment. But the vast majority of these female laureates demonstrated their accomplishment in the mainly “soft” subjects — the Humanities, social sciences, dance classes, and the like, where marking typically involves a high degree of subjectivity and teacher preference often plays a role. Only a comparative handful of male students were honored, all of whom majored in the “hard” disciplines where objectivity rules — science, math — and received top grades. The valedictorian, obviously, was a girl, with a high composite average enhanced, it would appear, by easy marks in the less demanding areas — and, I strongly suspect, likely with the help of grade inflation, since the principal is female, the vice principal is female, most of the teachers are females, and the school focuses in its Twitter feed, replete with the most cloying and vapid bulletins imaginable, primarily on girls. The high school is toxic for boys, who prudently kept out of full participation in most school groups and activities. Male students cannot but react with a mixture of bemusement and resentment — going MGTOW, going Galt — at the cost of our society’s scientific, literary and intellectual health, already in precipitous decline.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy has always been defined by ticking the boxes the far Left long wanted ticked.

Now he’s contemplating one more, by far the most dangerous of all: unilateral nuclear disarmament, or at least a rough approximation thereof. After reducing the size of our nuclear arsenal to dangerous levels, the Washington Post reports that Obama is considering a “no first use” policy with regard to nukes.

Peaceniks around the world will cheer; the rest of us will shudder. No First Use (NFU) was first raised as a strategic doctrine by JFK in a March 1961 speech. (Truman and Eisenhower knew better.) But Kennedy quickly dropped the idea after the Cuban missile crisis proved that proclaiming, “We will never strike first in any conflict,” had only encouraged Khrushchev to act more boldly. It was also true that NFU encouraged the Russians to think that they could win an all-out war in Europe. If, for example, a conventional Russian invasion through the Fulda gap into West Germany was so massive that NATO forces couldn’t respond in time or with enough impact, the Russians would be assured of victory with the threat of American nukes off the table.

Other presidents agreed with Kennedy’s abandonment of NFU, and the doctrine lay dormant for the rest of the Cold War. Today, the arguments against it may be even more urgent. As American and NATO troop levels stagnate and Vladimir Putin assumes a more aggressive posture while refurbishing the Russian military, the threat of a nuclear strike may be one of the few ways left to keep Russia in check. After all, Putin himself talks about using nuclear weapons to hold onto Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and his generals, meeting with American officials in March 2015, threatened to use nukes if NATO dared to reinforce the defenses of the Baltic states.

As General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander from 2011 to 2014, said in a BBC Radio 4 interview, Russia has hardwired “nuclear thinking and capability to every aspect of their defense capability.” Renouncing first-use will only encourage Russia or another aggressor with nukes to strike first at what is perceived to be an opponent with one arm deliberately tied behind its back — and to target our nuclear assets so they can’t be used in retaliation. Far from diminishing the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation, then, it could actually trigger one.

Deterrence in war always depended on a degree of vagueness and uncertainty. It’s not so much what you will do in retaliation but what you might do that makes the would-be aggressor think twice — especially if he thinks you are ready and willing to do things that precipitate the all-out conflict both sides want to avoid.

Of all the great American captains of World War II, none remains more controversial than General Douglas MacArthur, whose genius and folly have taken on mythic proportions. MacArthur alone among them fought in all of America’s major 20th-century wars as a general — World War I, World War II, and Korea — and he was the most versatile military figure since Ulysses S. Grant, as a combined tactician, strategist, geostrategist, diplomat, and politician.

Yet history has not with the same zeal sought to balance the strengths and weaknesses of the often hard-to-like MacArthur as it has with, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was a brilliant organizer but often strategically obtuse; George S. Patton, who was a dazzling field general but mercurial; and Omar Bradley, who was a media favorite but often plodding.

There are a number of writs against MacArthur, but perhaps three stand out. First, there is no doubt that his narcissism could reach obnoxious proportions. His ego was more than just superficial vanity that characteristically led him to stare endlessly in the mirror, pepper his speech liberally with first-person pronouns, and choreograph his public image with corncob pipe, shiny khakis, gold-braided cap, aviator sunglasses, and leather coat. At times his sense of self led to hubris — and nemesis often followed. He certainly proved personally reckless in a way at odds with his public persona of a ramrod-straight devout Christian. In 1930, the 50-year-old, divorced MacArthur had an affair with the underage 16-year-old Isabel Rosario Cooper and brought the young Filipina mistress back with him to Washington — only to be both blackmailed by columnist Drew Pearson into dropping his libel suit concerning Pearson’s allegations about the 1932 Bonus March and eventually leveraged into paying Cooper $15,000 to go away.

The more experienced MacArthur saw himself as intellectually superior to younger presidents and so talked down to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. He thought the wisdom of his strategy of island hopping through the Philippines should be judged by all as his personal redemption for his earlier loss of the archipelago. And by 1943, his “I shall return” press releases seemed to conflate his huge land, air, and naval forces with his own person, in a manner that had already irked Eisenhower, worried George Marshall, and frightened Roosevelt. Early on, MacArthur saw himself as a figure uniquely favored by God. In World War I, all on his small patrol near the Côte de Châtillon were killed by a surprise artillery barrage — a disaster known only by MacArthur’s own testimony, which would later be questioned. MacArthur remarked of his amazing survival: “It was God, He led me by the hand, the way He led Joshua.”

Second, MacArthur’s most brilliant victories — the Operation Cartwheel reconquest of much of the Japanese-held South Pacific and the brilliant Inchon landings near the Korean DMZ — were bookended by equally disastrous failures. He was ultimately responsible for, despite warnings, allowing his newly supplied air forces on Luzon to be caught by surprise hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His incautious approach to the Chinese border in November 1950 — albeit approved by almost everyone in Washington — downplayed growing warnings about the bitter cold, the difficult terrain, and the likelihood of the entrance of the huge Chinese Red Army across the Yalu River. MacArthur for the most part claimed the strategic breakthroughs as his own virtuoso performances but fobbed off the disasters on subordinates and politicians.