RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/330383/biden-s-private-reality-editors

Joe Biden’s career of intellectual dishonesty is one step short of the Aristotelian ideal: It has a beginning (his law-school plagiarism) and a middle (his later campaign-trail plagiarism), but his performance in the recent debate suggests that it is without end. From misrepresenting Paul Ryan’s legislative record to telling bald-faced lies about his own, the vice president offered a master class in the art of deception.

The Iraq War and the expenses associated with it have become politically unpopular; the same is true to a lesser extent of the war in Afghanistan. Biden blasted Ryan for “voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription-drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for [the] very wealthy. I was there. I voted against him.” No, he did no such thing. Biden, as the congressional record shows, voted for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as did the majority of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. To extend the vice president’s MasterCard metaphor, his signature is right there on the receipt. He did vote against the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, only to support a much more costly entitlement expansion in the form of the Affordable Care Act.

As for the Bush tax cuts, it is true that Biden opposed them in the Senate — right before supporting them as a member of the Obama administration. The Bush tax cuts for those whom Democrats insist on calling “the rich” — families and small businesses with income in excess of $250,000 a year — entailed about $800 billion in forgone revenue according to government estimates. But the expensive part of the equation is the middle-class tax cuts, which added up to some $2.2 trillion in forgone revenue. The Obama-Biden ticket has consistently supported retaining those tax cuts — i.e., the large majority of the Bush tax cuts Biden says he opposes. Which is to say, Biden opposes the billions in tax cuts but supports the trillions in tax cuts, and therefore judges himself to be frugal.

He also misstated by a factor of five the income threshold for which the Obama administration proposes to increase taxes: “The middle class will pay less and people making a million dollars or more will begin to contribute slightly more.” In fact, the administration proposes to raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 a year or more, not $1 million or more.

It is not uncommon for Joe Biden to be off by a factor of five or more. In the same debate he said that Syria “is five times as large geographically” as Libya, when in fact the opposite is closer to the truth: Libya is nearly ten times as large as Syria geographically. That is a simple misstatement, evidence of nothing more than the fact that Biden’s alleged command of foreign-policy details is not quite so impressive as his admirers imagine. But positively untrue statements about his voting record on the wars and his mendacity regarding taxes are evidence of something else: intentional dishonesty. If we bought into the cartoon version of Biden as a middling buffoon, we might come to a different conclusion, but it is difficult to believe that Biden does not know how he voted on the wars or what his administration’s tax policy is. The man is not senescent — he is a skillful demagogue.

Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Destabilizing Force By Iain Murray

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/330396

On October 12, it was announced that the European Union had won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement was greeted with warmth in Brussels and distinct coolness elsewhere — including throughout Europe. The award is notably odd because the EU’s policies are currently helping to destabilize the continent. Indeed, because of the euro, it may not survive another year without a secession crisis, or worse. Only a reversal of course on the EU project itself can restore hope and guarantee peace.

The EU was conceived as a framework for binding France and Germany together in a way that would keep the two countries from ever going to war again. Indeed, many German socialists, such as Martin Schulz, the current leader of the socialist group in the European Parliament, credit the EU with restraining Germany and guaranteeing peace. Giving the EU credit for this ignores the role of NATO over six decades, although the EU Customs Union undoubtedly helped. As the saying goes, when goods do not pass over borders, armies will.

But whatever constructive role the EU may have played is all in the past. EU regulations now suppress industry rather than encourage it. In many countries, EU regulations, piled on top of national rules, make it almost impossible to hire or fire employees. Generous welfare states and minimum-wage laws have contributed to youth-unemployment rates at or around 50 percent in much of southern Europe. Historically, large numbers of unemployed young men have not been a harbinger of peace.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/330397/october-surprise-may-be-libya-john-fund

What if we’ve already had an October surprise in this campaign, in September, and the mainstream media are failing to follow up? An issue becomes a real issue only if enough people give it the attention it’s due.

Many people in the diplomatic and intelligence communities say that the Obama administration, behind the scenes, is in complete disarray in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. That tension burst into the open during last Thursday’s debate, when Vice President Joe Biden said the administration “did not know” that U.S. personnel in Libya had made repeated requests for more security before the September 11 attack. “We did not know they wanted more security there,” Biden claimed.

That directly contradicted sworn testimony given by several officials just the day before, during a House Oversight Committee hearing. Lt. Colonel Andrew Wood, who led a 16-member security team in Libya for six months, testified: “We felt great frustration that those requests were ignored or just never met.” Wood’s team was ordered by the State Department to leave Libya in August, about a month before the terrorist assault.

After the debate, Obama-administration officials knew that Biden’s statement was untenable, so they explained that by “we” — the “we” who were in the dark about security concerns — Biden meant only two people: himself and President Obama. It’s a parsing of words worthy of Bill Clinton’s famous “it all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/creation-of-bosnian-muslim-state-led-to-ethnic-cleansing-of-440000-catholics/print/

“But that is what you get when you create another “moderate” Muslim state. Muslims may demand the right to build mega-mosques in London, Tennessee and right next to Ground Zero, but they don’t reciprocate. Islam has no notion of human rights… only Muslim rights. Or rather the rights of Muslim men over all sorts of inferior types like women and non-Muslims. Create a Muslim state and you get discrimination against non-Muslims. It’s how the religion works.”

In the late 90s the trendy thing to do was to agonize over the fate of Bosnian Muslims and all the terrible horrors that the PoorMuslims (TM) were experiencing in Sarajevo. Ethnic cleansing was the word of the day and the Serbs were the new villains of the hour.

Steven Spielberg even managed to make the ultimate liberal thriller, The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney racing against the clock to stop a Serb terrorist from launching a nuclear attack on New York City. (This proved to be a very timely film to make in 1997. Four years before Muslim terrorists (Shhh they don’t exist) launched a real attack against New York)

NATO carved out a Bosnian Muslim state by bombing a bunch of Serbian Christians, civilians and non-civilians, Billy Clinton didn’t really care. And ethnic cleansing became an actual thing… just not ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Mohammed’s last command to his followers was to drive the Jews and Christians out of Arabia. And as Muslims have expanded their reach, they have religiously been keeping their unholy prophet’s command.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/14/chris-stevens-libya_n_1965009.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D220043 Parents terrible grief and suffering should not be used as political hay….Cindy Sheehan, Nick Berg’s father, Daniel Pearl’s parents….deserve condolence from all Americans but their political opinions are personal and should remain so. America’s public must know the details of Benghazi….particularly before such a crucial election….rsk The father of Christopher Stephens, the United States […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dan-gagliasso/the-radicalization-of-teacher-education/print/ Major schools of education are increasingly trying to indoctrinate new teaching candidates with radical, far-left ideas. Propaganda spouting radical professors are putting numbers of talented prospective elementary and high school teachers in the unfortunate position of allowing themselves to be reeducated – or having to quit their post-graduate teaching credential programs. Consequently, American schools […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/mr-obama-the-future-belong-to-truth-tellers/ My heart sank when I heard president Obama’s recent statement at the UN: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” It was difficult to hear the president of the United States declare to the world that critics of Mohammed are wrong, they don’t have a cause, must not […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/meet-obamas-million-dollar-muslim-donor/print/ The Free Beacon has a brief profile of Kareem Ahmed from TPM, one of the few million dollar donors to Obama’s SuperPACs. You’d be forgiven if you don’t recognize Ahmed’s name. Before this year, his political giving was limited to a few four-figure checks to California candidates. Several veteran California politics watchers contacted for […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/the-left-after-communism/print/

The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm has been the subject of a lot of fatuous eulogies since his death a few weeks ago. Ron Radosh asks whether an intellectual – a man of ideas — who dedicated his whole life to the defense of the most murderous regime on human record, and to lying in defense of that regime – can be a good historian. The question, if put right, is self-answering. Yet even worthy conservatives like Niall Ferguson apparently get it wrong. Hobsbawm may have been a brilliant writer and an intelligent man. Yet he was morally defective, and that particular flaw is fatal to a historian since in the end the reader must trust his judgments and depend on his integrity and respect for the truth. Here is a review I wrote more than a decade ago of Hobsbawm’s “history” of the 20th century, which is little more than a Stalinist political tract, written after the fact when an honest man would know better.

THE LEFT AFTER COMMUNISM

Have compassion, my child; love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers. Nothing is more dangerous than their company, their humble pride. They must either dominate or destroy…

Rousseau

Workers of the world…forgive me

Graffiti on a Karl Marx statue
Moscow, August 1991

The monuments have fallen now and the faces are changed. In the graveyards the martyrs have been rehabilitated and everywhere the names have been restored. The Soviet Union, once hailed by progressives everywhere as a sixth of mankind on the road to the future, no longer exists. Leningrad is St. Petersburg again. The radical project to change the world is stalled, having left behind a world in ruin. In a revolutionary eyeblink, a bloody lifetime has passed into history; only vacancies memorialize a catastrophe whose human sum can never be reckoned.

In the climactic hours of the Communist fall, someone — Boris Yeltsin perhaps — remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work.” What more is there to say? If Communism’s final hour had truly spelled the end of the utopian fantasies that have blighted the modern era, nothing at all. If mankind were really capable of closing the book on this long, sorry episode of human folly and evil, then its painful memory could finally be laid to rest. Only historians would need to trouble their thoughts with its destructive illusions and appalling achievements. But, in fact, these millennial dreams of a brave new world are with us still, and it is increasingly obvious that the most crucial lessons of this history have not been learned. This applies most of all to those whose complicity in its calamities were most profound — the progressive intelligentsia of the democratic West.

Emblematic of this failure was the appearance in 1995 of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, a history of the epoch from the outbreak of the First World War to the end of the Communist empire, a period which Hobsbawm refers to as the “short twentieth century.” The Age of Extremes is actually the conclusion to a tetralogy that one American reviewer called a “summa historiae of the modern age,”[1] and which others have showered with similar accolades since the first volume appeared decades ago. This final installment was awarded Canada’s most coveted literary prize and appeared to reviews which canonized its author’s perspective as definitive for the age. A major assessment in the New York Times by Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann, for example, hailed Hobsbawm’s achievement as “magisterial.”[2] This adjective was lifted from the jacket blurb by a Rockefeller Foundation executive who wrote: “Hobsbawm’s magisterial treatment of the short twentieth century, will be the definitive fin-de-siecle work.” Liberal foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead echoed this praise, calling the Hobsbawm’s work “a magnificent achievement of a very rare and remarkable kind.”[3] The economist Robert Heilbroner concurred: “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” The historian Eugene Genovese, reviewing it for The New Republic was equally impressed:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=287779

Should we take Obama at his word? No, not when Israel confronts the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran.

For Obama, the issue is only political; for Israel, it’s existential—a matter of survival.

“Americans who support Israel should take the president at his word,” wrote Haim Saban recently in The New York Times, claiming US President Barack Obama is fully committed to the Jewish state.

But is that true? Should we take him at his word?No, not when Israel confronts the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran.

Time and again President Obama has signaled a lack of sympathy—or even outright hostility – toward Israel. Not long ago he was caught on an open microphone agreeing with French President Sarkozy’s slurring of the Israeli prime minister. And then there was his public snubbing of the Israeli leader’s request to discuss Iran during a recent US visit, a measure Reuters termed “a highly unusual rebuff to a close ally.”

Even more worrying, last month former US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, who attended several of Obama’s meetings with Netanyahu, admitted “there are serious differences between our interests and Israel’s own security interests.”

ALL THIS certainly raises questions about Obama’s sincerity when he publicly says he’ll “always have Israel’s back.” Nor are these the only times the president has left American voters wondering where he really stands on foreign relations.

Remember, earlier this year, when he was inadvertently recorded asking former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for “space” until his reelection, when he’d have more “flexibility” on missile defense? What did he mean? Obama was clearly not being forthright with the American people.