RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let me cut right to the chase here — this is a great movie.

Hands of Stone is a movie about the great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran, active from the 1970’s until his retirement in 2002, at age 50.

I almost didn’t see this movie, despite my intense interest in 1960’s-2000 boxing, which was the Ali-Frazier-Duran-Leonard-Hagler-Holmes-Tyson-Holyfield golden era of the sport. Stone received many mediocre reviews prior to its release and I said to my wife, “Let’s skip it.” She said, “No. I’ve heard some good reviews and besides, most of the negative reviews are from people who know nothing about boxing or its history. We should see this.”

As usual, she was completely, totally right. Like the 2000 movie Ali starring Will Smith, Hands of Stone gets all the important things correct and captures the essence and manner of the main character perfectly. Duran grew up on the streets of Panama’s slums, using boxing as a way out. He earned the nickname Hands of Stone early on, because of his ability to hit so hard, in spite of his small stature (a 5’ 7” 135-lb lightweight).

After coming to the U.S, a string of impressive wins put him in line for a title fight against highly regarded lightweight champion Ken Buchannan of Scotland in September 1972. Buchannan was no match for Duran’s relentless aggression, and Duran won after the fight was stopped following the 13th round, with Buchannan faking having taken a low blow, claiming he couldn’t continue. What a prophetic and ironic way this would prove to be for Duran to win the title. The referee rightly discounted Buchannan’s hollow claim and awarded the fight to Duran on a technical knockout (a TKO in boxing terminology).

In 1976, the U.S. Olympic boxing team won an unprecedented five gold medals in Montreal, a team featuring the soon-to-be famous Spinks brothers (Michael and Leon). The star of the team, however, was unquestionably the charismatic and telegenic Ray Leonard, who took the nickname of a former boxing great “Sugar,” after Sugar Ray Robinson. A new generation of sports fans now knew only of ‘Sugar Ray’ Leonard.

Turning professional right after the Olympic Games ended, Leonard proved that his talents and abilities as a boxer were truly special. His articulate manner and sharp wit — along with his handsome looks and cool demeanor — reminded many people of the previous boxing generation’s big attraction, Muhammad Ali. That he was trained/managed by the same person as Ali (Angelo Dundee) and hyped by boxing’s biggest broadcaster (Howard Cosell) as was Ali, only added to that perception. Leonard was boxing’s big draw, in an era when boxing enjoyed perhaps its greatest popularity and — because of satellite broadcast technology — its biggest worldwide audience.

There are, I fancy, few more avid admirers of James Madison than I. But reading through Bernard Bailyn’s extraordinarily brilliant The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I have to admit that the anti-Federalists who opposed those, like the temporary allies Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who argued for ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, had a point.

Their basic argument was that the Constitution as framed by the Federalists would subordinate the rights of the individual states and impose exactly the same sort of tyranny that the colonists had rebelled against in 1776. “Examination of the Constitution revealed,” Bailyn noted, “a taxing power in the hands of the proposed national government that would prove to be as unqualified by the restraints of the states as Parliament’s had been by the colonial assemblies.”

Here’s Patrick (“Give men liberty or give me death”) Henry on what would happen should the Constitution be adopted:

the Senate would live in splendor and a “great and mighty President” would “be supported in extravagant magnificence, so that the whole of our property may be taken by this American government, by laying what taxes they please, giving themselves what salaries they please, and suspending our laws at their pleasure.”

The anti-Federalist “Brutus” (probably Melancton Smith) dilated further on the economic calamity that awaited. The government’s power to “borrow money on the credit of the United States,” he warned, meant that

the Congress may mortgage any or all the revenues of the union . . . [and] may borrow of foreign nations a principal sum, the interest of which will be equal to the annual revenues of the country. By this means, they may create a national debt so large as to exceed the ability of the country ever to sink. I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befal this country than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.

It’s a pity that “Brutus” couldn’t meet Barack Obama. They would have had a lot to talk about. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s not even September yet, but I’m already hailing this USA Today item as the feelgood story of the year.

Read:

Two American fighter pilots who intercepted Syrian combat jets over northern Syria last week said they came within 2,000 feet of the planes without the Syrians aware they were being shadowed.

The tense encounter occurred after Syrian jets dropped bombs near a U.S. adviser team with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. The Pentagon warned Syria that American forces were authorized to take action to defend its troops. Syrian aircraft haven’t dropped bombs in the area since then, and the U.S. military is no longer operating continuous combat patrols there.

“I followed him around for all three of his loops,” one of the American pilots, a 38-year-old Air Force major, told USA TODAY Wednesday in the first detailed account of the incident. “He didn’t appear to have any idea I was there.”

The two pilots asked that their names be withheld for security reasons.

“The behavior stopped,” said Brig. Gen. Charles Corcoran, commander of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, which conducts airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from an undisclosed location in this region. “We made our point.”

But wait — it gets better:

Friday’s incident, as described by commanders here, began in the afternoon, when a Syrian aircraft was spotted entering the airspace around Hasakah, and the pair of F-22s, already in the area, raced toward them.

The captain said he quickly got on a common radio frequency in an effort to reach the Syrian aircraft, asking the pilot to identify himself and state his intentions. There was no response.

U.S. commanders also contacted the Russians by phone to seek information, but the Russians were unaware of the Syrian action.

At that point the only way to get information was to have the American pilots approach the Syrian planes, Su-24 Fencers, to determine if they were armed or dropping bombs.

The American pilots asked permission to get closer to the Syrian aircraft to determine if they were carrying weapons on their wings or appeared to be attacking ground targets. Normally pilots are under orders to keep their distance from Russian or Syrian planes to avoid a miscalculation.

Permission was granted. One of the F-22s watched as the other maneuvered behind the Syrian aircraft to get a closer look. After about 15 minutes, the Syrian jet left the area, apparently unaware it was being followed.

With the ongoing love fest between Turkey and Russia, there are several interesting and dangerous scenarios emerging for the United States. For years Incirlik Air Base has been the centerpiece of NATO forces on the southern tier of this alliance. This air base is also home to the U.S. nuclear force which serves as a deterrent to possible Russian adventurism.

Although it is a long arduous way for the Russians to gain access to this base, official requests have been made as a launch pad for Russian air strikes against Syrian rebels. Imagine, for the moment, a situation in which NATO permits this Russian access. Fifty U.S.-B61 nuclear warheads would be vulnerable to Russian intervention; a key U.S. deterrent would be rendered nugatory.

Moreover, there is the additional fear that these weapons of mass destruction are only 65 miles from the Syrian border and ISIS forces. Unaided by Turkish troops, it might be difficult for a small contingent of U.S. forces to prevent a breach in the present security arrangement.

Igor Morozov, a Russian official, said, “It just remains to come to an agreement with Erdogan that we get the NATO base Incirlik as [our] primary airbase.” Assuming the plausibility of this claim, Russian aircraft would be flying out of Iran and Turkey, a truly unprecedented situation.

Not only would this gesture add to Russian ascendency in the region, it would unequivocally demonstrate the diminished status of the United States. Russia has emerged as the Middle East “strong horse,” despite an economy rocked by failure and entirely dependent on the price of oil.

What has surprised U.S. State Department officials is the rapidity of this change. Part of the explanation lies with President Erdogan who believes the U.S. was at least partially responsible for the recent coup against his government by harboring Mr. Gulen – the man Erdogan believes planned and executed the plot against him.

In an interview last week for his new book The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal told Andrea Mitchell that Iran in 2013 had threatened to pull out of nuclear talks if the United States hit Bashar al-Assad’s forces over the Syrian dictator’s use of chemical weapons. The Obama administration quickly denied this. “Not true,” tweeted White House aide Ned Price.

Of course it’s true. And if it weren’t, Barack Obama would have a lot of explaining to do. Why else did he allow Assad to violate Obama’s own “red line” with impunity? Why did he jeopardize American interests and endanger allies throughout the Middle East? Why else did he allow a refugee crisis to destabilize Europe? Why has he done nothing to stop the slaughter of nearly half a million Syrians?

Obama himself publicly acknowledged that he won’t interfere with Iranian interests in Syria. In a December 2015 White House press conference, the president spoke of respecting Iranian “equities” in the Levant. That means preservation of the Assad regime, a vital Iranian interest since it serves as a supply line for Iranian weapons earmarked for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The White House was so serious about respecting this particular “equity” that it repeatedly leaked details of Israeli strikes on Iranian arms convoys. Obama wanted to show the Iranians his bona fides as a negotiating partner.

A nuclear deal with Iran has been Obama’s foreign policy priority since he first sat in the Oval Office. The agreement would pave the way for a broader realignment in the Middle East – downgrading traditional American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia and upgrading Iran – and thus allow the United States to minimize its footprint in the region. With so much at stake, including his hunger for a personal legacy, Obama didn’t dare risk alienating Iran by targeting Assad.

The real deal that Obama made with the mullahs has been clear for some time now: They got to keep their client in Syria, and Obama got his “historic” achievement. So why not just spin the press and claim that laying off Assad was part of the price America paid for Obama’s stunning diplomatic triumph? Indeed, last we heard from Ned Price, the White House aide was bragging to the New York Times Magazine about manipulating the media. “The easiest way for the White House to shape the news,” Price explained,
is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them – “ …“And the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

The Iranian defense minister recently pronounced that the Islamic Republic has “no limit for the range” of the ballistic missiles it is developing.

In making the pronouncement, General Hossein Dehqan also said that Iran is now on par with world standards for most of its weapons and military equipment, specifically, that “production of the national individual weapons and efforts to improve the quality and precision-striking power of ballistic missiles are among the defense ministry’s achievements…”

One of the advanced weapons Iran has developed is a ballistic missile that deploys multiple warheads against a single target. As the government-aligned Fars News Agency reported, “This makes for an efficient area attack weapon.”

(Never mind that just three months ago, that the state-owned IranianPress TV announced that “all these advancements on the military level are only for defensive reasons.”)

In addition, Iran has now deployed the long-awaited Russian-made, long-range S-300 missile system. The system was deployed to protect the country’s Fordo nuclear facility, which the commander of Iran’s air force calls paramount “in all circumstances.”

Western officials, who tried to block the delivery of the missile system, said that once in place, the S-300 would essentially eliminate the military option to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The nuclear deal made with Iran and the world powers was sold to the public as a way to contain not just Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but its ballistic missile program as well.

Ballistic missiles are mainly used to deliver nuclear warheads. Under the terms of the agreement we were told that the current UN restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program would remain in effect for eight years, including forbidding Iran from testing of ballistic missiles.

America’s terrorist shortage may be reaching an end. If Orlando didn’t satisfy you and San Bernardino left you wanting more. If you thought, why can’t we have more Boston Marathon bombings, Obama has your back, and your front and any other directions that a pressure cooker full of nails can hit you from.

This week the land of Washington, Jefferson and Mohammed Atta will reach a new milestone by taking in Syrian refugee number 10,000. It’s unknown if the TSA will shower him with balloons and confetti once he passes the gate while clutching a Koran and a copy of the Caliphate Cookbook.

Either way we hit the big explosive ten thousand. And the clock is ticking.

Media outlets are puffing out sympathetic portrayals of the oppressed Syrians moving into some neighborhood near you, and far from the bosses behind the major media outlets. All these folks fleeing the violence of their own religion want is a safe place to live. And safe inevitably means non-Islamic.

There’s an obvious lesson here that neither they nor our expertly chattering classes seem able to grasp.

But a few years from now there will be bodies and the killer will have the same last name as one of those oppressed refugees who weren’t looking to be safe, but to make us unsafe.

Indistinguishable from press releases, the stories tell us that the refugees have been thoroughly screened. Or as thoroughly as you can screen people coming from a country that we have no diplomatic relations with and major portions of which are on fire so that even if its government, which also used to sponsor global and regional terrorism as a hobby to pass the time on long summer days, was willing to cooperate with our immigration authorities, the information would be mostly useless.

How are we going to screen a Syrian or Iraqi man who claims to be from a city held by ISIS?

Are we going to phone the local ISIS office and ask the head headchopper to confirm that the fellow smiling for the camera isn’t affiliated with ISIS? Perhaps the local Jihadi Jack or Allah Akbar Abdul will regretfully inform us that they would be happy to help, but the local government office was burned down during a massacre of Christians, Yazidis and American hostages.

But there is really no doubting the fact that Obama has subjected Syrian refugees to the most thorough screening imaginable.

The most persecuted peoples in Syria are Christians and Yazidis. Obama has officially resettled 9,144 Syrians. 9,077 of them are Muslims. A mere 47 Christians and 14 Yazidis managed to slip through the nets of his careful screening process.

The 20th century’s darkest moments have inspired more than a few illuminating memoirs, and Agata Tuszyńska’s “Family History of Fear” belongs in their number. It is one of a cluster of remembrances that, drawing on family history, look back on genocide and war and record their aftereffects. Such narratives can be personal and yet also encompass the fate of whole nations trying to reconstitute themselves after so much ordeal.

Ms. Tuszyńska, a poet and writer from Warsaw, begins by giving us the origins of her own story before broadening her gaze to include earlier generations. She was born in 1957 to a Jewish mother and Polish father. Her mother, with her dark eyes and dark hair, was “happy to have brought a little blue-eyed blond into the world”: She had not wanted to weigh her daughter down “with a burden heavier than I could bear,” Ms. Tuszyńska writes. “She didn’t want her child to have to grow up with a feeling of injustice and fear.”

Ms. Tuszyńska’s mother, Halina, had every reason to want her daughter to avoid the burden of history. As a child, Halina had survived the war when her own mother—Agata’s grandmother—had walked with Halina through a courthouse on the edge of the Warsaw ghetto that opened onto the “Aryan” side of the city. She discreetly removed her armband—the telltale sign that they were Jews—and began an odyssey of survival, seeking hidden shelters and staying clear of the German occupiers. “Mother wanted to erase the past. To be as far as possible from the basements where she had to hide.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
Family History of Fear

By Agata Tuszynska
Knopf, 381 pages, $27.95

For much of Ms. Tuszyńska’s own girlhood, she tells us, she felt that “the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians.” Then, when she was 19, she learned that her mother was Jewish—and that she herself was a Jew. Ms. Tuszyńska was determined to “reverse the course of forgetting” and explore the shrouded history of her family.

Set aside Barack Obama the private man, about whom even now relatively little is known. The most likeable thing about Barack Obama the public man is his dedication to golf.

Conservatives hate President Obama’s commitment to his tee times. Or at least we pretend to. The talk-radio ranters and the cable-news mouthholes have tried to bully the president out of his leisure, going on and on about his putting around Martha’s Vineyard or Porcupine Creek while the world burns or Baton Rouge is submerged.

Those complaints are partly insincere — something has to fill up the minutes between doggie-vitamin commercials — and partly are an indirect complaint about media bias. Yes, the same press that savaged George W. Bush for his golfing and for his allegedly excessive vacation schedule has nothing to say about President Obama’s following that example. That is the way of things: Jackie Kennedy spent a little coin sprucing up the White House and she was single-handedly conferring “class” on the nation at large; Nancy Reagan bought a new set of china and it was the biggest crisis since Suez. The New York Times sniffed at Mrs. Reagan for ordering $200,000 worth of new Lenox for White House formal dinners; Mrs. Obama spent $290,000 on a single painting (by Alma Thomas) when she was redecorating a room in the White House — nothing. Mrs. Obama’s painting was not paid for by taxpayers, but then neither was Mrs. Reagan’s China, the tab for which was picked up by the nice people at the J. P. Knapp Foundation.

The hypocrisy should be noted, and complained about, but we should not let it make asses of us, if we can avoid it.

So Barack Obama likes his golf game.

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices. If golf is the only prophylactic we have against him, then Scotland’s second-greatest contribution to modern civilization is to be celebrated for doing work that the Supreme Court and Congress can’t quite manage.

‘Confidentiality”?

Yes, that’s the State Department’s story on why the Obama administration is stonewalling the American people regarding the president’s illegal and increasingly suspicious Iransom payoff. The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”

Whose confidentiality? The mullahs’? That of the intermediaries the president used? Whose privacy takes precedence over our right to know how Obama funneled our money to our enemies?

The closest thing to an answer we have to the latest round of questions comes courtesy of the perseverance of the investigative journalist Claudia Rosett. (You weren’t expecting the Republican Congress to be minding the purse, were you?)

Recall that we have been asking about the $1.3 billion payment since the first revelations about this sordid affair. After all, if, as Obama and his toadies maintain, the payment is totally on the up and up — just a routine legal settlement involving Iran’s own money — then why won’t they answer basic questions about it?

Why are such matters as the administration’s process in tapping a congressionally appropriated funding source for the settlement — a settlement Congress did not approve and seems to be in the dark about paying for — being treated as if they were state secrets so sensitive you’d need have a Clinton.mail account (or be a Russian hacker of a Clinton.mail account) to see them?

Generally speaking, the State, Treasury, and Justice Departments cannot issue press releases fast enough to salute themselves over legal settlements that supposedly benefit taxpayers by billions of dollars — at least according to the same math that brought you all those Obamacare savings. How is it that, in what is purportedly a completely aboveboard legal case, we are not permitted to know how our own money was transferred to the jihadist plaintiff?

With the administration taking the Fifth, it was left to Claudia to crawl through Leviathan’s catacombs. In her New York Sun report on Monday, we learned that she hit pay dirt: stumbling upon a bizarre string of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — yes, all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.” The transfers were made — to whom, it is not said — on January 19, just two days after the administration announced it had reached the $1.7 billion settlement with Iran. They aggregate to just 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion, the same amount the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution.

So, stacked atop of the pallets of $400 million in foreign cash that Obama arranged to shuttle from Geneva to Tehran as ransom (or, as the administration prefers, “leverage”) for the release of American hostages — via an unmarked cargo plane belonging to Iran Air, a terrorist arm of the mullahs’ terrorist coordinator, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — we now have a second whopping money transfer that (a) violates federal criminal laws against providing things of value to Iran and (b) looks like it was conceived by Nicky Barnes.